Forget Diversity!

Too many Americans get hung up on the term “diversity,” mistakenly believing it to equate with half-baked, unfair, politically correct, social initiatives designed to placate minorities while ignoring the interests of whites. In fact, I was once asked by an individual inquiring about my availability to address a group of helping professionals on the subject, to call it anything but diversity. She intended to address “something broader than the black-white issue,” she said.

At the time, I was reluctant to seek another term. In short, I didn’t believe it was necessary. After all, when one looks up the very word “diversity” in the dictionary, there’s nothing at all written about the minority experience versus the white experience. Instead, the true definitions capture exactly what many diversity trainers work so hard to address: Diversity simply means difference, variation. Period. Managing Diversity, therefore, is about supporting all kinds of difference, all sorts of variations. Period.

It occurs to me that the real problem here lies in the simple yet unfortunate reality that many, more likely a majority of us, are simply uncomfortable addressing the issue of difference, particularly in the context of skin color. This is especially so in the workplace environment where fear, guilt, anxiety and political leanings certainly have little to no place.

So, here’s a solution. Forget diversity! That’s right. Forget it. Think instead, in terms of intercultural competence where “culture” assumes its true definition and acknowledges that every single individual has his/her own unique variation of one. Learning about culture—what we value and how we interpret and interact with the world around us—can be a most valuable step towards understanding and dealing with difference of all kinds. This approach is especially powerful when we begin with a close examination of our own.

A brief primer on culture: Everybody’s got one

Culture shows up in the social norms, customs, symbols, humor, expectations, beliefs and communication practices of all social groups. The specific artifacts of culture may differ among various ethnic groups, racial groups, genders, generations, and other social groups. In addition, culture often points to different "value-systems." Only after exploring the broader social context, do these perspectives, values and norms tend to make sense to others.

Culture can be broken down into the following four components:

• Orientation to time: Whether focus is on the past, present, or future.
  
  
• Orientation to people: Ideas about authority and hierarchy, communication style, approach to conflict, etc.
  
  
• Orientation to the environment: Whether it's here to serve us, or we're here to serve it.
  
  
• Values and Philosophies: What's most important in life.

A simpler way to think of culture may be via the 3 Ps framework, which breaks culture down into:

• Perspectives – the beliefs, philosophies and value systems of a given social group.
  
  
• Practices – the norms or “rules” that guide interpersonal interactions and social behavior.
  
  
• Products – the actual artifacts of a culture – its music, instruments, food, style of dress, etc.

It’s easy to identify the critical ways in which cultures differ when we consider, for example, generational differences. The 60s US culture was very different from the one that exists today. Beehive hairstyles, Afros, bell-bottom jeans, liberal social ideas, and expressions like “groovy,” “hip,” and “far out” have been replaced by pixie hairstyles, the Jennifer Aniston hairdo, hip-hugging straight-legged jeans, conservative social ideas, and expressions like “bling,” “chill,” and “awesome.”

We must always recognize that within cultures, however, there are also subcultures. For example, African-American and Latin cultures, while they tends to influence white American culture in many ways, differ from dominant American white culture in several important ways:

• The African-American and Latin cultures tend to be more collectivistic (group-identity oriented) than individualistic (focus on the individual).
  
  
• Facts and scientific data are less important in African-American and Latin cultures, which is also often the case in other world cultures. These groups are therefore, more likely to be employ different methods for making decisions.
  
  
• Latin cultures tend to view and approach time in a more fluid fashion – rather than in a concrete manner; meetings may begin when members are ready, rather than at a specific time simply because the time had been preset.

Article continues with a discussion of Intercultural Intelligence