Introduction
Diversity is a common topic in business today, for a few different reasons. First, most workforces these days are diverse places, but even when they are not, people work with other offices in other countries, with suppliers around the world, and with customers wherever they are found. If business fifty years ago was largely a regional affair, it is fully global today, and that demands an entirely new skill set around understanding diversity and global issues, and working within those contexts to deliver exceptional business results.
Diversity
There are a few different ways to understand diversity. The first is to take sort of a “census” approach, breaking people out by easy-to-measure demographic categories. This is a fairly basic approach that leads one to recognize that there are different people in our communities and workforces, but does little to guide one’s thoughts and actions. Going a little bit deeper, one can see that groups of people are not at all homogenous. Generic categories like “White”, “Black” and “Asian” all come with many different subsets, and each subset has unique cultural characteristics. There are also national origin characteristics that go beyond race, especially for people from countries that have high levels of diversity of their own.
Marketers need to know how best to target their audiences. Human resources departments need to avoid discrimination in the workplace, and managers need to be aware of how certain groups are discriminated against in their career development, and take steps to counter that sort of discrimination, such as providing mentorship opportunities. Lozano and Escrich (2017) note that it can be quite challenging...…the changes in the way that issues like race, class and gender are perceived today. It is not uncommon for people who are older to be inflexible – the world today might be different than the world they grew up in, and they have difficulty acknowledging that. All told, being able to adapt to changes is the best way to manage global issues, especially when dealing with a diverse workforce. Being open to people who have different gender expression, or identities with which one may be unfamiliar is certainly a possibility, but there’s really no reason why this needs to be a pain point for anybody.
Thus, global issues, and diversity, highlight the changing nature of the world, where we are becoming increasingly globalized, and where managers now need to remain open, flexible and adaptable to change in order to maintain relevance.…
