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At Dell Inc., a corporation that has scooped up many awards for its commitment to diversity, leaders understand the importance of fostering an affirming diversity climate. Thurmond Woodward, Dell’s VP of global diversity said, “We don’t want to focus only on representation, because representation without the right culture leads to a revolving door, and that is not what we were looking to do.”

Within the last fifteen years or so, the workplace has become increasingly diverse along dimensions such as race, gender, age, and nationality. Most business leaders recognize that, by introducing greater diversity into their organizations, they have the potential to gain a strong competitive advantage. At the same time, though, they recognize that this demographic shift is accompanied by pretty big challenges. In fact, organizational diversity doesn’t always work—merging people with different backgrounds and worldviews has the potential for both positive and negative outcomes. For example, diverse organizations have been associated with more effective problem-solving abilities and greater innovation, but also intergroup friction, higher turnover rates, and lower productivity.

What makes diversity work

In order to get the benefits of diversity and minimize its potential negative consequences, it’s not enough to simply implement a couple of diversity-related training programs. Becoming a truly successful multicultural organization requires starting at a deeper level. It requires cultivating a climate where people genuinely value diversity, rather than see it as a moral imperative or as a means of accessing wider markets.
After a yearlong assessment of their diversity climate, Dell put forward a variety of initiatives that would contribute to what they call a “cultural evolution.” These initiatives included sponsoring networking groups for different minority groups, career management programs, cross-cultural training for leaders and employees alike, and diversity focused recruiting. Their efforts were well worth the rewards –now, over half of their employees are minorities and they report higher levels of inclusion and identity freedom. Woodward states that, in terms of the bottom line, their climate has improved customer service experiences and powered their globalization effort.
Dell’s example highlights the fact that climate change is a difficult and long process and that, in order for it to be successful, business-leaders need a multipronged approach to diversity. Taylor Cox, a widely known author in organizational psychology and the founding father of the theoretical model of the multicultural organization, offers some suggestions towards this end. He argues that in order to make this transition into an organization that is truly multicultural and values diversity, efforts must be made in the following areas:

1. Leadership

When leaders become advocates for the importance of diversity, when they demonstrate how diversity is related to broader strategic objectives, and when they model the behaviors they wish to see in the organization, they can have profound effects on the diversity climate. This might mean that the CEO presents the results of a company-wide survey related to diversity issues, makes a video to be delivered to each unit in which he outlines his vision for diversity management, and kicks off and closes diversity seminars. Taylor boldly insists that strong leadership is the single most important element in managing diversity –this type of effort is “doomed to failure” if diversity officers and human resources staff are the only ones taking charge of it.

2. Continuous research and measurement of diversity-related matters

The creation of a diversity climate needs to be data driven. That is, organizations need to be able to diagnose the climate for diversity, measure progress, and tweak diversity initiatives accordingly. In my research, I’ve found evidence that, compared to white employees, racial minorities may have a more negative perception of the organizational climate for diversity. If this is the case in your organization, you may seek out the opinions of minority employees through surveys or focus groups, determine the reason for this perceptual gap, implement a solution, and importantly, continually collect data to monitor the situation.

3. Education

Cultivating an affirming diversity climate also requires an ongoing commitment to education on diversity. Note that this is different from a “one-shot” diversity-training program. These training programs can be used to develop specific communication and leadership skills as well as to help employees understand their responsibilities in the cultural change process. The important element here is that these programs are continually offered and available for employees.

4. Follow-Up

This component is linked to the research and measurement described earlier. It emphasizes that some form of accountability needs to be built into this cultural evolution. By holding quarterly meetings to assess the progress of diversity-related goals, providing incentives to managers and employees for these goals, and managing the sharing of knowledge about diversity efforts, accountability can be strengthened.

