Literature Review - A Look at Current Books and Articles of Interest to Diversity and Vitality Practitioners

Each quarterly issue of Diversity Praxis will summarize and/or reflect upon at least one new contribution to Organizational Diversity and Vitality.

Diversity Beyond the Numbers; Business Vitality, Ethics & Identity in the 21st Century by Gary Y. Adkins
(GDI Press, August 2003, 296 pgs., $34.95/$25.99)

AUTHOR:
Gary Adkins is an organizational consultant, educator, author, and speaker on the topics of organizational development and diversity. He recently published Diversity Beyond The Numbers; Business Vitality, Ethics & Identity in the 21st Century by GDI Press (2003) and is the founder of The Diversity Solutions Consulting Group (www.diversitysolutions.com). He has lived and studied in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Gary has worked in technical as well as management and executive ranks. As an internal Executive Consultant at AT&T, he led the first successful diversity management and empowerment based reengineering effort within that company. After leaving AT&T, Gary founded The Diversity Solutions Consulting Group. His clients range from Fortune 100 to nonprofits, from Healthcare to Manufacturing and Technology.

He can be reached at: gary@diversitysolutions.com 310-990-2826

ABSTRACT/SUMMARY:
Diversity Management is in need of a new paradigm. We must revisit three basic business questions: Why diversity? What is diversity today? How do we optimize diversity for business success? Gary Y. Adkins will answer these questions with an example and with a history of management approaches to illustrate the new paradigm.

SYNOPSIS: by Gary Y. Adkins, author
The business case for diversity rests on 5 main pillars: (1) resolving the internal contradiction within the 'diversity management' field itself, as stated above. This includes the theoretical flaws (e.g. managing diversity versus managing for diversity) that lead to application problems (2) globalization and increased multiculturalism of the marketplace (labor markets as well as customer markets) (3) the goal of becoming an employer of choice - this speaks to both recruitment and retention issues that the demographic time bombs surrounding talent shortages and the need for the most creative knowledge workers in the marketplace attest to (4) provider of choice and employee utilization issues where diverse peoples and perspectives come together, collaborate and respectfully collide in an effort to deliver on innovation and (5), the need to be stakeholder of choice, whereby the necessary business relationships that matter (e.g. alliances and supplier management) are entrenched and deepened based on mutuality and reciprocity.

Diversity Beyond The Numbers proposes that to further the improvements in our diversity praxis we must dialogue amongst ourselves while revisiting three basic business questions: Why diversity now? What is diversity now? How do we optimize diversity for business success and vitality in the 21st century? I will begin this dialogue by answering these questions with a brief history of management approaches to diversity, along with looking at the new sciences of complexity and identity theory, and by using social theory to identify disenchantment in the workplace as we build enchantment within business vitality. This will help practitioners to diagnose workplace anxiety and conflict by looking at the context. I will end with an example from my practice.

Why a new paradigm and what is diversity, identity and difference?

The human, social and physical sciences have undergone an extraordinary shift since the early days of industry. In the industrial age, businesses were at their best when operating as well oiled machines, like clockwork, and other Newtonian metaphors from pre-Einstein physics. Now we think of living cosmologies, of shifting and flexible organic associations that cooperate as well as compete (coopetition). A well known example of coopetition is how Microsoft produces software for the Apple platform (MAC Office Suite). Ours is a world of relatedness, relativity and perspectives. Post Modernist diversity and organizational leaders do not want our employees to be cogs in a machine, but rather thinking and creative beings capable of collaborating with others in relationships that matter to the project producing innovative solutions for our customers. Ours is an uncertain age of disruptive technologies, terror, globalization, and multiculturalism. Businesses can no longer think in terms of absolutes (i.e. right-wrong, one way only, etc.), nor in terms of control and of long term strategic plans. They can no longer exclude, demand conformity of and manage people like clockwork. Rather we must think strategically, not plan for inevitabilities, and be flexible to the shifting marketplace landscape that can eliminate entire industries as new ones emerge out of garages (e.g. the PC and internet revolution). For us to think strategically and flexibly, the changes in physics that are impacting the social sciences need to make their way into management science. To answer the 'why', we must remember that Human Resources, including diversity, is a part of management science.

