RELATIONSHIP SKILLS--MANAGING A NEW KIND OF DIVERSITY

RELATIONSHIP SKILLS—MANAGING A NEW KIND OF DIVERSITY

The world is shrinking and globalization is a fact of life. Only twenty years ago finding a "Made in China" label would have been fairly rare. Today, a shopper can hardly walk through any store in the world without seeing one. From manufacturers such as 3M, General Motors, and Boeing to retailers such as Wal-Mart, Ikea, and Target to media such as the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, and Fox to local shops and stores, world markets are at our doorstep. While there are yet obstacles to a fully global, operationally integrated free-trade environment, such a global marketplace is not too far out in the future. Business leaders today must figure out how to build enough of the right kinds of diversity into their culture to connect to and profit from a changing world marketplace in the Dual Age of Information and Connections.

In this chapter we refer to building and managing a workforce that is diverse in more ways than age, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and nationality. Diversity in the information and connection economy must be broader and deeper than the traditional dimensions of equal employment opportunity, affirmative action, and adverse impact. It is no longer enough to have a workforce that looks like its customer base and the communities in which it operates. The particular kind of diversity that twenty-first-century leaders must be able to manage is the diversity of ideas and opinions and how people express those ideas. Managing this new kind of diversity requires a special set of relationship skills on the part of leaders, because diversity of thought can quickly lead to conflict—conflict that an enterprise leader must be able to manage in a healthy, productive manner. Otherwise, people start throwing ideological spit-wads and verbal rocks at each other.

Core Human Values Override Cultural Nuances

Human cultures are as diverse as the people who inhabit them. Yet despite cultural nuances, humans have many core values that cut across cultural barriers. From Anchorage to Ankara people understand honesty and keeping one's word. From Bangkok to Brussels people understand and value the importance of trust. From Canberra to Calcutta people know a fair deal and whether or not they are being cheated. From Dakar to Duluth people intuitively know if you are being open and candid or closed and secretive. These core human attributes help lubricate your ability to partner in a global economy. Having a staff fluent in these partnering skills will do more to improve your global network than all the transactions in the world. Once the price gets cheaper someplace else, your customers may move elsewhere if you have not established a durable relationship. The cross-cultural diversity that we're talking about goes beyond hiring people who look like our global customers, and includes people who think differently from us, who process information differently, and who are capable of building the kinds of connections that enable business to occur.

Diversity of Opinions and Ideas

One type of diversity typically overlooked is diversity of opinions and ideas. For example, we know of a board of directors for a large corporation based in the south-central part of the United States. The board all looks the same—white men, with one exception, a white woman—and, what is more disconcerting, they all think alike. They view the world through the same set of filters. Their values and beliefs mirror each other's. The most devastating trait they share is their dislike for any conflict. As a result of this discomfort with conflict, they never argue over anything. They honestly believe that their ability to avoid conflict enables them to interact in a productive manner. While their interactions may seem polite on the surface, under the veneer of civility they seethe with tension and mistrust. Because they use the style of accommodation with each other to avoid conflict, they have made some huge blunders in their decision-making process. They overlook ethical issues, support cronyism, and make decisions based on a narrow focus of interest … their own. The result of the culture they have established on their board is that their organization has overlooked many illegal activities committed by management, and the business has been indicted for criminal activities, including tax avoidance, perjury, and fraud.

Having people who think differently and are free to express their views is an important component of diversity. Without that element challenging and pushing us to achieve more, to continue to be honest, open, and fair-minded, we can sink into an abyss of self-serving behavior that destroys trust and closes down the life blood of the new economy: information and knowledge.

Approaches to Processing Information

How people process information is also critical to having a diverse team. Some people need time to process information, while others do so immediately. Decision making is sometimes as much about timing as it is about the decision itself. Having teams that can respect various decision-making styles is important. Forcing people to make decisions when they are not ready or allowing the decision-making process to drag on too long are equally counterproductive. Making sure there is a balance in your decision-making process not only expedites a decision, but also ensures that the process is thoughtful and participative, building commitment to the outcome and loyalty to the team.

People view the world in limitless ways. As with the evolutionary process, having diversity within an organization is a strategy for continued growth and success. The new kind of diversity means that you will never get so locked into one way of thinking, or viewing the world, that when things change you will be left behind. With the incredible speed of information growth, having a diverse workforce will ensure you're not left behind.

Across the Hall, Across the River, Across the Pond

In a global marketplace, people think differently, act differently, react differently, and do things for reasons that differ from one culture to another—regardless of where they're from. The people of one culture tend to think that the people of other cultures think like them, act like them, and react like them, and that the people of those other cultures do things for exactly the same reasons that they would in their own culture. That assumption is not accurate. Twenty-first-century leaders must learn how to overcome the natural tendency to make that assumption, to counterbalance it with a new set of partnering skills.

Neither an organization's leaders nor its employees acquire the relationship skills to manage the new diversity by osmosis, or by accident, or by divine intervention. Remember the distinction we drew in Chapter 1 between a culture by design and a culture by evolution? The same kind of design-versus-evolution distinction applies to building the relationship skills needed to transform a company into a Powerhouse Partner. As a leader of an enterprise competing in the twenty-first century, would you prefer that your workforce build relationship skills by design or stumble along with relationship skills by evolution? Which set of skills would you wager has the greater likelihood of enabling your people to achieve your organization's vision, to accomplish its mission, and to carry out its strategic directions? Leaders who want to succeed in managing and leveraging the new kind of diversity must proactively learn, apply, and refine a robust set of partnering skills, and they must ensure that their employees build the partnering skills needed to execute against the strategic framework.

But people in different parts of an enterprise are likely to need different kinds of relationship skills. Partnering with a colleague whose cube is across the hall requires basic partnering skills—interpersonal and perhaps cross-functional skills. Partnering with a colleague, a customer, a supplier, or a strategic business partner whose office is across the river or across the country demands a broader set of partnering skills—interpersonal, cross-functional, and cross-organizational. Partnering with a colleague, customer, supplier, or strategic business partner whose office is across the pond or halfway around the world calls for the highest mix of partnering skills—interpersonal, cross-functional, cross-organizational, and cross-cultural. The farther away a partner is, the greater the need for well-developed relationship skills. Time and distance are relentless adversaries, and you will not overcome them by accident.