So these are the areas where attention should be focused, particularly as our economy is in a tailspin. Studies show that in times of economic instability, individuals go into a self-protective mode, isolating themselves and their socio-cultural group, and this may lead to an increase in workplace discrimination. During this recession, it is perhaps most important to be attentive to and nurture your company’s diversity climate to gain that competitive edge.

I just signed up to participate in a project going on at KM.gov – their aim [informally] is to bring knowledge management to the U.S. government so that collaboration, lessons learned, innovation, etc. can all help with the implementation and long-term success of the major changes our country will be undergoing as a result of the coming stimulus bill.

Here’s their mission as they say it:

Inform and support federal government departments, agencies, organizations, and  their constituencies in the research, development, identification, and implementation of knowledge management (KM) activities, practices, lessons learned, and technologies.

To accomplish this mission, the Federal KMWG will mobilize and leverage thought leaders and KM practitioners from government, quasi-government, academia, non-government, non-profit, and the private sector around the globe.

Anyone can sign-up and contribute – go to the site to request an account and you’ll soon have a voice in helping shape the [hopeful] future of how our government operates in our knowledge society.

I haven’t participated for quite some time but this month’s Big Question on the Learning Circuits blog was too intriguing…

If you peer inside an organization in 10 years time and you look at how workplace learning is being supported by that organization, what will you see?

The Knowledge Economy

I’ll preface the rest of the post by saying that I feel we’re currently well into a knowledge economy and that in ten years this transition will be even more apparent so my response will hinge upon that being true.  I view a knowledge economy as one being populated by workers creating and relying upon quick access to, and acquisition of, information that they need – organizations can range from construction to IT…as long as they depend on the acquisition of relevant info/knowledge in order to perform and improve they are staffed with knowledge workers in my opinion.  I do feel that the knowledge economy will bring with it different learning and development needs for the knowledge workforce.

The Truthful Answer

Quite frankly, I think the honest answer to the Big Question listed above is…not too much different from what we see today.

Just like other societal transformations, I think our move into the knowledge economy will take a long time to cement itself into the philosophies and methodologies of organizations – this includes learning departments.  There are so many factors ranging from mental models of those that have been in the industry for a long time to infrastructures and contracts that are entrenched and cannot be uprooted quickly that will prevent a speedy transition to fully supporting the needs of the workforce in a decade.

I recently wrote about the 2008 Chief Learning Officer [CLO] Magazine report on trends in the industry and the Executive Summary of this report shows no signs of much movement in the field. Do I think this will change substantially over the business landscape in ten years?  No.  I certainly feel that there will be pockets of progressive organizations that will make some great shifts [as indeed there are already several examples of this today] but for the overall learning industry to fundamentally change how it sees the world of L&D I think will take much longer.

The Wishful Answer

I hope I’m being cynical and that the above proves not to be true because I feel that the next 10 years presents an enormous opportunity for L&D to ramp up it’s organizational credibility to a place where we’re not yearning for a seat at the proverbial table…it’ll just be there waiting.

What I’d love to see of L&D departments in 10 years is one that oversees knowledge in the organization.  Departments that acknowledge that the vast majority of learning and development takes place outside of the classroom or computer [although some is better delivered in those places as well] and implement methods that reflect this ratio.

To me this looks like departments that ensures communities of practice and knowledge networks are thriving, active and supported by the right IT tools.  Ones that takes the role of redesigning the workspace [wherever it may be] of employees so that knowledge flows freely, ones that assesses the entire value network of an organization so that learning strategies can be extended to members whose performance affects that of the organization, ones that effectively integrate new-hires into their new network and provides the content they need when needed, ones that develops leaders to lead in a collaborative web and ones that promotes innovation throughput by running off of the energy created by the aforementioned methods.

