Great Reads for Understanding and Embracing Diversity in Organizations

I have stumbled upon a few great books that offer practical information and effective strategies on understanding, embracing and managing diversity. While I believe that one must learn from people for the best education, these books will give you great information on how to apply what you’ve learned in the workplace. Learning about differences by reading and attending workshops is a great way to start, however the best way to understand differences is to engage with those who are different than you.

Along with reading the suggested books below, I recommend the following to help you move from cultural competency to cultural proficiency:

1. Take time to really discover what your thoughts and feelings are related to people who are different than you. Do you have any biases? If so, work on discovering why you have them and what you can do to begin removing them from your thoughts and actions.

2. Get out and explore your city/town. Go into the neighborhoods of different people and see how they live. Eat at their restaraunts, learn about their customs, traditions and culture. Be sure to engage with them and just experience what life is like for them.

3. We all can learn from someone. The key to be enriched by engaging with others who are different. Another goal is to share your culture with them as well. I believe that genuine interest and open and honest dialogue is the best way to begin learning about people who are different than you.

4. When learning about and engaging in “diversity issues” please try real hard not to intellectualize what is happening, instead try to BE in the moment, listen with your heart and eyes and work to really hear the perspectives of those who are different than you.

5. Relax and be open to enriching your life by learning all that you can learn about different races, ethnicities, religions etc. The journey should be a pleasurable one if possible. Yet realize there may be bumps in the road so don’t give up, keep learning, asking questions and most important do the work from the inside out.

Book Suggestions:
Putting Our Differences to Work: The Fastest Way to Innovation, Leadership, and High Performance. By Debbie Kennedy.
Kennedy shows how to make all the dimensions of difference — such as thinking styles, perspectives, experiences, work habits, and management styles, as well as more traditional diversity considerations like gender, race, ethnicity, physical abilities, sexual orientation, and age — tremendous sources of strength. She draws on the latest research and a wealth of real-world examples to offer compelling evidence showing exactly how putting our differences to work accelerates innovation and contribution. Kennedy identifies five distinctive qualities of leadership that leaders must add to their portfolio of skills to make differences an engine of success. And she provides a detailed six-stage process for making the most of differences in the workforce, combining first-person best-practice stories and strategic with tactical ideas to help you put each step into action.

Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America. By Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden.
Jones, national correspondent for USA Today , and Shorter-Gooden, a psychologist, team up to examine how black women cope with racism, sexism, and the myths – from the image of hypersexuality to long-suffering strength – that govern their lives. Based on research garnered from the African American Women’s Voices Project, the largest study to date of black women, the authors detail these women’s survival strategy of “shifting” as needed into different roles, personas, and even language appropriate to corporate America or black communities. Drawing on surveys of a cross section of black women, the authors cite troubling statistics on dissatisfaction with their image and their treatment. The authors intersperse the statistics with excerpts from interviews that illustrate how individual women are coping. The poignant individual portraits provide a glimpse into the lives of black women in the church, in their families, at work, in personal relationships, as the women behind the statistics speak with their own voices about the personal cost of the need for “shifting.” Vanessa Bush

Reading these two books will certainly enlighten you about how others think, feel and live everyday and provide suggestions how to bridge the gaps and build collaborative relationships anchored in mutual respect. Enjoy!

By Catrice Jackson