At the heart of this new scientific revolution is complexity science and the primacy of relatedness. This has established that there is no simple, linear cause and effect or ultimate rule-book in need of discovering. It is about relationships, emergence, and co-evolution with others. People should not be controlled, rather the context that people find themselves in at work needs to be managed such that people are enabled to be successful. When the theory of relativity abolished absolute space and absolute time, substituting instead relative spaces and times with which objects and people move about, then the notion of reducing people to an absolute becomes meaningless and futile. Rather, we have come to appreciate that people are made up of fluctuating and relative identities that can be apprehended only in relation to one's own space/time and to the space/time of others with which they relate. This concept is the principle of relatedness applied to HR and diversity educators. People are not simply categories like race or gender, but rather complex adaptive and learning beings who happen to have a race and gender as well as multiple other identities. These identities are part of their make-up, as is intelligence, skills and position. Depending on which identity is being called upon, questioned, or attacked will determine which identity you see in that particular moment (space/time situation). Hence, people are more like the fractals found in nature (e.g. the snowflake, the fern, etc.) than they are like things and categories to be managed.

Diversity practitioners, whether managers, HR professionals, trainers, consultants or educators must move beyond managing diversity categories, beyond championing mere diverse representation, to the more challenging and rewarding goal of creating idea chambers and thought systems that allow people to flourish in all of their variety and perspectives to work. This approach not only answers the employer of choice and retention challenges, but it also hits at the provider of choice concerns regarding innovation while suggesting a pathway to build reciprocal relationships with stakeholders in our stakeholder of choice concerns. All of this is the work of enchantment.

What has trust got to do with it? Anxiety and conflict

Enchantment is that sense of awe and wonder we feel when we are surprised and pleased by our external world. To optimize diversity by enabling identities to flourish, relate to others in cooperative endeavors and to be creative is the work of enchantment. It means establishing leadership legitimacy and safe spaces for employees to contribute. When leadership loses legitimacy, either in the eyes of its employees or in the eyes of its other stakeholders, whether shareholders, customers or community stakeholders, then there is disenchantment. The drivers of disenchantment are too numerous to name in this short article, yet a central one that gets little attention is the issue of trust and anxiety. Legitimacy, defined here, is when employees trust that the company will comply with the organizational imperative to provide general social welfare for its people. This was once called the 'people value added' narrative (PVA). With the constant reengineering efforts over the last 20 years, from boom to bust cycles of layoffs and talent shortages, employees are left with a whiplash. When employees are told that people are the company's greatest asset, yet training dollars are cut, layoffs are relentless, and workloads skyrocket while health costs are shifted onto the employee, then the PVA narrative is unlikely to be believed. Trust is broken and management legitimacy goes into crisis. Motivation morphs into survival strategies and shadow systems of disgruntled employees proliferate. Some feel anxiety turning to distress, tolerance to intolerance, and fear into loathing. Disenchantment becomes pervasive, employees lash out and management is called in to suppress it or HR / diversity consultants are called in to fix it. Regardless, trust is broken, and hence one's sense of personal security (whether financial, physical, emotional or ontological) is lost. Trust is replaced with dread.

Social psychologists know that trust is linked to engaged and motivated people seeking out relationships to cooperate on projects. Trust generates what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls a 'leap of faith' to want to be with others and feel secure enough to share one's knowledge and talents. Yet again, if reengineering is relentless and training scarce, then why should I trust you to share what I know? If I feel dispensable, then I will shut down efforts at collaboration and hence creative innovation in favor of survival. Walking the talk of the business 'family' and PVA is so far from the talk itself in this scenario that cynicism and fear dance the dance of shifting loyalty. From organizations to careers, from careers to specialized fields and from rapidly made obsolete fields to ultimately just myself, loyalty gives way to the talk of the victim or of an entitled 'Me! Me! Me!' Yet, the skills gap, the shortage of talent, the falling birth rates, growing immigration, growing theo-diversity (religious diversity), immigration anxiety and unyielding identity militancy are not going away and continue to encircle business vitality, threatening success.

