I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the 1960s when they were desegregating public facilities. I attended an all-black school. When I left the city in 1962, they were dealing with the implications of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. I remember the movie houses, where blacks had to sit in the balcony and whites sat downstairs, the colored section and white section on the buses. And who could forget the restrooms?
Because I came out of a segregated environment, I had an interest in racial relations and racial equality. But my first experience with diversity was from a business perspective. I became acquainted with the word "diversity" as a doctoral student studying with two professors who were concerned about it not so much in the racial or gender sense, but in the context of how a company functions. They were looking for an answer to the question: How do you have multiple lines of business under one corporate shell and yet still be part of a synergistic whole?
When I became dean of the school of business at Atlanta University, we started to think about how we could prepare black MBAs to deal with environments that were historically white. It was around that time that I founded the American Institute for Managing Diversity, the first national nonprofit think tank created to advance diversity management. My definition of diversity was different from that of most others who were talking about the concept and trying to implement it. Many managers and CEOs still think of diversity as a relatively simple concept. They think of it as a race, gender, or age issue. What we should all be striving for is diversity management. By that I mean making decisions that sustain and maximize a diversified workforce.
CEOs can have difficulty with diversity management and not be biased in the traditional sense. They can simply have difficulty making quality decisions because they're challenged by the complexity of dealing with a diverse workforce.
I know of a principal with students of 39 ethnicities in his school. He has been heard to say on a number of occasions, "If I can just get through the day without an explosion, that is success." How can you have such low aspirations for something as important as educating our young people? It's not that he has low aspirations. It's that he doesn't have the management tools for dealing with that melting pot of ethnicities. There are no books to read and no one in the central office to turn to. In an environment like that, a parent whose child has a problem in the school will probably start complaining that the institution is biased, that it has a problem with her son's ethnicity.
For future business leaders, the state of business, and our country, we need to get beyond seeing diversity as just achieving a desired profile-whether it be racial, gender balance, or even age mixture. We assume that if we get rid of all of the "isms" -racism, sexism, and so forth-that everything will be okay. Wrong. If you don't know how to manage a diverse workforce, you won't move your company forward. The challenge becomes: Can you, as a manager, create an environment that allows you to access talent, however it comes packaged?
Now look. I am a supporter of racial and social justice. The heroes that come to mind quickly are Dr. Benjamin Mayes, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Dr. Howard Thurman. They did a lot of thinking about tough, tough issues. Dr. King did more than just think about them. He was a thinker and a person of action. Without a doubt, minorities have much greater opportunities today than when I left grad school in 1974. That doesn't mean that there aren't still challenges. But we need to think about diversity as something more than an extension of the civil rights movement.
The biggest misconception companies have about diversity is that it is politically correct terminology for affirmative action, that it's a politicized concept. If that's how your company embraces diversity, you're up against a brick wall. Let's be clear. There is diversity-achieving the "right" racial or gender profile-and there's diversity management. The latter takes a set of principles and combines them into a framework that can be used by the CEO, managers, and other executives to enhance their business decisions-whether that involves workers of two races, two ethnicities, two or three departments in a company, or two or three customer groups.
Managers today and in the future need to make quality decisions for a diverse workforce and a diverse company. A quality decision advances your company in terms of its mission, vision, and strategy.
If a company embraces diversity, but the surrounding community doesn't buy into its efforts, the company won't succeed. What you're beginning to see is corporations looking out at the community-and inviting them into the boardroom-to discuss diversity with them. The Diversity Leadership Academy, an arm of the American Institute for Managing Diversity, offers seminars in cities to provide educational opportunities for nonprofit and community leaders who might not otherwise be able to afford it. We've done it in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Atlanta. These talks result in a shared way of thinking about diversity that can be supportive of corporations' efforts in moving forward. While we address racial and gender issues, we lay out a universal approach, one that can be used with any diversity mixture.
I'm optimistic about diversity. It's a state most companies wish to achieve. I, too, want racial diversity. But diversity management is what allows a manager or company to sustain and maximize that state once you achieve it. Companies and MBA programs need to put diversity management on the table, to develop it as a craft. When you graduate, it would be wonderful to say that you have mastered that craft, no matter how diversified the workforce or the company.
America is an experiment in diversity. As a country, individually and collectively, we need a diversity management capability-in companies, in the state houses, in Congress. I'm not even clear that people remember that the United States is an experiment in diversity. But we are-even after 200-plus years. The question is: How do you get wholeness out of diversity? How do you make certain that you can get a cohesiveness and connectedness among the citizens? How do we make sure that our country doesn't dis-integrate?
That's the challenge we need to meet.