The End

As I said above, I think that L&D Departments have a golden opportunity at the moment – to make this transition and show their organizations the value they can add by truly supporting the business workforce.  If this transition isn’t made I’m afraid other disciplines such as knowledge management may rush to fill the gap left by L&D.  I really see these fields merging as I think the lines between them will begin to blur – so after all this rambling, maybe that’s what things will look like in 10 years…

CLO [Chief Learning Officer] Magazine released their 2009 Business Intelligence Industry Report today.  In full disclosure I have not read the detailed report [which is being sold for $495] – I just read the free Executive Summary but from the pieces in there I received a good enough overview to be disappointed.

A common lament in the L&D world is how to get a ’seat at the table’ – in other words how can the L&D function be seen as being strategic enough to warrant participation in the C-level strategy interactions that determine the direction and operation of the organization.  Based on what I read in this summary it’s not surprising that the ‘tables’ out there don’t have many name tents with ‘L&D’ on them.

Before I provide specific examples I’d like to offer some context on my viewpoints and philosophy.  I believe that we are currently living/working/playing in a knowledge-based economy, or one in which know-how, experience, networks, tacit knowledge and who you know provide the real competitive advantage to improve efficiency, bring products to market, deliver to clients, etc. – and it doesn’t matter if you’re in consulting or cement.  Assuming this is true, the approaches used by L&D need to transition to support this new world as well and what I read in the CLO report indicates that they haven’t.

There are multiple examples in the summary of ways that L&D departments haven’t adapted to support a knowledge-based organization in an information society – from methodologies to analytics to perceptions of the C-level.  Some examples below…

Learning Delivery Methods

In an age where informal learning/knowledge networks/collaboration is known to be the source of the vast majority of learning and information for workers of all types one would think methodologies to support these would be creeping [if not entrenched] into corporate learning portfolios.  Rather, formal classroom training “clearly remains the most common method used.”  In a close second place, “the combination of live and self-paced e-learning is the second-most common delivery modality used by organizations.”

The nature of learning ‘delivery’ is flawed from the start when a knowledge economy dominates the market.  Organizations that commit most of their L&D resources to prescribing, designing and delivering everything that their workforce needs to know rather than reallocating those resources to help support and facilitate the exchange of the collective intelligence that already exists are missing a key competitive advantage in the information society.  Dispatch those trainers to begin creating learning histories to prevent brain drain, to act as facilitators/knowledge brokers between geographically dispersed teams with similar objectives or to help redesign the office layout so that informal exchanges can happen more effortlessly.

Learning Analytics

This section was the most shocking to me.  Not only do the methods being used by most of these organizations sound outdated, the report acknowledges that the metrics [when they're gathered] are proving that they’re providing little value.  Some notable quotes/stats…

• “Not surprisingly, little progress  has been made during the past year with the correlation of learning to various other business metrics…”
• “Approximately 1/5 of organizations correlate employee productivity to learning.”
• “Less than 1/10 of organizations correlate extended enterprise performance to learning.” [umm - wow!]
• “In reality, most organizations measure little beyond the basics, such as course enrollments, completions and learner satisfaction rates.”

Learning & Development Staffing

The report then talks about staffing – mentioning that “heads of HR and corporate education and chief learning officers represent the largest groups that believe the enterprise does not have enough staff to support the learning initiatives.”  What does the C-level think? – “only 12 percent of CEOs, COOs and presidents believe the organization does not have enough staff.”  Based on this chasm in perceptions the report concludes that this “obviously highlights a lack of communication between learning executives and senior-level business executives.”

Does it really?  If I were an executive at one of these organizations what I would see is our L&D department using methodologies suited for a past era, applying useless analytics to those ineffective methods, complaining because they need more staff and then saying that I’m out of touch with them because I think they’re staffed just fine and that I’ll likely trim their department if we hit a rough patch.  I don’t blame those executives one bit for their views of these L&D departments.  After all, let’s review a stat from the Analytics section above – “Less than 1/10 of organizations correlate extended enterprise performance to learning.”  Any other department that boasted those stats would be lucky to have a seat period – let alone one at the Executive table.

Where to now?