Without a sense of security bred by trust and empowerment, employees retreat into the security of default assumptions, in an effort to survive the next round of cuts, using old stereotypes and the comfort of old and unexamined prejudices. When certainty cedes to doubt and when answers cede to questions, then anxieties increase, pushing us to embrace personal identities. These can be either sociological identities such as race, gender, culture, or they can be psycho-social identities such as religion or ideology. Inter-personal or inter-identity (diversity) conflicts become inevitable. All of this affects absenteeism, creativity, productivity and collaboration. Change then is dreaded, not embraced for the new opportunities embedded in it, and fear takes over. Fear shuts down one's motivation, the affect that is needed for creative engagement. It can lead to rigid, compulsive and uncreative behaviors that lash out at others who are different or at work processes perceived to be not like it 'should be done'. Fundamentalist behaviors are an example of this in that the fundamentalist seeks illusions of certainty to offset the dread and anxiety of uncertainty and loss. Whether identity fundamentalism or religious fundamentalism, it is about dread and the staving off of anxiety. Victimization behaviors proliferate, although they are often misdiagnosed as a diversity conflict such as a racial dispute. The racist or other exclusionary and disrespectful behavior in the given situation is often the symptom, not the root cause. It could simply be ontological fear (root cause), the anxiety and dread of lost security and certainty, leading to 'acting out' behaviors (symptoms). Diagnosis of the social constellation on the job is a crucial new skill set for the post-industrial diversity practitioner.

How are we going to do this? Vitality & Ethical Pluralism in a constitutional project

With the rise in uncertainty, including white water rapid change, and with rising anxiety, dread and stress on the job, some organizations are gyrating between returning to the old way we used to do things (rigidity) and the more fragmented and chaotic embracing of constant newness or anything goes (chaos). These two trends in business have a direct impact on people, on diversity and therefore on business vitality. The skill for the diversity/HR practitioner is to diagnose the social constellation that the organization is producing - chaos, rigidity or vitality - and the social constellation that individuals on the job are placed within. This assessment is crucial in the new paradigm of optimizing diversity for vitality in that it prevents us from merely focusing on the individual and unconsciously colluding with victimization.

Rigidity, the first organizational trend mentioned above, represents the industrial model of a top down, command and follow conformity. In today's temporarily elevated unemployment (job shortages versus talent shortages), the push to conformity and certainty can become irresistible. The longer the company has been in existence, the greater the likelihood that it will want to get back to basics and reproduce what was done in the past, believing that if it worked in the 70's it will work now. Obviously, this strategy is doomed, but people on the job live in fear of layoffs and begin to line up, conforming to this dominant industrial mentality. Diversity and diversity initiatives are tabled for 'better times'. Diversity initiatives become seen as a cost and not as an investment for those better times. Innovation, in the form of innovative products, services and production processes become harder to achieve as creativity gets drowned out in a chorus of traditionalism. This is at the root of the Columbia disaster "management culture" failures.

This situation has become common today due to a 'conventional wisdom' that has circulated after the dot com implosion whereby anything 'Silicon Valley' represents 'post industrial' chaos, and that the dot com phenomena was what goes wrong with post industrialism. It is easy for us to miss the certainty of the old rule-bound, top down structure (rigidity) in this period of economic entrenchment, cutbacks, and fierce competition. It can give us an 'illusion of certainty'.

