Diversity, Teams, and Training

The Challenge

One of the great challenges facing organizations is getting all employees, from the CEO to the hourly workers, to realize that to become the best, they have to embrace diversity.

Why Must We Embrace Diversity

Diversity is about empowering people. It makes an organization effective by capitalizing on all the strengths of each employee. It is not EEO or Affirmative Action. These are laws and policies. While on the other hand, diversity is understanding, valuing, and using the differences in every person.

Simply enforcing government regulations will not get you to the best. To obtain that competitive edge you need to create great work teams by using the full potential of every individual. Teams are much more than a group. A group is collection of individuals where each person is working towards his or her own goal, while a team is a collection of individuals working towards a common team goal or vision. This helps to create a synergy effect with teams...that is, one plus one equals more than one. An individual, acting alone, can accomplish much; but a group of people acting together in a unified force can accomplish great wonders. This is because team members understand each other and support each other. Their main goal is to see the team accomplish its mission. Personal agendas do not get in the way of team agendas. Personal agendas are a huge waste upon an organization's resources because they do not support its goals.

By using the synergy effect of teams you create a competitive advantage over other organizations who are using people acting alone. You are getting more for your efforts!

If team members do not accept others for what they are, they will not be able to use the abilities of others to fill in their weak areas. Hence, the team effort will fail. Their only goal becomes the ones on their personal agendas...to make them as an individual look good while ignoring the needs of the team and the organization.

Embracing diversity is the first item for building teams. Every team building theory states that to build a great team, there must be a diverse group of people on the team, that is, you must avoid choosing people who are only like you. Choosing people like yourself to be on teams is similar to inbreeding - it multiplies the flaws. While on the other end of the continuum is having an assorted group of individuals which diminishes the flaws of others. Diversity is what builds a team...a team will not be built if every member of the team does not embrace diversity.

Why Is Embracing Diversity A Challenge?

Our bias and prejudice are deeply rooted within us. From the moment we are born, we learn about ourselves, our environment, and the world. Families, friends, peers, books, teachers, idols, and others influence us on what is right and what is wrong. These early learnings are deeply rooted within us and shape our perceptions about how we view things and how we respond to them. What we learn and experience gives us our subjective point of view known as bias. Our biases serve as filtering devices that allow us to make sense of new information and experiences based on what we already know.

Many of our bias are good as they allow us to assume that something is true without proof. Otherwise, we would have to start learning anew on everything that we do. But, if we allow our bias to shade our perceptions of what people are capable of, then the bias is harmful. We start prejudging others on what we think that they cannot do.

When people communicate, they also use these biases or filters. For example, if you know me as a heavy drinker and I tell you I was in a fight last night, then you might draw a picture of me in a bar-room brawl. On the other hand, if you knew me as a boxer and I told you the same thing, then you would probably visualize me in the boxing ring. Where these bias become destructive is when we prejudge others.

Simply giving a class on diversity will not erase these bias. Indeed, even the best training will not erase most of these deeply rooted beliefs. Training can only help us to become aware of them so that we can make a conciseness effort to change. Training diversity is more than a two-hour class; it involves workshops, role models, one-on-ones, etc. But most of all, it involves a heavy commitment by the organization's leadership. Not only the formal leadership but also the informal leadership that can be found in almost every organization.

Embracing diversity is more than tolerating people who are different. It means actively welcoming and involving them by:

Developing an atmosphere in which it is safe for all employees to ask for help. People should not be viewed as weak if they ask for help. This is what helps to build great teams - joining weakness with strengths to get the goal accomplished.
Actively seeking information from people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. Also, including everyone on the problem solving and decision making process.
Including people who different than you in informal gatherings such as lunch, coffee breaks, and spur of the moment meetings.
Creating a team spirit in which every member feels a part of.

Why Do We Need To Become The Best?

If an organization does not take on this challenge, it will soon become extinct or left far behind. There are too many competitors who are striving to become the best. They know that customers will not tolerate lackadaisical service. Those that are the best must continue to fight to be the best or they will soon be overtaken. You need to strive to be the best in one or more areas such as the fastest, cheapest, most customer oriented, etc.

Great companies who remain competitive in one or more areas do not sit around patting themselves on the back, for they know that there are dozens of others who want to take their place. They do, however, celebrate accomplishments and achievements. This celebration is important because it shows the employees what success looks like. When tough goals are only partly met it is also important to celebrate - setting a difficult goal and not reaching it is far more important than meeting a mediocre goal. These tough spots of difficult goals provide learning experiences that cannot be taught in training classes. And they provide opportunities for leaders to install new character into their employees...do not let them revert back into old behaviors!

