There are broadly two kinds of diversity — inward and outward
In the past few years, diversity has become a hot topic in cultures and organizations.
In broad terms, diversity or diverse means different.
A diverse set of opinions.
People from diverse backgrounds.
People with diverse experiences.
If you have more women on a leadership team, the greater the chances of them creating policies that actually understand and address the challenges faced by women.
If someone on the board in any organization has a child with a learning disability or is mentally challenged, the greater their ability to empathize with someone working there who is going through a similar challenge and help them accordingly.
There are broadly two kinds of diversity — inward and outward.
Outward diversity, according to the situation, can mean:
a) people from different races
b) people from different cultures and backgrounds
c) equal gender representation
When you have people from different backgrounds and ethnicities, getting different perspectives becomes somewhat easier. We make a lot of assumptions because we find it very hard to step into another person’s shoes, simply because those experiences are alien to us.
Diversity hits a roadblock when we surround ourselves with people who look and talk just like us. When you see decisions or policies that are skewed towards a particular religion, sex or financial background, it’s mostly because the person or the committee who made the policy lacked the requisite diversity.
Inward diversity is very simply having diverse experiences. This doesn’t mean you need to have done a hundred different things. But it does mean having the ability to understand another person’s point of view or actions without judging them first.
If someone on your team came you and said they were suffering from depression, would you sit down with them and talk, or would you try and get them out of your view as you didn’t know how to address a topic you weren’t comfortable with?
If someone in your team needs to work from home on some days to take care of a young child, would you shove the company policy in their face or work out a schedule that allowed them to care for their young child while still contributing to the office?
Both inward and outward diversity, in many ways, lead to the same thing — empathy.
When you surround yourself with people from different backgrounds and experiences and get to know their stories, it will help shape your own perspectives and opinions.
When you channelize your own varied experiences and observations, it’s a pathway to stepping into someone else’s shoes and helping understand other people’s experiences better.
A lack of diversity suggests a lack of empathy, both inward as well as outward.
It’s also important not to confuse diversity with divergent.
Divergence is having a different point of view, not always necessarily one that is stemming from different experiences.
Many times, massive organizations suffer from the problem of divergence for the sake of it — basically different people at different levels trying to justify their position and salary and offering their opinion just to make their presence felt, even if it doesn’t make much sense.
It’s a challenge to cultivate diversity and empathy in today’s world. Social media has made it a lot easier to listen to the opinions of people you can relate to and shut off the others. It’s easier to hire someone who has traversed a path very similar to yours and has had a set of experiences that you can relate to.
Old boys clubs, toxic cultures, cliques at the workplace and elsewhere, all of them reek of a lack of empathy and diversity.
We can never be truly diverse. All of us walk around with a bunch of contradictions and prejudices. But if those are influencing our ability to lead a reasonably happy and fulfilling life, it might just help to address them.
PS — The idea for this piece came from a piece I read about a founder’s wish to make his agency and industry more diverse and an episode on the People and Projects Podcast hosted by Andy Kauffman, a podcast you must check out.
