The Richness of Unity and the Poverty of Uniformity
Details: September 28, 2023, 03:45 PM - 05:00:00 PM ET
Workshop Track: Human Resources
Primary Audience: Senior leaders, HR professionals, and all other caretakers of organizational culture
As work has become increasingly team-based and teams continue to become more diverse, some analysts have proposed that synergistic performance is finally within our grasp. David Livermore’s 2016 book "Driven by Difference: How Great Companies Fuel Innovation Through Diversity" is a prime example of this optimistic search for the rich rewards of unity in diversity.
But also in 2016, Helen Turnbull argued in her book "The Illusion of Inclusion: Global Inclusion, Unconscious Bias, and the Bottom Line" that “Companies hire for diversity and manage for similarity. We hire people for their difference and then teach them directly and indirectly what they have to do to fit in to the corporate culture.”
This pressure to assimilate robs organizations of the potential rewards of unity in diversity. In this session, we’ll explore four common workplace environments and identify the elements of an environment that eradicates the poverty of uniformity by authentically welcoming difference.