Optimizing diversity can lead the organization in the direction of vitality, avoiding the twin perils of chaos or rigidity. Just as 'disruptive technologies' launch new industries and kill off inflexible organizations, it is to 'disruptive change agents' that rigid organizations must rely on to prevent inflexibility from happening. Disruptive change agents are professionals that can populate diversity councils and vitality change teams. Organizational Vitality needs diverse perspectives, work histories, cultures, and experiences flourishing on teams that oversee the ethical and pluralist project of an organization. When diversity is optimized and allowed to flourish, yet bounded by the project mission, values, ethical standards and stakeholder concerns, then organizational resilience and adaptability is enhanced. Without placing boundaries on diversity, though, we can fall victim to rigidity's Janus face, chaos. Chaos is that space where 'anything goes' in the name of diversity, where authority is abdicated in the name of empowerment and where relativism replaces assimilation. Chaos is the heartbeat of the nihilist organization. In summary, we disrupt the conformity of assimilation in rigidity while we disrupt the relativism and anything goes of chaos, all in the name of vitality by way of ethical pluralism. Lets look at pluralism again.

Organizational Vitality is based upon pluralism (instead of assimilation or relativism) and upon the organization's ethical system. Herein we balance the need for diverse creative voices colliding respectfully in the service of customer innovation. Pluralism, used in vital organizations, is an acculturation process whereby the employee and the employer mutually adapt and learn, coevolving for the betterment of both. Assimilation, used primarily in rigid organizations, is an acculturation process that demands that the employee adapt totally to the rules and culture of the organization, in effect suppressing their own fractal identities. Relativism, used in chaotic organizations, is based on the total equality of all cultures and cultural values, inviting into the organizational acculturation process an 'anything goes' posture leading to anarchy or fragmentation. Vitality relies on assembling a pluralist employee body where different ethnic, religious, political, group, cultural, and cognitive diversities coexist and are offered an ethic of recognition and respect. Yet, simultaneously, they must 'assimilate' to the organization's mission, vision, values and ethics, together called the grammar of conduct. What distinguishes this from rigid assimilation is that employees use their plural and diverse perspectives to creatively interpret how best to serve the customer or client restricted only by the values and principles held in the grammar of conduct and ethical system. Innovation in terms of processes, relationships, products and services result. Consequently, disruptive change agents on diversity councils target the drivers of disenchantment, including conformity and assimilation. They do not do this in the name of relativism and randomness. Rather, they focus on the balance between authority and anarchy in enchanted cultures of vitality.

Accountability and a practical example

This balancing act between rigid assimilation and chaotic relativism is dependent on accountability and upon educating and training all employees on the value system of the organization. This establishes the ethical standards of conduct, such as respectful behavior towards others. This, in turn, allows managers to regulate behavior without falling prey to controlling people nor to using rules. Regulating involves setting up principles and values in a grammar of conduct, with its consequence management in place, and role modeling ethical behaviors such that employees feel comforted when faced with multiple choices in our ever-changing world. We do this via ethical systems. Ethical systems help employees to reconcile one's behaviors and actions with the flux of experiences, the quantity of choices, and the constant changes occurring at work. Ethical grammars of conduct structure our behavior and explain to us the choice of behaviors taken by our co-workers. It also allows us to seek justice and fairness on the job. Without values and ethics, how can a manager discipline 'inappropriate' behavior? What is inappropriate in an ethical vacuum? How can I speak up in team meetings when exclusion or witnessing at the expense of a team member has occurred? How can I be safely engaged or empowered? Without ethical consistency, how can I avoid falling into passivity (survival mode - 'retired in place') if I am sitting at the edge of anxiety. By doing this, it helps us to prevent controlling people in a conformist 'iron cage', to contain anxieties surrounding uncertainty, and it also helps managers and HR to navigate the increasingly abundant ground of 'morality disputes' on the job. Yet, let us remember that accountability is a two way street; organizations are accountable for their legitimacy and regulating the grammar of conduct (values, ethics, vision) just as individuals are responsible for ethical performance reflecting that same grammar of conduct.

Lets look at an example from my practice that I use in Diversity Beyond The Numbers; Business Vitality, Ethics & Identity in the 21st Century.

