Diversity and Inclusion Solutions
Helping Yourself and Others Work Through Changes
One useful tool to help ourselves and others work through changes in society, respond to new concepts, and even to understand how we relate to different people, is to locate ourselves and others using five typical roles: Innovator, Change Agent, Pragmatist, Sceptic, (Skeptic in North America), and Traditionalist. Based on Marilyn Loden’s Diversity Adoption Process,…
Read MoreStrengthen Your Ability to Work with Others
There are many things that make us unique and distinct – and there are larger, universal things that connect us. We all feel emotion. We may express it differently based on our culture, personality, and context (many of us would not bring full emotional expression to work, for example) but to be able to work…
Read MoreResponding to Difference: A Few Basics
Working with Diversity and Inclusion is simple, not easy. As always, it starts with us. Here are a couple of behaviours and reflections that may prove useful. The behaviours are often simple; for example – use reversability. If you say something about a woman and refer to her gender as part of what you say,…
Read MoreBeginner's Mind
As mentioned above, working with difference is simple but not easy. A very useful way of approaching our experience with difference is to apply the insights from another activity that is simple but not easy – mindfulness. Sharon Salzberg, one, of the preeminent Western teachers and writers in this space, suggests that this idea of…
Read MoreHow to Tell If Your Organisation Is Serious About Diversity and Inclusion
First – the why. Why would someone in the dominant power structure want to change the system? As a leader, as a practitioner – anyone wanting to create more equitable and inclusive organisations – you need to be able to answer one question: what’s in it for me WIIFM)? If the business case was sufficient,…
Read MoreGender and Men
How often when we hear about gender equity or gender diversity do we automatically think that gender = women? Recent and ongoing work for the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation found that while a majority agreed that gender [in]equality is still a problem, a majority of men agreed that “political correctness means I cannot openly say what I think…
Read MoreExpanding the Pause
Of course, we all have biases; what’s necessary is to Recognise and accept that we all have biases Sometimes an assumption is made that it’s only the majority, or the power elite, who are biased – so for example in places where white men dominate the power structures men are biased, white people are biased, etc. In…
Read MoreClosing the Intention – Action Gap
I recently had the privilege of attending a talk by Professor Iris Bohnet of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, published by Harvard University Press is a great resource to help close what she calls the Intention-Action gap. Useful reminders from her work include: The question is not “Do…
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