Although most companies will never become the best at what they aim for, they must compete to do things better than their competitors. This not only allows their employees to grow, but also lets their customers know that they are willing to go out of their way to serve them in their area of expertise.

What Has This To Do With Human Resource Development (HRD)?

Most problems in the work place are not that people cannot do their jobs. It is that people cannot get along with other people. People are hired on the premise that they can perform the job, or with a reasonable amount of training, be coached into performing the job. Except for some basic courses about the organization and perhaps a course or two on safety and computer networking, most training given to new hires involves on-the-job (OJT) training. Normally, this involves very little effort from HRD as OJT is conducted by supervisors, leads, peers, etc. Although, HRD should become more involved in the OJT process, e.g. providing coaching classes for the trainers and creating training aids. Otherwise, people spend wasted hours in OJT and do not learn the needed objectives because their trainers have not received basic training, coaching, and learning skills.

The role that HRD needs to excel in is by making greater efforts in effectively training the soft skills. This includes such subjects as diversity, communication, and people skills that allows people to understand each other and develop good team skills. Every team member must not only be able to understand and work with all the other team members, but they must also want to. This should be HRD's number one priority, to build real teams, not just groups of people with titles called Teams.

What Exactly Does Diversity Include?

Diversity is not only black and white, female and male, homosexual and heterosexual, Jew and Christian, young and old, etc.; but the diversity of every individual, slow learner and fast learner, introvert and extrovert, controlling type and people type, scholar and sports-person, liberal and conservative, etc. Although it includes gender and racial differences, it goes beyond that to touch on the fabric of our everyday lives.

This is where HRD needs to focus its efforts...helping people to realize that it takes a wide variety of people to become the best and that they need to have the ability to be able to rely on everyone on their team, no matter how different another person may be. A organization needs controllers, thinkers, dreamers, doers, strategizers, analyzers, organizers, and team builders to reach the goals that make an organization the best. It does not need people fighting and distrusting other team members!

Organizations need an extremely diverse group of people on each and every team. For example, having a group of team builders will get you nowhere, as everyone will be out trying to create a team. Likewise, having a group of doers will get you nowhere as everyone will be trying to accomplish something without a clear goal or vision to guide them. Most organizations picture diversity in very limited terms. The essence of diversity should NOT be to picture diversity as race, religion, sex, age; but to picture it as the uniqueness that is built into every individual. Only by accepting the uniqueness of others, will people want to help the team as a whole to succeed.

How We Tend to Categorize People

Worker Characteristics	Personal Characteristics	Traditional Differences Characteristics
Seniority Position level Experience Union or Non-union Salaried or Exempt Education Training	Sexual orientation Physical status Ethnic background Religious background Club associations Socioeconomic status Place of birth Culture Experiences Married or Single	Race Gender Age

It is these characteristics and experiences that makes a worker unique. Diversity occurs when we see all these unique characteristics, and realize that workers are more valuable because of their differences.

Why Does Culture Matter?

Organizations have to realize that the cultures of the world are their potential customers. Not too long ago, many business focused on the young and/or middle age white classes. This was where the money was at. Now, thanks to great efforts towards recognizing the many facets of diversity and the good that it brings us, more and more money is starting to be in the hands of people from a wide range of diverse backgrounds. In order to attract this wide variety of cultures, organizations must truly become multi-culture themselves. They can no longer just talk-the-talk, they must also walk-the-talk. Organizations that only employ "people of their kind" in leadership and high visibility positions will not be tolerated by people of other cultures. These cultures will spend their money at organizations that truly believe in diversity. Embracing diversity has several benefits for the organization:

It is the right thing to do.
To attract good people into their ranks, organizations must take the moral path. Good organizations attract good people, while bad organizations attract bad people.
It helps to build teams which create synergy...you get more for your efforts.
It broadens their customer base in a very competitive environment.

What Goals Does HRD Need?

There are two main goals for HRD to achieve. The first is having all leaders within an organization become visibly involved in programs affecting organizational culture change and evaluating and articulating policies that govern diversity. To do so displays leadership that eradicates oppression of all forms. The result is enhanced productivity, profitability, and market responsiveness by achieving a dynamic organization and work force. This is the first goal of HRD, to train the leadership.

The second is inspiring diversity in the work force. Workers want to belong to an organization that believes in them, no matter what kind of background or culture they come from. They, like their leadership, want to be productive, share in the profits, and be a totally dynamic work force. Almost no one sets out to do wrong. If HRD trains the leadership, this goal will be relatively easy. It is much easier to train people when they have role models to base their behaviors on. Also, you will have the backing from the very people who can support you in your efforts.

How Does One Go About Training Diversity?