I was once delivering a training session when a client-employee paralyzed management with claims that he was hired to save souls, stop the so-called filthy practice of sodomy, and in effect witness against other employees' sins. In the name of diversity, freedom of speech and religion, management felt that he was an annoyance but that they had no recourse. This is a classic example of relativist pluralism, not ethical pluralism. Here, the anything goes paradigm resulted in chaos, paralyzing the workforce. A rigidity reaction could also easily have occurred that would have clamped down on all differences, reinstituting conformity.

Instead, to educate everyone present while moving beyond this paralysis, I proposed a 'vitality' solution based on ethical pluralism. The values basis of the corporation that this employee was called upon to adhere to in ethical behavior included respect and diversity; respect for all individuals' contribution to the job and diversity including the protected class of employees defined in the corporate equal employment statement. This statement included sexual orientation (all sexualities) and respect included a zero tolerance for intolerance regarding the shaming and harassing of others different from oneself.

It was a secular declaration of values with a corresponding ethical code. In other words, like most American businesses, it is a-moral and takes no position on theological constructs such as sodomy or on sacred texts (e.g. the Bible, Talmud, or Koran). As theo-diversity explodes in the U.S. and abroad (to over 9,900 separate religions), American businesses must understand and articulate the difference between having business values and being agnostic on moral issues of the day.

In the above example, a public dialogue ensued between myself and the moralist employee that included asking him if he agreed to the values and if he was motivated and able to ethically behave (i.e. act reflecting the corporate values instead of his personal values driven by a worldview of sin). This distinguishing between ability and motive is crucial to how a manager can support the individual in achieving a desired performance level. If he is not motivated to change behaviors, then he must give up his employment at the company. If he is motivated to behave appropriately, but doesn't agree due to his personal values, that is acceptable. If he simply does not know how to demonstrate respectful behavior to others whose identities are unacceptable to him, then training, education and coaching is necessary.

This situation represented a corporate constitutional conflict between the universal rights of the individual (e.g. respect, diversity, speech, integrity) that exists within a non-democratic organization such as a business and the values that constrain those rights (e.g. zero tolerance for intolerance) in the business's ethical code. It had the potential to disenchant. Yet, because this company was in the midst of a diversity driven organizational change process that I was helping with, the conflict, instead, became a valuable learning moment for an entire district. Because management reactions were inconsistent, ranging from "fire him" to "but he's right!" anxieties went up. I reminded all of the involved parties that the organization's constitutional project forbids the privileging of one form of life or culture at the expense of another, as in witnessing against another's purported sins. The universal rights of the individual were codified to include equal rights and respect for multiple others to co-exist. The specific rights constrained by the ethical system were intolerance, disrespect, and non-collaboration. The organization's constitution, with its 'bill of rights', sets the horizon upon which employees can reach an understanding of their self as unique and diverse employee-citizens, including understanding the silencing role of rhetorical signs such as 'sin'. With ethical pluralism, we encourage learning about each other's cultures, respectfully, by meeting at this business horizon where all cultures can make a worthwhile contribution. In this case, the moralist employee felt that he disagreed with the corporate values, but would accept help in learning how to behave ethically. His motivation was there and he was willing to improve his ability to perform optimally. My parting recommendation to local management was to measure his performance on this issue, in effect, regulating his accountability. I was able to concretize the notion that people clash, not cultures.

This example brings forward the complexities of our changing world - a world of increasing identity hybridity, identity militancy, and morality confusion. It speaks to a new paradigm of optimizing diversity, situated strategically within the overall goal of business vitality. It stops the pathologizing of differences when trying to control individuals or when trying to reduce individuals to a single identity category. It speaks to a fractal world of shifting relationships, loyalties, and identities. It underscores the need for thinking employees engaged creatively in innovative solutions to business customer demands. It inoculates the organization against the kind of disastrous consequences that the recent report analyzing the Columbia disaster outlined. That report points an accusing finger at rigid management culture, just as recent analyses of 'group think' rigidity in the airline industry has done. It ushers in a new praxis for a new world.

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