Coaching Managers For Success In Today's Diverse Workplace
By Joe Santana

The ability to manage within the framework of a diverse workplace today is rapidly becoming as much of a key success requirement as knowing how to manage projects. Even if your company is not listed among the top forerunners in Diversity Inc. Magazine, the results of an increasingly diverse workplace and marketplace is without question impacting you and your organization.

While some companies have well-articulated plans designed to ensure greater representation in their workforce, the demographic makeup of all companies is changing. Here are just a few of the factors that are creating change even in the most diversity-passive companies:

* Affirmative Action Policies. Many companies have specific goals, policies and action plans for increasing their success in hiring people that belong to traditionally underrepresented groups in their organizations.

* Demographic Shifts. Based on recent census figures, the number of women and non-Caucasian males, collectively referred to as "women and people of color" is growing in the United States. This translates into a wider pool of available workers.

* Marketplace Forces. A number of companies that want to capture the growing buying power of women and people of color are seeking employees who reflect and understand the needs, expectations and experiences of their target markets. Many organizations also require their suppliers to have a diversity process in place or in some cases to be actually certified as a women or minority owned business.

* More Cross-functional and Global Work Environments. Diversity is about more than race and gender as pointed out by Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas in his 1991 book "Beyond Race and Gender." Diversity is also present between people who work in different environments, under different rules of operation. Today, more than ever, it is common for people from IT, marketing, sales and finance to find themselves working as a team on one project.

Even if employees are of the same race, gender and age, their career development histories create many of the same tensions and opportunities found in other types of diverse groups working together. Add to this working with delegates from other countries in global companies and centralized help desks located in one part of the country interfacing with field engineers on the other side of the country and you have a good picture of the commonplace operations of today's cross-functional/global workplace.

* The replacement of "melting-pot" acceptance with the desire to be part of a mosaic. Over the past decade there has been a slowly growing resistance to assimilation. In the past, employees were more willing to trade away some of the differences that made them unique in order to fit in with the overall team. For example, someone with a "minority identity" would adopt the ways of the majority in order to gain acceptance. While people are still willing to make some concessions and trade offs, they've placed a greater limit on how far they are willing to go. There idea of the ideal is not to enter a "melting-pot" and become absorbed into the whole, but rather to become one of the distinct components of a well-coordinated mosaic.

Add this all together and you have a recipe for great success or disaster depending on how managers and organizations handle this evolving workplace.

The Consequences Of Handling Diversity Poorly

Many of the factors that result in worker disengagement according to a recent Gallup survey hinge on the relationship between managers and their team members. Clearly the demographic shifts impacting the workforce add to the challenges managers face in creating the relationships that result in an engaging workplace. Subtle to broad differences in perspectives and interpretation of events can yield bigger communication and support challenges.

For companies, this could result in huge losses or great opportunities. In the absence of managers developing effective skills to manage a diverse workforce, the results can be increased disengagement, burnout and turnover. Recruiting dollars spent to attract and bring in employees from under-represented groups may increase as a result of hiring replacements in order to sustain, "the representation numbers." Al Smith, President of AA Smith & Associates, calls this "the Frustrating Cycle" or employee churn. "In the Frustrating Cycle, companies can spend ever-increasing amounts of money and experience diminishing productivity when the focus is only on creating greater representation," states Smith.

In this scenario, organizations sense a crisis (we need more of these or those), and then embark on a recruiting campaign. New employees with expectations of success join the company, only to soon learn that the culture of the company or of the department, or that existing policies, practices, traditions, inappropriate behaviors and procedures create ceilings or walls for them.

Within some period of time, these new recruits leave the company or worse yet, quit and stay (which a colleague of mine recently referred to as retiring on the job), with growing amounts of frustration for the new employee, the manager and the organization. Within a short time frame, the cycle repeats itself.

According to diversity experts, some companies churn through this cycle a dozen times before understanding that a process is required that includes, understanding diversity, managing diversity and leveraging diversity. "To be successful and truly reap the benefits of diverse functional backgrounds, perspectives, cultures and langages, managers must be skilled in creating a productive, respectful, inclusive workplace where all employees can contribute to the business goals of the organization," states Smith.

