For our society to move towards a more inclusive consciousness, diversity must be explored through thought and perspective, not by race or gender.
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Diversity means a lot of different things
The US can only function as a healthy democracy if we find a way to diversify our social connections, if we find a way to weave together a strong social fabric that bridges ties across difference.
Right now, we are moving in the opposite direction with serious consequences.
Two contemporary trend lines can help us understand this.
Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working.
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You don't have to read these unless you wish to, but we might touch upon them in conversation
Williams, K. Y., & O'Reilly, I. I. I. C. A. (January 01, 1998).
Demography and diversity in organizations: a review of 40 years of research.
Research in Organizational Behavior, 20, 77. Don't necessarily read it all, but glance over it to get a sense for how it looked from the middle to the end of the previous century.
... the majority of research has been undertaken using one of three general theoretical frameworks:
similarity/attraction, social categorization, or information/decision making.
These approaches have been characterized by different assumptions about the role and effect of diversity
and the modal way to conduct the research.
Researchers in the three traditions either implicitly or explicitly accept a model that argues that
group or organizational diversity can affect group processes such as social integration, communication, and conflict.
Group functioning is then presumed to affect group outputs, including performance
and the ability of the group to function effectively in the future ...
Given the convincing evidence that diversity can have both positive and negative effects on group functioning
and performance, at least three major unanswered questions emerge.
First, we need to understand in more detail how different types of diversity affect group process and performance ...
A second important question concerns the nature of the conflict generated by diversity ...
A third important gap in our understanding of diversity concerns how successful groups are able to leverage diversity.
What’s equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another.
That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time.
What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and
unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community
where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work ...
Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender,
the more creative and productive they are likely to be.
But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years,
we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance ...
(however their reseach shows) a significant correlation between high cognitive diversity and high performance ...
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things we'll talk about
in America, has the push for cultural, religious, ethnic, and gender diversity
affected the way organizations recruit and hire new members?
is it an organization's responsibility to ensure that it is diverse?
how can organizations balance the need to recruit the best possible members
with the need to recruit diverse members? or is it a false choice?
how can organizations prevent biases from influencing recruiting decisions?
or are we framing the discussion in an entirely incorrect manner?
What is our understanding of organizational diversity?
One of my last songs was "Chan Chan," which I wrote in 1987.
I played it for the first time at a club called Cristino.
It's a number that has four notes, and four chords.
There's very few numbers that you can sing the whole song with four notes.
I've been to Santa Clara-Las Villas province and everybody up there knows it; I've been to Santiago de Cuba y and everybody there knows it too.
I go by a school and when a kid sees me, he says, "Look, it's Compay Segundo," and starts singing, "I'm going from Alto Cedro to Marcané then from Cueto, I'm going to Mayarí."