I think this should serve as a wake-up call to the L&D field as a whole – the world we live and work in has changed…we need to change with it.  There is a burgeoning field of knowledge management/learning communities/knowledge networks/social networking/workspace design/collaboration/etc. out there that is primed to take on the L&D role in organizations that are preparing themselves to compete in a knowledge society.  The lines between knowledge management and L&D should be becoming very blurry in my opinion.  If not, when you leap for the L&D seat at the table you may land on the lap of someone setting up their KM table tent.

We’re doing work with a large organization to help them support their knowledge networks by building learning communities, increasing collaboration, etc.  Unfortunately we couldn’t get to them before they moved into their brand-spankin’ new office space because they missed a golden opportunity.

This new space is actually quite progressive – it’s touted as the first fully LEED certified building in Denver and with that comes nice aesthetics, trendy fixtures and many other neat amenities.  Where they went wrong, though, is in some of the construction decisions.  A great example of that is in the kitchen/copy rooms…

They made a great decision by putting the copiers and supplies in the same space as the refrigerator and micowave – it is intended to serve as a central spot where people will happen to be as part of their day and engage in informal conversations…thus leading to knowledge transfer and collaboration of course.

The problem is that this space is quite narrow.  When people are standing at each copier shown above it’s too cramped to walk through and certainly not inviting for an ad hoc meeting.  Same at the other end – the microwave, water machine and refrigerator are all so close together that you can barely stand at one without being in the way of someone at another.  I’ve seen many impromptu conversations spoiled by someone needing to walk through or just not happen at all because of the confining feelings generated by the space.

What opporuntiies are there with your space to foster more informal conversations?  Look at the areas with an eye for welcoming spots that have plenty of room for people to meet and chat while others that aren’t involved can easily drift past unnoticed.

I recently returned from a trip to a client’s site in the Andes just outside Cajamarca, Peru.  We were there with an elusive mission…capture knowledge.  Can it get more vague?

As we plow further into an economy centered around knowledge and the exchange of it, this exercise will become much more commonplace (I predict) but for us we needed to explain to our client that in order to facilitate the exchange of tacit knowledge, first we had to be able to show some of it.

Of course tacit knowledge, by definition, can’t really be adequately captured so we were looking for things that would serve as the catalysts of conversation, as indicators that people around the globe in similar positions were facing like challenges and developing complementary solutions.

To accomplish this I brought along six tools:

1. Videocamera: probably the most important of them all.  The power of video cannot be underestimated as a means for transferring tacit knowledge, building relationships/trust and just providing a consistent (and quick) means of getting others up to speed on complex situations.
2. Camera: For situations where video wasn’t allowed or suitable a still camera was utilized.  It has similar benefits as a videocamera…just a slightly different application.
3. Audio recorder: This was used to capture the conversations we had with people.  It was a great resource for us to go back later and revisit our conversations and hear verbatim what the person was saying as well as their tone when saying it.
4. Flash drive: Not everything we encountered was tacit knowledge.  Explicit knowledge that was contained in documents and spreadsheets is certainly valuable as well and we were easily able to snag it via the USB drive.
5. Laptop: While technically not critical for capturing, my laptop served as peace of mind that we could download our loot from the day and know it was safely saved for later use.  It also allowed us to see our pics and videos from the day and refine our strategy for the following days.
6. External hard drive: This was also for peace of mind as well as video storage.  It’s a 500 MB durable drive that I dumped video into each night.  It’s nice b/c it didn’t take up space on my laptop and it can take a beating.

This was a great trip because it yielded many tangible (or at least viewable) examples of the knowledge that people had as well as what they were seeking.  This provided the foundation for several excellent conversations with our project sponsors – it’s nice to be able to transition from talking about things such as ‘knowledge workers’, the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ and show a video of real-life examples of this happening at one of their locations.

What tools have you used to capture the knowledge in your organization?

CLO Breakfast Club, Chicago

International Sunbelt Social Network Conference

Talent Management Strategies 2009: Innovation to Impact