Why is building diversity so difficult?

Diversity is a hot theme when I talk to my clients. It makes me happy, because I absolutely believe when a company represents our society and consists of multiple talents, it will be fitfortomorrow and grow.

But in many cases, attracting and hiring more diverse employees does not add to more diversity. And ends up with just a different layer of icing on the same cake. And not the masterpiece with all flavors well balanced what was intended by hiring them.

Whathappens? Meet Sandy a diverse employee on her first working day. She enters a meeting and after expressing her ideas in the meeting, she noticed: ‘Nobody responds to my remarks, or asking me questions about it.’ Leaving her with the feeling of notbeingheard. Feeling in doubt if she would make another remark. ‘Maybe better not? First wait and see how things go around here?’ You cannotblame the other employees for this ‘closed behavior’ because opening up is a really difficult thing for humans to do. It makes us feel vulnerable and afraid to losecontrol. Not a great feeling. When we don’t feel safe, we go into survivalmode either by starting to take over the conversation, withdrawing, or nodding yes while thinking no.

To make diversion successful, we all need to learn how to openup without having the feeling of losing power or control. And to learn how we can build on the othersopinion, without losing our own ideas and identity. And therefore we need to focus on the glue* of the company. And start building an openandlearning glue.

Are you curious how to build this glue for your organization?

• How to make teams open up to eachother and to be able to build on eachothers ideas?
• Or how leaders can help grow this glue?

I would love to come in contact with you.

Send me a PM when this is of importance to you. Hope to talk to you soon :-)

*the glue is that what happens in between people. The invisible but very strong sense of ‘this is how we do it here’. You could also call it culture.