Posted on

Where Is Our (Or Your) Diversity?

The demographic makeup of society in general has changed dramatically in the last 25 years, and it will continue to change. The demographic of many professionals, however, has not kept pace and that of professional leaders even less so.

Living and working in our world and especially in our professions will require each of us to become increasingly aware of not only the challenges, but even better, the opportunities presented to us by the cultural changes occurring both around and among us. Both our professional societies in general and all of the various sections thereof should wholeheartedly embrace the concept of our growing cultural diversity.

We need to:

  • Increase our awareness of the various dimensions of diversity.
  • Examine our own cultural identity and how that identity affects our relationships with others.
  • Become more aware of our own attitudes, perceptions, and feelings about various aspects of diversity.
  • Commit to increasing our understanding of diversity issues.
  • Make it important to ourselves and others to mentor and sponsor those in underrepresented groups so they can fully participate throughout all of our professional workspace.

My problem in taking the last of these steps is that from merely reading the of membership lists of the various professional organizations I have joined and seeing the same few hundred people with whom I regularly interact, I cannot see what opportunities exist to mentor and sponsor younger (I’m in my 60th year walking God’s great earth) people who might want to be so mentored and sponsored by me.

Therefore, to help me help others, please, respond off the list to me at KenBesser@LifeCycleLaw.com and tell me, if you feel underrepresented, who you are and how can I help you. Or, if you know someone else who is underrepresented, who they are and how do you think I can help them.

In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your workweek and then go have a meaningful day of rest with people you hold most dear.

By the way, using my CASE (Copy And Steal Everything) research and writing method, today I ran across a great Overview of Diversity Awareness first written by some Penn State people on 2001 and updated in 2015. It is some of the best and most easy to read discussion diversity I have ever read. There’s the link to it.

Posted on

5 Ways To Be More Diverse and Inclusive of Your People Resources

Diversity and inclusion are all the rage. A Google search for the combined terms yields 224,000,000 results. Google’s Scholarly articles for 2018 alone yield about 23,000 results. With all this attention being paid to the topic, one must wonder, “Why we have not yet solved the problems of having people feel excluded from various spheres of their lives simply because they differ from the majority of those being natured and nurtured in the world?”

The answer may reside in the truth that we may be talk too much about the problem and doing too little to actually include the entire continuity of our communities.

Glen Llopis, a Cuban-American entrepreneur, bestselling author, speaker, senior advisor to Fortune 500 companies and organizations in many workspaces, and contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur magazines thinks there are five ways to get along farther faster toward talking less and doing more. Llopis handful of suggestions are:

  1. Move diversity and inclusion out of human resources.
  2. Know what opportunity diversity and inclusion solves for.
  3. Sole for respect and not recognition.
  4. Think mosaic not melting pot.
  5. Move people to the center of your organization’s growth strategy.

To learn more details about how these five things might help you and your enterprise thrive better in our shrinking global world, read his article in Forbes.

In the meantime, send me an answer to this question: What are you doing to include a more diverse group of people in your personal and business spheres?