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Diversity alone is insufficient Great leaders create inclusive teams and innovative organizations. Sharmla Chetty explains how
An inclusive culture helps improve financial performance and innovation to drive future growth Dialogue Q2 2020
It was a tale of two beaches. While growing up in South Africa, I longed for the right to sunbathe on the beautiful, soft beaches along the breathtaking KwaZulu-Natal coast. But this was the Apartheid era. The lusher shorelines were reserved for white people. The racist regime excluded me as a non-white, and sequestered our communities to rockier beaches with steep dunes, distant from the bathing spots. My formative years taught me much about the horror of exclusion and gave me a lifelong purpose to include – and to promote inclusivity. Just as whole nations have thrived from harnessing the value of everyone within them, so too must organizations. Yet still too few know how to do so. Inclusion has become conflated with diversity, as if diversity alone is sufficient. Diversity is a prerequisite for inclusion, yet it does not guarantee it. Business leaders need to work at inclusion, by driving change and making proactive steps to bring people in. They must create a diverse, inclusive culture that helps
improve financial performance and innovation to drive the future growth of their organizations. Globalization brings an influx of information from an increasingly diverse workforce. In this fast-changing environment, every situation and context brings its own set of challenges. Leaders must navigate dilemmas and reconcile competing expectations – and learn from different perspectives. What are the measures leaders should take? Six key lessons stand out.
Lesson 1 Extol the benefits and measure success Diverse, inclusive teams are more productive and more profitable. That’s proven. Leaders have a duty to remind people of the fact. Why? Because humans’ instinct is to recruit in their own image and to surround themselves with people like them. Homogeneity is such a powerful urge that it is still fairly common to find executive teams comprising men who attended the same schools. Yet diverse, inclusive teams bring new ideas to a business. If you look the same, and behave