February 9th, 2010
I think that organizations are truly more about alchemy and ecology than they are about finance, strategy and tactics. I think that very few organizations actually understand that and this is a big part of the reason that the organizational lifespan is still not terribly long.
Organizations that favor conformity over diversity, that value title more than contribution, that prioritize politeness over truth, that base decisions on what can be measured rather than on what matters have a very hard time learning and evolving. An organizations capacity to learn and evolve is not going to show up in its finances (until it is too late) or any other one dimensional metric.
Inclusion is part of that mix of alchemy and ecology.
Inclusion is really about utilization of resources. It is about capture. In any organization there exists a certain amount of potential, skill, experience, creativity and other intangible assets in the workforce. Inclusion is about how much of that stuff you are capturing and benefiting from. How much of that stuff are you using and how much of it are you wasting.
If your organization bought 10 new computers and a year later it had only used 2 of them, I think someone would be in trouble for waste. If your organization leased 10,000 square feet of office space and only used 4,000 square feet, someone would probably be in trouble for waste. I would argue that there is no resource we are more wasteful of than the stuff that exists in our workforce. When seeking out ideas and input we have a tendency to fish with a single line and certainty rather than with a net and curiosity.
Assumptions, labels, stereotypes and expectations are always going to play a significant role in this unless we are intentional as individuals and organizations in pushing back on them. We like to say that we are non-judgmental, but that is simply not true. We are human beings and we rapidly and relentlessly categorize people and make assumptions about them.
These categories and assumptions can prevent us from capturing and capitalizing on the experience, ideas, perspectives, creativity and other intangible assets that we have access to in our workforce. Human nature unchecked can drive us to have a different kind of relationship with and different expectations of an employee because of their race, gender, profession, education or how long they have been with the company.
Consider this…if you heard the same idea from two different people, and one of the people was Bill Gates and the other person was your IT person would you possibly hear that idea differently? Would you value it differently, evaluate it differently depending on who it was coming from? If one of the people was your CEO and the other person was a new employee would you hear that idea differently? Most of us probably would…because we are human beings and because that leads us to have some pretty strong assumptions about who has the valuable insight and perspective. If we are not able to push back on this, we risk losing valuable ideas and perspectives that might come from the IT person or the new employee. Or the female manager. Or the older employee or the younger employee or the employee without a college degree.
Nobody owns the whole truth, but we each own a piece of it. The more we rely on the truth that comes from those select few with the appropriate title and expertise, the more ideas, perspectives we risk wasting.
Is your organization inclusive?
Do you do a good job of capturing the ideas, experiences, couriosities and other assets in your workforce, or do you have a self-imposed contribution tax, a self-imposed talent tax, a self-imposed idea and creativity tax?
Are you wasting your most valuable asset?
Be good to each other.