March 20th, 2011
Pretty cool way to start the week…
I get to talk about diversity and inclusion…on the radio…with Dr. Julianne Malveaux. Pretty good stuff. The show is The Sound of Ideas and it airs Monday morning at 9am (EST). My understanding is that they will be livecasting the show (though I will not be there in person) and it will also be available as a podcast later in the day.
Anyway.
We are going to be talking about diversity and inclusion, and one specific example that will be considered is the cabinet assembled by Ohio Governor John Kasich.
I think that this conversation is going to right on theme with a lot what I have been talking about lately in Great Minds Do Not Think Alike, The Think About Talent, and Picking Fights With Reality.
A few points that I will attempt to add to this conversation…
- Individual talent / ability / competency is a actually a very vague and ambiguous thing. We talk about it as if it is a tangible commodity like a pound of sugar or a gallon of milk. It is not. It is very difficult to quantify and even define. This idea that diversity is not worthy of any conversation because all we need to do is hire the best person for the job is flawed from the beginning. We are still not good at identifying the best person for the job.
- Identification of talent / ability / competency is largely a subjective process, so the social identity of the decision maker is a huge piece of the equation. The easiest thing in the world is for us to surround ourselves with people that look and talk and think just like us…take a look at your network of relationships and see what you find.
- A talented group, team or cabinet is not simply about finding talented individuals. Groups of talented individuals perform poorly all the time. Groups of really smart individuals behave very stupidly all the time. There is a whole other set of dynamics that factor into talent / ability / competency on a group level (trust, communication, etc.), and one of them is diversity.
- We all bring a narrow and specific world view to our work. The more a group of individuals shares the same narrow world view the more definitive that world view seems and the more likely it is that groupthink takes hold.
Or…maybe the conversation will go an entirely different way, who knows? Looking forward to it either way.
Be good to each other.
Diversity is usually rerefred to when speaking of people of different color. How ever diversity is also can be variable among religions or people with disabilities. There are stigma’s out there in society regarding mental illness, autoimmune disease and other illness. One expects though Mayo seeks diversity regarding mental illness even though some of the public may refer to it as goofy behavior. I was stunned when I heard the Mayo physician in clinic evaluation in front of the patient refer to the patient with autoimmune encephalopathy as Goofy. Not once but twice stated so you get goofy and then predisone takes it away? Did he just say she was goofy? Twice? Reading over this physician’s publications I could not find anywhere in which he rerefred to autoimmune related encephalopathy as Goofy as a description. Autoimmune encephalopathy brings with it seizure, psychosis, suicide, coma sleep, and in some untreated cases death. Now easily treated with predisone almost immediately reverses all the encephalopathy very possibly saving the person’s life. When the chair of this department was questioned as to the subordinates word goofy, he remained silent. While Mayo Rochester can advance promises of diversity among people with brain illness, some there may not have wholly internalized this concept by holding onto old social stigmas. Yet where no action is taken to correct such stigma’s, one wonders the extent the institution has internalized such beliefs.