“Large-scale change is only permanent when rooted in a
cultural transformation."
— John Kotter, chief innovation officer at Kotter International
You have just been given the responsibility to lead a diversity and inclusion initiative in your company. You are excited, due to strong support from a top executive. Yet you have reservations based on your organization's inconsistent historical focus on the work. Are there some workplace culture roadblocks that you need to know about?
Before diving into working on the content and logistics of creating a diversity and inclusion plan, conduct an “Armchair Culture Audit.” Depending on what you find, you will know whether to formally integrate organizational culture knowledge into your plan and the role that diversity management can play as part of your strategy.
Here are three basic steps to help you become a culture sleuth for diversity and inclusion. Give yourself six weeks to complete the “Armchair Culture Audit.” One of the advantages of this approach is that it can be done simultaneously with other planning work.
Step 1: Take a Step Back and Understand The Big Picture
Ask three questions of a randomly selected group of fellow employees:
- How do you personally define diversity? Does the company have a clear definition for diversity?
- Why is our company spending money on diversity and inclusion?
- Will diversity and inclusion work be easy or hard to implement? And, most importantly, why?
Write down the answers from your investigation and identify common themes. These are some clues you might find:
1. There are differences between your employees' definition of diversity and how the organization defines diversity. However, both focus on outcomes of diversity and inclusion work rather than on defining diversity:
Personal definitions of diversity are as an action of “leveraging differences and understanding biases.”
Organization's formal definition of diversity is unclear to most people and they note that the company's actions say it is a focus on “recruiting and promoting women and people of color.”
2. The reasons given for why the company should invest more money on diversity and inclusion are consistent:
- Need to identify with customers better and work together across silos to re-build our business.
- Most of our top leaders are straight white males:
- Females and executives of color executives are external hires and do not stay long.
- There is a lack of open LGBT employees above the director level.
In some declining product areas, we are seeing how diversity of thinking styles is improving market penetration.
Recognition of responsibility to be prepared for proactive hiring of veterans and people with disabilities.
3. And, the clues for how easy or hard diversity and inclusion will be to implement are:
- It will be hard, because people development and promotion practices vary by department.
- It will be easier in one way as there are already business units where diversity is seen as a source of success.
Step 2: Dig Deeper to Identify Organizational Culture Roadblocks
After investigating the big picture, the next step is to dig deeper into why your colleagues say implementation will be hard or easy. If diversity and inclusion efforts require employees to act in ways that go against the grain of your organization’s current culture, it is good to know this in advance.
Therefore, Step 2 requires more culture sleuth work to help you begin to understand the “rules of behavior” of your organization’s culture. First, think of the resources readily available to you. Some options are:
- Observe what images are put on the walls (physical and digital) and website of your organization.
- Review employee engagement survey results from the last five years.
- Interview 10-12 employees from different levels and years of service.
- Make sure to include three kinds of employees in order to receive a variety of input - employees with less than two years of service, those with many years of service, and employees who have worked in different organizations in your field/industry.
The focus of your next level of investigation is on the
following topics:
- Who are the heroes and heroines of your organization and what are they known for?
- What is valued and measured in your company, i.e. what does the company spend money on?
- What does it take for an individual to be successful in your company?
In this second level of culture sleuth work, you might identify the following cultural rules of behavior:
- May find that the company likes people who can figure things out on their own and are “self-starters.”
- May inadvertently lead to resistance to formal talent development systems.
- May discover that many times in order to be successful, it is more important to “know the right people” than it is to “achieve results.”
- May inadvertently lead to better opportunities for people who know how to network and can self-promote.
From this “Armchair Culture Audit” example, you can see there may be organizational culture roadblocks that will need to be addressed in your overall diversity and inclusion planning.
Step 3: Develop a Diversity and Inclusion Strategy with Long-Term Success Built In
As you move into developing your diversity and inclusion plan, you have some preliminary information to guide your thinking.
- Need to develop a clear diversity definition and business case for diversity and inclusion.
- Recognition the need to educate leaders on how organizational culture may influence diversity and inclusion efforts.
Assess leader readiness to:
- Connect success with diversity and inclusion to culture change.
- Find early clues as to which organizational systems and behaviors may need to be strategically addressed in plan.
- Gain knowledge of which managers/units are ready to pilot diversity and inclusion efforts and act as change centers.
Final Thoughts
These three steps will require you to put on a strategic mindset and to loosen your curiosity about why people in your organization act the way they do. Remember, this is not a full culture assessment; rather, it is a “mini-diagnosis” and introduction of how organizational culture knowledge may need to be part of your diversity and inclusion plan.
To further your journey on becoming a skilled culture sleuth for diversity and inclusion, Part 2 of this article (to appear in the September/October issue of INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine) will reveal additional clues on how to identify and reconcile organizational culture roadblocks and short cuts. We will also focus on the diversity management approach of “requirements versus preferences and traditions” as part of your culture sleuth arsenal of tools.
Pamela Arnold is the President of The American Institute for Managing Diversity and a member of the INSIGHT Into Diversity Editorial Board. Terri W. Kruzan, a.k.a. the Culture Sleuth for Diversity Management, is the founder and lead consultant at Culture Sleuth Consulting.
Published in our Summer 2012 issue.
