A Leader’s Guide to Leveraging Diversity

Strategic Learning Capabilities for Breakthrough Performance

Authors
Terrence Maltbia is the Director of The Columbia Coaching Certification Program and is on the Adult Learning and Leadership Faculty in the Department of Organization and Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.
Anne Power is a leadership consultant and coach. She is core faculty at The Columbia Coaching Certification Program and teaches emotional and social intelligence at Columbia University, New York, NY.

OVERVIEW

Leveraging Diversity: Strategic Learning Capabilities for Breakthrough Performance is designed to help conquer the complexity and take advantage of the opportunities associated with working productively with diversity.

The book will teach you how to build the strategic learning capabilities needed to create and sustain adaptive organizations that effectively respond to today’s competitive demands. It provides a practical guide that features a variety of proven learning practices for leveraging diversity with case examples and planning tools.  Structured in four parts, each chapter in the book addresses one of the three strategic learning capabilities: contextual awareness, conceptual clarity, and taking informed action.  We present cutting edge practices in support of building the targeted learning capability.  Case examples and sample tools assist the reader as they internalize the practices and provide guidelines for applying the tools to their specific work situations. In the final part of the book, the reader is introduced to the three critical success factors necessary to support the execution of the strategic learning capabilities. Whether the reader is new to diversity work or wishes to learn how to further leverage existing diversity initiatives with other strategically important business priorities, this book provides a comprehensive blueprint for navigating the complex and changing nature of situations involving diversity.

LEVERAGING DIVERSITY: LEADERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Leveraging diversity does not happen accidentally, it takes direct and deliberate engagement by leaders and by a critical mass of individuals at all levels in the organization. As chief architects of organizational culture, the daily actions and decisions of leaders directly influences the climate of the organization and the related outcomes. Through our work with leaders, we have learned that well executed diversity initiatives result in a range of positive outcomes. Conversely, when diversity initiatives are not well executed, or no strategic focus for leveraging diversity exists, increased diversity in an organization results in lower group cohesion, increased conflict among associates, lower productivity, and higher turnover (Jehn, 1999).

Is it possible to actually learn to leverage diversity? We believe so. Throughout the book, leveraging diversity is positioned as a process of learning and change whereby an organization uses diversity as a vehicle to realize positive performance outcomes. It is a cyclical process — an ongoing self-renewing cycle — with no start to finish blueprint. It is a process that requires ongoing strategic learning and adaptation to respond productively to changes in the internal and external business environments.

The focus of the book is the lessons learned from the specific experiences of twenty leaders guiding diversity strategies.  We site individuals who lead best in class companies, and understand how to take advantage of the connection between leveraging diversity and business success. These leaders recognize diversity as an asset, not a problem to be minimized. Specifically they know:

• Diversity is a life work, a journey, not a destination.
• Diversity is not simply a formula or set of tools and protocols.
• Diversity work is both art and science and is highly contextual.
• Diversity work is successful when applied to meet the needs of the specific situation.

There is no one size fits all. In short, each of the leaders share that diversity work requires deep change in everyone engaged.

Strategic Learning: A Leadership Framework for Leveraging Diversity

Strategic learning is emerging as a specific form of learning with a clear set of characteristics. Strategic learning is intentional, purposeful, and results oriented guided by the strategic objectives of the business and integrated with important business priorities and related initiatives. Pietersen (2002) defines strategic learning as having ‘‘four key steps — learn, focus, align, and execute — which form a self-reinforcing cycle that combines learning, strategy, and leadership into one organic process’’ (p. 4). Strategic forms of learning aim to foster individual and organizational growth, adaptation, innovation, and renewal to keep pace with changes in the external and internal business environment.

Strategic learning is holistic with thinking, emotional, and behavioral dimensions. This holistic nature of learning brings focus to the importance of creating learning interventions designed to leverage diversity while engaging the ‘‘whole person,’’ that is the head work (or cognitive), hand work (or behavioral), and heart work (or affective/emotional/motivational).

Leveraging diversity is a process whereby an organization uses diversity as a vehicle to realize positive performance outcomes. These range from attracting and retaining a diverse talent pool, to successfully penetrating diverse markets.  Leaders must understand the various ways in which the ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘how’’ of diversity come into play, and increasingly in cultural terms.