The training of diversity is considered a soft skill. Unlike hard skills, soft skills are relatively hard to evaluate. For example, "Using a calculator, notepad, and pencil, calculate the number of minutes it will take to produce one widget." This hard skill is easily measured not only in the classroom, but also on the job. Now, consider a soft skill, "After the training period the learner will be able to work with others as a team." This cannot easily be measured in the classroom. Its true measure must be taken in the workplace, and this is also difficult to measure. This is because this type of training falls more under development, rather than training or education. For a quick review of the three programs of Human Resource Development:

Training is the acquisition of technology which permits employees to perform their present job to standards. It improves human performance on the job the employee is presently doing or is being hired to do.
Education is training people to do a different job. Unlike training, which can be fully evaluated immediately upon the learners returning to work, education can only be completely evaluated when the learners move on to their future jobs. We can test them on what they learned while in training, but we cannot be fully satisfied with the evaluation until we see how well they perform their new jobs.
Development is training people to acquire new horizons, technologies, or viewpoints. It enables leaders to guide their organizations onto new expectations by being proactive rather than reactive. It enables workers to create better products, faster services, and more competitive organizations. It is learning for growth of the individual, but not related to a specific present or future job. Unlike training and education, which can be completely evaluated, development cannot always be fully evaluated. This does not mean that we should abandon development programs, as helping people to grow and develop is what keeps an organization in the forefront of competitive environments.

Soft skills often look as if they might fit within all three terms. Using the team training example, we see that it has these characteristics:

Training - it will be used to increase performance on the present job, that is, being able to perform as a team member.
Education - it will be used to increase performance in a different job, instead of being a group member, the learner will become a team member.
Development - it will be used to acquire a new viewpoint so that the organization can become more competitive.

It is this vagueness with soft skills that make them so hard to train. Are we training, educating, or developing? It does mainly fall under development however because it is difficult to measure - how do you evaluate "works as a team member." In order to prove that our training is effective, we must be able to evaluate it. We have no way of knowing if the learning objectives were met if we cannot measure the task being used on the job, hence, we have no way of knowing if our training is of any value to the company

Also, soft skills generally fall under the domain of attitudes. When we train a task, we are teaching a person to perform a new Skill (psychomotor), learn a new body of Knowledge (cognitive), and display a new Attitude (affective) (SKA). The type of task determines what percent of the SKA is devoted to each domain.

For example, training someone to operate a forklift requires about 80% skill (eye hand coordination, deftness with controls, etc.), 10% knowledge (location of controls, rules, etc.), and about 10% attitude (eagerness to learn, concentrating on precision movements, etc.).

Training someone to set up formulas in a spreadsheet might require about 20% skill (typing, using a mouse, etc.), 70% knowledge (procedures, reading and interrupting formulas, etc.), and 10% attitude (how hard they believe the task to be, will it help me do my job better, etc.).

Training a diversity topic would require about 15% skill (interacting with others, soliciting input, etc.), 10% knowledge (knowing culture differences, knowing the terms, etc.), and about 75% attitude (responding to others, changing a deeply held belief, etc.)

How Do Attitudes Affect Training Diversity?

Soft skill training is mainly changing attitudes - a persisting feeling or emotion of a person that influences her choice of action and her response to stimulus. It is defined as a disposition or tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain thing (idea, object, person, situation). Attitudes have been defined in a variety of ways, but at the core is the notion of evaluation. Thus, attitudes are commonly viewed as summary evaluations of objects (e.g. oneself, other people, issues, etc.) along a dimension ranging from positive to negative. Attitudes encompass, or are closely related to, our opinions and beliefs and are based upon our experiences. Training that produces tangible results starts by changing behavior...which ultimately changes attitudes.

Since our attitudes are deeply rooted, they are very hard to change. Attitudes are latent constructs and are not observable in themselves. That is, we can infer that people have attitudes by what they say or do. And what they say or do are behaviors. The training developer must identify some sort of behavior that would seem to be representative of the display of the attitude in question. This behavior can then be measured as an index of the attitude construct. For example, if you are training diversity, you cannot be sure that you have eliminated prejudice from a learner. Therefore you have to measure behaviors, such as showing respect for all cultures.

This does not mean you cannot go after changing attitudes. It some cases it is a must. For example, the 1997 Texaco headlines about the racial slurs of its leaders show that attitudes must be changed. If you only rely upon the correct behaviors being displayed without attitudes being changed, then expect to see a headline like this about your organization. When we attempt to display behaviors that do not coincide with our attitudes, then expect to make big mistakes. As stated earlier, training diversity is about 75% attitude. Attempting to change only the other 25% will not work. That 75% attitude is just too great of a number to ignore.

