Managing the Challenges of Change: Diversity & Inclusion is the Answer

Co-authored by Belinda Holdsworth, Site Manager, F.Hoffmann-La Roche, Ltd.

Change produces many conflicting emotions in people, especially employees. For some it threatens their need for security in trusted systems, undermines their sense of competence, disrupts relationships and creates fear, uncertainty and confusion. Wishing to cling to the familiar, they feel change should be resisted.

Conversely, for others change is imaginative, adventurous and exciting, opening new opportunities. Change carries with it the promise of better solutions and methods. Change should be welcomed and embraced, these individuals believe, because it energizes people and allows them to discover new potentials.

Our attitudes and responses to change are profoundly connected to our cultures, our historical experiences, our mindsets, upbringings and behavior. Yet whether you view it optimistically or pessimistically, change contains elements of risk, promise and opportunity.

Thus, the essential questions facing leaders in business and other fields are: how do you lead in times of change, how do you approach this challenge, and how can an organization continue to innovate and perform well during times of dynamic uncertainty and transformation?

There are myriad reasons why change processes often fail in corporations: the reasons for and the benefits of change are not adequately explained; management is not trained properly to introduce and lead change; and there may be an inability to understand the reasons for resistance to change and how to deal with this. Moreover, change may come too fast or is too revolutionary and not enough time is given for employees to digest the changes.

Fortunately, there is an excellent and effective tool for successfully and effectively managing and gaining the greatest benefits from change: Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) policies. According to many consultancy and academic studies, those companies with greater levels of diversity including women in upper management out-perform all other firms, sometimes by as much as 15%, as pointed out in a 2015 McKinsey report on gender diversity entitled, Why Diversity Matters.

By its very nature, D&I pools different cultures, genders, personalities, ages, skill-sets and physical abilities into highly creative, innovative and more tolerant teams open to new ideas and perspectives if well-led by enlightened and supportive managers. Diverse teams are superior in finding new paths to creative solutions, automatically making such teams, their departments and ultimately their companies more agile, inventive and welcoming to the positive and beneficial forces of change and organizational transformation.

There is, of course, a certain level of risk involved in increasing a companys D&I levels. Intercultural challenges may arise including different ways of viewing time and urgency and giving feedback. Some team members will be highly task-oriented, some very relationship-oriented. Different age groups will have contrasting attitudes and skills regarding the latest technological advances. Women and men possess distinctive communication styles and channels. Different personal mindsets and assumptions also have to be understood, accommodated and tolerated such as direct or indirect communication approaches, or expressive as opposed to reserved emotional levels and body language. If not carefully managed with great sensitivity and highly attuned soft-skills radar, these verbal and non-verbal aspects, perspectives and behaviors can destroy teams.

For this reason, modern leaders seeking to get results, enhance team performance as well as their own careers and satisfy the demands and expectations of executives, board members and shareholders, must possess excellent cross-cultural management skills. They should be talented in pro-active listening as well as finding and developing the best roles for the most suitable team member. They should be able to see the great business advantages in promoting women into management positions. They should also recognize and acknowledge that most people have an instinctive dread of change and dealing with the new, and should be able to express with authentic conviction and compelling vigor the benefits and competitive advantages of change and transformation.

We Earthlings are not all the same: we are immensely and gloriously diverse culturally, historically, individualistically. From this rich diversity springs bright sparks of ingenuity and innovation the very things which companies across the globe want to foster and develop to ensure their continued growth and prosperity.

To embrace D&I is to embrace a willingness to go beyond perceived limits, to move beyond our comfortable groups, and to see business and human value in including, appreciating, supporting and utilizing different perspectives and experiences. D&I is a mighty tool for managing change processes successfully. D&I is essential for expanding and sustaining long-term prosperity. It makes compelling and logical business sense to embrace D&I policies because they are the vector of innovation.