When you look at the photo above, what stands out the most? A group of women smiling? The Lenovo backdrop? How we didn’t know which camera to look at? Well to me, I see that photo and I see diversity.
I believe diversity is important to the success of an organization, but we need to be clear what it means. As I’ve said before, diversity is defined by the demographics of your organization. Your leadership team is going to be more effective if it’s reflective of your population.
When we look at our organizations, we should not limit our understanding of diversity to only race or gender. Diversity needs to be cultural as well. I don’t think there’s a magic percentage you need to have, but your organization (and leadership) needs to have an even spread of people. Not only cultural representation, but let’s get diversity of age in there too! We have Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials in our workplaces and now Gen Z is entering the workforce.
Your leadership team is going to be more effective if it’s reflective of your population.
When I started in my management career, there were very few role models for me to look up to. At twenty-six years of age, I started as a frontline manager and oversaw people who were the same age as my parents. I guess you could say I was not reflective of the population of the organization! When I was promoted, as an operational expert with a finance background, to run a global team of 500 engineers, the large majority of whom were white, middle-aged males, I experienced what not being a diverse organization actually feels like.
I think you need a good mix of people that have diverse thoughts and experiences to form an organization because I truly feel you’re never going to get the best solution for your business till you’ve truly looked at and have people that can express all their thoughts.
Today, 50% of my global team at Lenovo speaks Mandarin (and not all these people live in China, by the way), and 50% represents the rest of the world. The team truly is diverse, across gender, race, and age.
For me, diversity simply is about business, in all its aspects.
What interests me most of all about diversity, beyond its common humanity, is how to make diversity real, how to channel what it means inside an organization to become better at what we all do, and to ensure it becomes established for the long-term.
This has nothing to do with quotas, nor is it to do with, as Bernard Coleman noted earlier this year in Forbes, establishing a business case. For me, diversity simply is about business, in all its aspects.
So: How do you grab hold of something as diverse as ‘diversity’?
I’m a huge fan of Dr Shalom Saada Saar, of the Center for Leadership Development, and a teacher at MIT and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing (diversity in action!). I’ve taken classes with Dr Saar, he’s become a personal friend, and in previous organizations I’ve invited him to advise on how to create true diversity in transformation teams.
He defines diversity as being built on shared values that underpin a range of experiences and skills. As he defines them, they are:
- Green — people who are innovative, energetic, always positive, creative
- Red — people who love data, who are analytical
- Blue — people good at decision making, at seeing the bigger picture, at creating bold ideas
In his model, diversity in teams and leadership is therefore about skills, leadership development and training, with age, sex, race and culture essential and important personal elements that influence these skills.
What’s so powerful about Dr Saar’s thinking is the understanding of how to make diversity real, in a practical sense, not just that diversity is needed or beneficial, for a project or an organization.
Dr Saar’s approach means you can quickly identify the right people for the right transformation projects and what types of people work well together. This approach gets a project to not only move but move mountains.
Here’s an example: Right now, Lenovo’s Data Center Group is undergoing transformation. To achieve our objectives, we need the very best people in all the important roles. Having the most-diverse team we can possibly create is making a tangible difference to our results — we can see the financial results of this attention to diversity. What’s more, that success, born of the efforts of this diverse team, creates a positive feedback loop that further promotes diversity and collaboration.
This approach gets a project to not only move but move mountains.
The key has been to map the diversity of the team to the organization, to map diversity to its operations, and to ensure that teams and leaders have the diversity of skills and backgrounds to deliver success. One thing I learned early in my career is that diversity for its own sake can be hollow and set individuals up for failure if not made meaningful. As I noted above, diversity is not about a target on a quota form.
Put in these terms, you can see how powerful a truly-diverse team will be, but also that care and effort are needed to ensure that diversity is real, and meaningful, so that success follows.
To make diversity real in an organization, work on these four areas for real results
- A diverse team maximizes success. You need people with different skills, competencies and backgrounds to successfully deliver a project. Usually, there are three kinds of people on any team — creative people, people who are obsessed with data and people who look at the bigger picture and take action. A leader’s role is to understand all of them, and their cultural backgrounds.
- Having a diverse leadership team is important when seeking to create a diverse team committed to delivering high-performance. When the leadership team reflects the composition of its members, that leadership and management — and the team — become even more effective.
- How do leaders make diverse teams work? Leaders need to walk the floor, provide a meaningful extra human touch, and create relationships at work that engage with the teams. Celebrate wins. Thirty percent of management is about people: Managers must become culturally aware. When crises hit (and they will) resist the urge to default on assigning roles or replacing team members to people of the same background as you: Consciously aim for diversity, using data and cultural inputs to make the best-possible choice for the long-term. The crisis will pass, but the need for diversity lasts.
- It is the leader’s job to nurture other leaders/managers to embrace diversity.Creating role models from the team’s diversity sets people up for success. Diverse inputs mean you’re less likely to miss something.
When I was promoted to manage that team of 500 engineers, my manager explained his decision this way: “You need to understand and feel what each of these areas look like.” I think that’s a great summary of what diversity in practice means: understanding and empathy, for the benefit of the team and the organization. When everyone benefits — that’s a real result!
About the Author
Renée Ure is Vice President, Global Supply Chain for Lenovo and leads a global organization responsible for Planning, Procurement, Fulfillment, Operations, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Engineering for the Data Center Group. Start a conversation with her here, or on LinkedIn and Twitter.
