|
If you are managing diverse employees, you should ask
yourself this question: Am I fully tapping the potential
capacities of everyone in my department? If the answer
is no, you should ask yourself this follow-up: Is this failure
hampering my ability to meet performance standards?
The answer to this question will undoubtedly
be yes.
Think of corporate management for a moment as an
engine burning pure gasoline. What’s now going into the
tank is no longer just gas, it has an increasing percentage
of, let’s say, methanol. In the beginning, the engine will
still work pretty well, but by
and by it will start to sputter,
and eventually it will stall.
Unless we rebuild the engine,
it will no longer burn the fuel
we’re feeding it. As the work
force grows more and more
diverse at the intake level, the
talent pool we have to draw on for supervision and management
will also grow increasingly diverse. So the question
is: Can we burn this fuel? Can we get maximum corporate
power from the diverse work force we’re now
drawing into the system?
Affirmative action gets blamed for failing to do things
it never could do. Affirmative action gets the new fuel
into the tank, the new people through the front door.
Something else will have to get them into the driver’s
seat. That something else consists of enabling people, in
this case minorities and women, to perform to their
potential. This is what we now call managing diversity.
Not appreciating or leveraging diversity, not even necessarily
under-standing it. Just managing diversity in such
a way as to get from a heterogeneous work force the
same productivity, commitment, quality, and profit that
we got from the old homogeneous work force.
The correct question today is not “How are we doing
on race relations?” or “Are we promoting enough minority
people and women?” but rather “Given the diverse
work force I’ve got, am I getting the productivity, does it
work as smoothly, is morale as high, as if every person in
the company was the same sex and race and nationality?”
Most answers will be, “Well, no, of course not!” But
why shouldn’t the answer be, “You bet!”?
When we ask how we’re doing on race relations, we
inadvertently put our finger on what’s wrong with the
question and with the attitude that underlies affirmative
action. So long as racial and gender equality is
something we grant to minorities and women, there
will be no racial and gender equality. What we must do
is create an environment where no one is advantaged
or disadvantaged, an environment where “we” is everyone.
What the traditional approach to diversity did was
to create a cycle of crisis, action, relaxation, and disappointment
that companies repeated over and over
again without ever achieving more than the barest particle
of what they were after.
Affirmative action pictures the work force as pipeline
and reasons as follows: “If we can fill the pipeline with
qualified minorities and women, we can solve our upward
mobility problem. Once recruited, they will perform in
accordance with our promotional criteria and move naturally
up our regular developmental ladder. In the past,
where minorities and women have failed to progress, they
were simply unable to meet our performance standards.
Recruiting qualified people will enable us to avoid special
programs and reverse discrimination.”
This pipeline perspective generates a self-perpetuating,
self-defeating, recruitment-oriented cycle with six
stages:
1. Problem Recognition. The first time through the
cycle, the problem takes this form—We need more
minorities and women in the pipeline. In later iterations,
the problem is more likely to be defined as a
need to retain and promote minorities and women.
2. Intervention. Management puts the company into
what we may call an Affirmative Action Recruitment
Mode. During the first cycle, the goal is to recruit
minorities and women. Later, when the cycle is
repeated a second or third time and the challenge
has shifted to retention, development, and promotion,
the goal is to recruit qualified minorities and
women. Sometimes, managers indifferent or blind to
possible accusations of reverse discrimination will
institute special training, tracking, incentive, mentoring,
or sponsoring programs for minorities and
women.
3. Great Expectations. Large numbers of minorities and
women have been recruited, and a select group has
been promoted or recruited at a higher level to serve
as highly visible role models for the newly recruited
masses. The stage seems set for the natural progression
of minorities and women up through the
pipeline. Management leans back to enjoy the fruits
of its labor.
4. Frustration. The anticipated natural progression fails
to occur. Minorities and women see themselves
plateauing prematurely. Management is upset (and
embarrassed) by the failure of its affirmative action
initiative and begins to resent the impatience of the
new recruits and their unwillingness to give the company
credit for trying to do the right thing. Depending
on how high in the hierarchy they have
plateaued, alienated minorities and women either
leave the company or stagnate.
5. Dormancy. All remaining participants conspire tacitly
to present a silent front to the outside world.
Executives say nothing because they have no solutions.
As for those women and minorities who stayed
on, calling attention to affirmative action’s failures
might raise doubts about their qualifications. Do
they deserve their jobs, or did they just happen to be
in the right place at the time of an affirmative action
push? So no one complains, and if the company has a
good public relations department, it may even wind
up with a reputation as a good place for women and
minorities to work.
If questioned publicly, management will say
things like “Frankly, affirmative action is not currently
an issue,” or “Our numbers are okay,” or
“With respect to minority representation at the
upper levels, management is aware of this remaining
challenge.”
In private and off the record, however, people say
things like “Premature plateauing is a problem, and
we don’t know what to do,” and “Our top people
don’t seem to be interested in finding a solution,”
and “There’s plenty of racism and sexism around this
place—whatever you may hear.”
6. Crisis. Dormancy can continue indefinitely, but it is
usually broken by a crisis of competitive pressure,
governmental intervention, external pressure from a
special interest group, or internal unrest. One company
found that its pursuit of a Total Quality program
was hampered by the alienation of minorities
and women. Senior management at another corporation
saw the growing importance of minorities in
their customer base and decided they needed minority
participation in their managerial ranks. In
another case, growing expressions of discontent
forced a break in the conspiracy of silence even after
the company had received national recognition as a
good place for minorities and women to work.
Whatever its cause, the crisis fosters a return to
the Problem Recognition phase, and the cycle begins
again. This time, management seeks to explain the
shortcomings of the previous affirmative action push
and usually concludes that the problem is recruitment.
This assessment by a top executive is typical:
“The managers I know are decent people. While they
give priority to performance, I do not believe any of
them deliberately block minorities or women who
are qualified for promotion. On the contrary, I suspect
they bend over backward to promote women
and minorities who give some indication of being
qualified.
“However, they believe we simply do not have the
necessary talent within those groups, but because of
the constant complaints they have heard about their
deficiencies in affirmative action, they feel they face a
no-win situation. If they do not promote, they are
obstructionists. But if they promote people who are
unqualified, they hurt performance and deny promotion
to other employees unfairly. They can’t win. The
answer, in my mind, must be an ambitious new
recruitment effort to bring in quality people.”
And so the cycle repeats. Once again blacks, Hispanics,
women, and immigrants are dropped into a previously
homogeneous, all-white, all-Anglo, all-male, all
native-born environment, and the burden of cultural
change is placed on the newcomers. There will be new
expectations and a new round of frustration, dormancy,
crisis, and recruitment. |
Disclaimer