According to Gallup, the cost of employee disengagement in the United States is approximately $350 billion dollars in lost profitability. Companies that are only working to increase the representative of formally under-represented groups may find themselves holding a large disproportionate amount of this burden if their managers fail to develop skills needed to effectively manage the diverse workforce.

The Benefits of Having A Well Managed Diverse Workforce

"On the other side of the coin, companies that have managers who are equipped to successfully leverage the distinct and rich talents, skills and knowledge of all employees will not only avoid these drains on profitability, they will actually attain a number of strategic benefits" says Linda Stokes, PRISM International, Inc. (www.prism-diversity.com). By effectively harnessing the different perspectives and talents of a diverse workforce, skilled managers help their companies to differentiate and produce results that are superior to any that could come from the collective efforts of a more homogenous group.

In fact, in recognition of the value of effectively harnessing the full capabilities of a diverse workforce by some major Fortune 500 companies in the IT consulting space, they've hired consultants, such as William Arruda (www.reachcc.com), a well known Personal Branding guru, to help their employees to identify what makes them unique or, in other words, diverse relative to other team members. "Tapping into diversity is ESSENTIAL for success in the technology business," States Arruda. "Diversity breeds creativity and creativity drives innovation. To be successful in the IT business, your people need to be able to innovate so that you can remain differentiated from the competition - otherwise your company becomes a collection of 'commoditized' people that produce 'commoditized' products and services" he adds.

The bottom-line is that In the IT industry, the ability to manage diversity is extremely valuable. Even in companies that are not in the IT industry, the effectiveness of IT managers in managing diverse relationships can be a powerful tool given the strategic nature of the IT function and its impact on a company's overall ability to meet its objectives.

How can you help managers improve their effective management of a diverse workforce?

So as an HR professional, where do you advise managers to begin? What are some of the things they can do to get their arms around managing a diverse workforce? Here are six items of advice you can share with them:

* Become more open, aware and understanding of the viewpoints of others. Advise them to start by acknowledging their own biases (By the way women and people of color also have biases to acknowledge). Ask them to develop and open their minds to different approaches. There are many roads that lead to the same place. Many times one person will approach their work in a totally different way from what their manager deems right and arrive at the same if not better result due to their own unique set of talents and experience. Remind them that they are different from them, 'you and I' is not necessarily a bad thing.

* Teach them to differentiate between work requirements, work impediments and personal preferences that do not impact work. Work requirements are specific behaviors that support the goals of the business and are therefore needed from team members to succeed. Work impediments are behaviors that serve as obstacles to achieving the vision and goals of the team and company. Non-impacting preferences, on the other hand, are behaviors that we may like to see in others and/or that make us feel more comfortable, but do not directly impact the achievement of business vision and goals.

* Encourage them to focus behavior standardization efforts on work requirements. Demand adherence to the behaviors that are deemed requirements for success in the workplace.

* Coach them in rejecting work impediments. Any behavior that interferes with achieving the mission and vision of the company and team must be rejected.

* Show them how to be flexible in the area of non-impacting preferences. If a behavior does not impact the achievement of the business goal in a negative way, be open to accepting it even if it is not a behavior you would personally practice.

* Give them the skills and tools they need. Linda Stokes suggests that we "Ensure that managers have the skills and tools necessary to coach, interview, address issues when they arise, delegate, communicate, sell, and provide customer service across a large variety of dimensions of diversity so that they can tap into the creativity and innovative ideas needed to solve the complex and unique set of challenges that their business is facing".

As we move from the dawn of the twenty-first century toward the completion of its first decade, the ability to manage diverse workgroups in a rapidly evolving work environment will clearly be a large factor in determining who succeeds as an effective manager and what companies move to the front of the pack. By teaching managers how to employ these skills, you will enable your company to gain a powerful competitive edge.

Reprinted from  HR.com

Joe Santana is a Director with Siemens Business Services, Inc. a tier one global IT outsourcing and consulting company. He has 21 years of experience as an IT executive. His career includes roles as the buyer, seller and leader of IT delivery teams in fast-paced business environments.

Joe has taught and coached hundreds of new IT Managers and IT sales representatives. Joe has often been quoted in well-known industry and business publications regarding key IT topics. He has also been a guest on business radio and network television. He has a newly published book, Manage IT, which is designed to help new and aspiring IT Managers to make the right career choices and gain a solid foundation in the skills they need to succeed as new managers.