Why diversity matters...

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A special thanks to all my colleagues, friends and family who reviewed the content of this post prior to publishing. Without all of them providing open and invaluable input, this post wouldn't be what it is today.

All leading organizations and its leaders consider diversity as a key part of high performing teams and cultures. However, the term itself is also plagued with a misunderstanding about what it entails.

As a male, leader of color, born and raised in India and in the industry for close to 2 decades, I wanted to highlight the obvious; Diversity spans more than just the common misconception: gender diversity.

And Diversity truly matters.

The purpose of this post is to highlight that diversity is beyond gender and to provide leaders and team members in corporate culture, some tips on how to promote, preach and practice diversity in all its forms.

"Diversity" encompasses different aspects; perspective, thought, gender, cultural upbringing, religion, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and all things visible and not; Diversity hence enables the art of thinking independently...together, as famously coined by Malcolm Forbes.

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without. - William Sloane Coffin Jr.

Irrespective of the visible and invisible differences, diversity has an immense impact on how teams operate, both today and in the future. Below are few key benefits that make diversity an imperative to building high-performing, cohesive teams, open and transparent cultures, and powerful leadership.

Perspective

One of the most impactful contributions of diversity on your team and your workplace is the opportunity to learn from and share broader perspectives. Sharing without fear of judgment is bred by a culture that is open, transparent and practices radical candor. A closed feedback loop between work culture and diversity exists. The key is to ensure the leader provides a platform where perspectives can be shared without judgment.

Thought

Analytical vs Creative; Left-brain vs Right Brain; Detail-oriented vs Big Picture; Strategic vs Tactical. Teams that can bring together the power of individuals who think differently from one another, create a symbiotic environment.

Diversity of thought helps the team focus on the differences and the collective versus affirmations of equality.

Innovation cannot happen without inclusion and collaboration. Being inclusive requires openness and respect for peers' thoughts and its differences from our own.

Inclusivity occurs when we seek to listen and understand but not respond. Building a keen ear understand others thoughts and their standings. This ultimately helps us make our decisions well grounded and robust .

Race, Religion, Cultural

A quick pivot to why life experiences help us build a stronger foundation for diversity. My personal history; My father and mother would be what you would consider "radically progressive" for an Indian family. I still vividly remember my father telling me I should go attend a Sunday prayer to experience and to learn about various religions and asking me to read all religious scriptures irrespective of what religion they preached.

Raised in India, I studied in a Christian school and my best friends were Christian, Muslim and Sikh. Religious diversity was how we were raised. Subliminally it helped us (if you chose to see it) decouple the teaching from the teacher. It was helpful to draw parallels between teachings of the Bible, the Quran, Guru Granth Sahib and the Bhagavad Gita though I am no professor in religious studies.

Building an openness to cultures can also happen via travel and exposure to other cultures. Experiencing other cultures and the underpinnings of each help us understand the value of cultural diversity. It also helps remove unconscious bias that can drive box-style thinking.

If travel is not your thing, my second strong recommendation is reading! Read about other cultures to broaden your horizons. Exposure to cultural diversity helps you understand why people are the way they are; unique, yet similar but different all in one. It also helps you understand others and helps uncover blind spots if any, of your own, that have been subtly hard-coded into your psyche, both conscious and unconscious.

Building a bond on a team and learning about one another in a workplace or beyond cannot happen without a foundational understanding of one another. This will feel less forced when you are exposed to cultural diversity.

Why fit in when you were born to stand out? - Dr. Seuss

Life Experience

To quote John Keats, "Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced". Each of us has lived unique lives and with it, a plethora of personalized experiences. Sharing and being open about these experiences helps us build a stronger bond on the team. There is no price that can be put on experience. We all are a product of our experiential, cultural, analytical and philosophical selves.

Our life experiences help us build a better barometer- our gut feeling so that we can identify potential issues before they happen intuitively. Experiential diversity helps teams develop an instinct which can be the difference between immense success and astronomical failure.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Age: Generational

Ageism is now becoming a prevalent concern in the workplace. Dictionary meaning of Ageism is prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age. To quote an article from 2017, "For years, job hunting over the age of 40 in the youth-obsessed Silicon Valley could prove hazardous to your career. But judging from the experiences of technology workers roaming the country in search of job opportunities elsewhere, ageism is a universal problem in the industry."