First, we are interested in leveraging the talents of our diverse workforce — leveraging difference for insight, innovation, and performance. A basic premise of strategic learning is that insight is a precursor to innovation. Second, in terms of action we place strategic learning at the core of leveraging diversity and the related performance outcomes. Finally, we integrate important concepts drawn from organizational transformation theory, transformative learning theory, and the field of workplace diversity to provide a comprehensive blueprint to help conquer the complexity of today’s markets and take advantage of the opportunities by using diversity for a competitive advantage.

Organizational renewal is the ability to continuously adapt to the external environment and respond to emerging problems, challenges, and opportunities. While not the only factor, winning companies are beginning to understand that leveraging diversity can contribute greatly to creating and sustaining an adaptive enterprise.

Part of understanding the strategic context for diversity is to learn the competitive landscape of the business, what keeps leaders up at night, and figuring out ways to link diversity to the existing business plan. You have to understand the contextual, cultural nature of this change and have the ability to act and devise strategies to change the systems that drive behavior in organizations.

Breakthrough Performance

Performance is at the very core of organizational effectiveness. Whether at the individual, unit, or system-wide level, performance is about intentionality, that is, the ability to act deliberately to achieve results and desired outcomes.

In today’s rapidly changing and unforgiving global markets, the incremental gains resulting from continuous improvement are necessary. However these gains are not sufficient to meet the increasing demands of customers, nor are they enough to respond effectively to fierce competitors. Continuous improvement is appropriate for a number of  challenges leaders face, but adaptive challenges call for a break from the past and the generation of completely new business concepts.

Such performance breakthroughs often require, and are the result of, organizational transformation.

Transformational change in organizations involves discontinuous, adaptive and radical changes in how members perceive, think and behave at work.

Leveraging diversity for breakthrough performance demands organizational transformation. Leaders who commit to building strategic learning capabilities will transform their perceptions, thinking and resulting behaviors. It is only through this personal and organizational change process that breakthrough performance emerges.

Strategic Learning Model

Diversity is understood as both a set of characteristics and processes resulting in patterns of behavior that account for how similarities and differences interact in the workplace. A review of diversity work in pioneering companies reveals three common phases associated with the process focused on creating an environment that attracts, understands, values, and leverages diversity:

1. Creating awareness and generating knowledge (Contextual Awareness)
2. Building skills and capacity (Conceptual Clarity)
3. Applying the learning in real work situations (Informed Action).

Enacting the diversity learning and change process often involves the transformation of self, others, organizational systems, and structures. In short, comprehensive diversity strategies involve work in three areas: opening doors, opening minds, and opening systems.

The practical application of our strategic learning model rests in 12 leadership practices, and three strategic learning capabilities listed in Table 1. Together these provide a blueprint for devising strategies and tactics to leverage diversity for breakthrough performance.

LEVERAGING DIVERSITY BEGINS AND ENDS WITH LEADERSHIP

Throughout the book, we position leveraging diversity as a cyclical process of learning and change. We suggested that this self-renewing cycle requires ongoing strategic learning and adaptation to respond to changes in the internal and external business environments.

Leading to leverage diversity is as much of a leadership mindset as it is a set of action strategies and tactics. Leveraging diversity requires ongoing engagement in a learning and change process to help you determine where you want to go and how to get there. This is not a linear process. Rather, we have found it is a two-pronged cyclical process that combines outside-in and inside-out work.

The essence of outside-in work is the development of strategic initiatives that respond to changes in the external environment, or outside of the organization. Inside-out work emphasizes individual learning and change initiatives, which insure a work environment conducive to performance breakthroughs. And most important, effectively leveraging diversity requires that outside-in efforts and inside-out efforts interact seamlessly. The outcome of the dynamic interplay between the two is a set of organizational and individual transformations that impact our way of thinking, behaving and over time, our very being—who we are as individuals and collectives.

Leveraging diversity is a leadership challenge. Leadership may change, but the challenge does not go away. To survive in the global economy, leveraging diversity is not an option. Rather it is an imperative.

Additional Links

• iThrive Issue 8: Emotional Intelligence
• iThrive Issue 9: We Create Each Other
• iThrive Issue 12: Stress and Major Life Events
• iThrive Issue 13:Rethinking Multitasking