The Road to Empowerment: From Affirmative Action to Managing Diversity

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Suva is a middle aged woman living in a small Midwestern town. She is a native of Kadavu Island, Fiji's fourth largest island in the Southwest Pacific.

All of Fiji's 330 islands are typically described by American tourism brochures as "the land of broad smiles, flashing white teeth, gentle relaxation and absolutely no stress."

But this morning Suva isn't smiling.

She is stressed, after being up all night preparing for a special company multicultural dinner.

Her company's annual affair helps co-workers appreciate Suva's culture. Everyone will love her special sweet potato and pineapple bake; they always do. They will enjoy looking at slides of Suva's last trip home. They probably don't realize the hours it takes Suva to prepare for this special event, especially since her children are very young and she must first tuck them into bed before she starts cooking.

Suva wonders what it would like to stay below the radar and just do her work. Maybe next year everyone will be happy if she hands out her Fiji recipes and skips the cooking. "Well, it is a thought," she muses, while packing up her car with food and the slide projector.

Managing diversity is still a very new idea for many companies. Most of Suva's co-workers have never traveled outside of their country or their state and experiencing food from another culture is an important start.

Will this dinner meet expectations of the Human Resources Department? Will employees learn to work together in groups and to consider the unique contributions from individuals? Will all employees experience empowerment? Will the company grow and prosper in today's competitive, global environment?

At the heart of managing diversity is changing a root culture. It is a difficult task that takes education and time for discovering what needs to change, developing a change plan and implementing and evaluating the solutions.

Corporate cultures and systems do not change quickly. Managers and leaders who realize such change is critically needed may at first set up affirmative action programs for short-term relief, seeing managing diversity used later on to initiate long-term change.

Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., considered the country's foremost diversity thought leader, would likely see some gain from Suva's meal, describing a move from affirmative action into valuing differences as easing the transition into managing diversity.

Affirmative Action or AA was never meant to be the end all. Its intent was to fulfill a legal, moral, and social responsibility by initiating special efforts to ensure creation of a diverse work force, and then to assist in upward mobility for minorities and women, Thomas writes.

But managers have too often focused on affirmative action and ignored corrective action, seeing both as the same.

AA often works like this: A company studies its current process for evaluating supervisors and decides it doesn't work very well for minorities, women and others not in the dominant cultures − those who are physically challenged, who come from another country or who are members of the LGBT community, or perhaps mentally ill.

An additional process is set up for these employees. The new process is used for two years and substantial gains are reported.

But the company hears back from minorities and women they have been stigmatized because of this "special process," and white males complain the new system is reverse discrimination and want it abolished.

Upper management sees the system as successful and believes they now understand how to manage minorities and women so they halt this process, "since everyone wants to see it go."

The "regular" system remains uncorrected. No efforts are made to understand why it does not work naturally for everyone in the first place. If a correction ever is discovered, the existing culture probably would not allow needed change.

So if everyone returns to the original system, the problem recurs, and those assisted by the special process stagnate or even leave the company.

Management becomes upset by failure of the AA program and begins to resent those who they had "tried to help" and the cycle continues.

Organizations, like Suva's, may already have affirmative action programs in place and are tryig to harmonize their efforts with activities known as valuing differences.

They plan special minority dinners, invite noted diversity speakers for workshops or introduce "culture" clubs meant to establish awareness of and respect for diversity in the workplace.

College campuses typically have similar programs such as "foreign students clubs" while some companies have added clubs for anyone from educational groups for parents of autistic children to LGBT employees who meet for political action.

"Differences" programs are targeted to individuals and interpersonal levels,trying to improve relationships among employees and/or students and to minimize blatant behaviors like racism. sexism or gay-bashing.

But other times, this is not the case. Recently, a well-known private women's college touted on its website a special program to recruit women of color. After reading the planned activities, it was evident the purpose was only to add to the school's racial statistics while keeping these newly recruited women isolated.

For the most part, the focus is on people thought of as "different" because of their values, their religions, and ways of thinking, cultures and more. Some activities use confrontation (and some using these techniques have been successfully sued) and others do not.

The typical goal is to assist people in becoming aware of differences and accepting or at least tolerating each other. Participants are often led to explore how their differences might be "tapped into" as assets in the organization.

AA was historically needed due to racist, malicious and other dysfunctional behavior and attitudes. This next phase, valuing differences, is based on a belief that undesirable behavior is due to a lack of awareness and understanding.

Organizations having difficulty with employees or student relations often find valuing differences can help -- at least to improve relationships and minimize some of the worst behaviors.

But claiming to value differences is not enough to create an empowered workforce, and this is where the newest ideas about managing diversity come into play. For all students, employees and other organizational members to reach their full potentials naturally, managing diversity is the critical key.

Suva's company recently started transitioning from valuing differences into managing diversity with the hiring of a diversity officer. Who knows? The annual diversity dinner that focuses on Lori Suva could actually disappear by next year.

Or perhaps even better, the dinner responsibilities will be shared by all employees who will bring a favorite dish and family photos representing their ethnic roots, the new diversity officer says, "...that is, if they know their family history."

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