Managing Diversity

Diversity is a difficult concept that raises our pulse and will generate strong responses from colleagues.
Diversity is the differences between any two people (race, ethnicity, gender, religion, socio-economic, education, experiences, or values). Even between seemingly homogeneous groups, there is diversity.

We cannot find strong research to show that diversity improves performance. Clearly, productivity comes from an individual and like-minded clones.

Why must we sell diversity solutions to our management and colleagues?
1. the labor market is too tight to ignore groups of people
2. diverse employees gives a team access to diverse resources, solutions, and customers

OVERCOMING DIVERSITY:
Overcoming diversity requires a focus on the similarities, usually goals and dependencies.
Team-building focuses on the next milestone and the orchestration of everyone's necessary contribution.

OPTIMIZING DIVERSITY:
Optimizing diversity is to recognize and show interest in the diversity.
At this point, we identify the strengths (and maybe weaknesses) of the team members to assign roles that leverage the strengths of the team.

REAL DIVERSITY