Remember, with age comes experience and learning that can easily translate to them functioning as a lighthouse for the team. Additionally, senior talent make great mentors, enabling us to develop the next generation of leaders.

Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization. - Bo Bennett

Ensuring that we as leaders and as individual contributors be aware and sensitive to unconscious bias towards or against age is crucial to fostering an open culture.

Gender

Gender is perhaps the most talked about with respect to diversity and is perhaps most important of all. For decades the workforce (within engineering since that's what I have been preview to) has been predominantly male with women (especially in engineering) having to fight the uphill battles of trying to fit in.

I have the privilege and honor of being married to a high-performing, bad-a$$ woman and still hear all the challenges that she has to go through daily to manage the perception of being the only woman in a team or an entire office.

Old-school workplace stereotypes - arguably propped up predominantly by men should be broken down. Gender diversity in the workforce can only happen if the men in the office are woke and actively focus on inclusion and diversity as part of their fabric. Stereotypes also exist with old-school thinking that spans both men and women which can hinder other women from entering certain career paths.

I say this often to a lot of folks at work; " The two strongest people I know are women; one is my mother and the other my wife".

Putting myself in a woman's shoes to get perspective was immensely humbling. In 2018, I attended the watermark conference for women and was one among the handful of men who attended the conference. I was surrounded by women. It felt similar to what a woman might encounter at the workplace with men today. There were many moments where I just stood by the sidelines feeling...overwhelmed. And I heard the voice in my head saying " If 10 minutes in a woman's shoes made a confident, accomplished man like me feel intimidated and overwhelmed, can you imagine what the women go through in the workplace?" Wow!

Hats off to all ladies to get to the offices in a male-dominated workplace and continue to pave the way for more.

Without Gender diversity, we would be missing a full spectrum of opinions. So be part of, seed and breed cultures where equality is real.

So how do we practice, preach and promote diversity?

OK. You have made it to the last section of this post. So while all of the above might resonate, what can you do about it? The following is written with the lens of an engineer, team member, leader, and husband all in one - a neutral male lens. So for the men reading this...listen up. While a lot of the following apply to gender diversity, it can be extrapolated to serve other aspects as well.

1. Equality starts at home. I strongly advocate for a "partnership" model to relationships - each understanding their role and each benefiting from the toils of the other. This could be a division of chores, responsibilities and everything else around the home. You cannot preach what you do not practice at home.
2. If you are a leader looking to hire into your team, take added steps to have diversity and inclusion at every level of the hiring process. Some of them are ensuring you go out of your way to have a diverse candidate pool, and additionally have an interview panel that is very diverse. Another option is having each member on the interview panel send you their opinions directly prior to a broader discussion to pick the top candidate to prevent unconscious bias.
3. Attend seminars and conferences focused on diversity groups in your area of work. This will help get a ground-level perspective on what are the key challenges faced by them in the workplace. Once you do, see if this would apply to your workplace and actively action 2-3 change vectors.
4. Seek to understand. Speak to a more diverse audience to gather more perspective. Sometimes, it's the story that we tell ourselves that comes in the way of growth.
5. Actively mentor, coach, sponsor individuals from diverse backgrounds. Helping them through challenges faced in the workplace provides immense satisfaction to you as a leader and a sense of connection to the why should I do this.
6. Spread the word. The more of us out there preaching and sharing our success around promoting diversity as well as sharing challenges we face, the better.
7. Diversity starts with equality. Nothing more. Nothing less. Check your equality barometer first. Check your environment and help recalibrate constantly. And keep a group of trustworthy friends who would check yours. As one of my female colleagues eloquently stated: "I am always seeking cerebral equality and opportunity not physical/psychological."

My ask of you is to take one step as you read this post to practice, preach and promote diversity. Guaranteed that it will be a leap of faith for some of you, but a giant leap it shall be for all of us.

Remember, as Anais Nin stated, We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.

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