Another example is safety. Being able to perform safely in the work environment is not just about knowledge and skills. It also requires the correct attitude. For many, doing something the safe way requires more effort or work. Employees must have the correct attitude towards safety or when it counts the most, they will relapse back into the faster or easier method...and this is not right for all the coworkers involved. They deserve a safe working environment!

Can attitudes be changed? In a experiment by social psychologists Wells and Petty (1980) (1), students were asked to assist in testing the quality of headphones while the listener was in motion. Three groups of students put on headphones and listened to music and an editorial about tuition. One group, told they were acting as controls made no movements while listening. The second group moved their heads up and down, while the third group shook their heads from side to side. Afterward, the students rated the quality of the headphones and judged the material that they had heard. Among the questions was one about tuition. Half the students had heard an editorial suggesting that tuition be raised to $750 while the other half heard that it should be drooped to $400. The editorials by themselves were persuasive; they influenced students who listened without moving their heads. However, movements made by the students as they listened had a strong effect on their opinions.

When asked what tuition would be fair, those that heard that it should be raised, thought, on the average, that it should be $582. Those that heard that it should be lowered, thought that a fair price would be $412. The involvement of body movement had a striking effect. Students who nodded their head as they heard the $750 editorial thought a fair tuition would be $646, while those that shook their heads thought it should be $467.

These motor responses that signal agreement or disagreement had a profound affect on attitudes...effects that are not trivial.

To train soft skills, HRD practitioners must picture themselves not only as trainers, but also as educators and developers. To do so, requires a different sort of mind set. With our greater preoccupation with human relations, the affective domain (attitudes) cannot be ignored, regardless of the difficulties encountered.

What Are Some Pointers For Training Attitudes?

Listed below are some helpful hints for developing, training, and evaluating attitudes.

Training Development

As stated before, training attitudes is extremely difficult. At times we want to change attitudes, at others, the best we can hope for or want to, is to change displayed behaviors. The chart below shows attitude as running along the vertical axis and behavior running along the horizontal axis:


  |  9
A |  8
t |  7
t |  6
i |  5
t |  4
u |  3
d |  2
e |  1
  |  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
   ______________________________
              Behavior

For each degree that you want to change the attitude (vertical axis) of the learner, you must come up with a training method that changes the behavior an equal amount of degrees (horizontal axis). Methods will also have to be devised to measure the behavior an equal amount. When training diversity, you are going to want an attitude change along the scale of 8 or 9. This means you need to make a heavy commitment to training because the behaviors you want displayed will also be at the end of the scale - 8 or 9.

Some attitude changes do not require such a drastic change. For example, when people are outside on break and they put their cigarette butts out on the ground instead of the ash receptacle; calls for less drastic behavioral changes. The effort (and the amount of effort that you would want to expend towards the problem) to change their behavior would be on the scale of 1 or 2.

Training Techniques

See Changing Behaviors, Coaching, Implementing Training for some other techniques.

Evaluating Diversity Training

There are five major approaches to collecting attitude data:

Records - These include observed behavior such as attendance records, anecdotal records, incidents, and interviews.
Self Reports - Such as inventories of employees reporting directly about their own attitudes.
Report of Others - These include information, rating scales, and interview results of others reporting about the attitude of an employee or team.
Sociometric Techniques - Such as sociograms and social distance scales in which members of a group report about their attitudes towards one another.
Projective Technique - Picture presentations and sentence completion in which the learner supplies a response to the stimulus.

Steps for evaluating:

Determine from the learning objectives what specific attitude (desired behavior) is being trained.
Determine the behavior (construct) that will best exhibit this attitude. Concentrate on one or two specific behaviors during any given evaluation period.
Decide on the most appropriate way to get the information.
Select or develop an instrument for collecting the information. Collect only the information that will provide evidence of the desired behavior.
Decide who will be observed and when. Obtain as many observations as possible and review patterns of change.
Confer with the learners to provide feedback.

Precautions In Attitude Measurement:

Attitudes are impossible to measure directly. The evaluator is relying on inference.
Behaviors, beliefs, and feelings, are not consistent, even when we assume they reflect a single attitude. The pattern of behavior may be very complex and be a manifestation of more that one attitude.
Attitudes do not stand still long enough for a one time snap shot measurement. Frequent measurements at selected intervals will reflect a more accurate representation of a consistent attitude.
Certain attitudes do not have a universal agreement on their nature or what the correct behavioral display is.
Collection of certain types of personal data about learners may lead to legal complications involving their rights to privacy.

Team Building

Team building activities have always been popular, but be careful that you do not divide your workers! For example, one company Christmas party did not work as it was supposed to. Because of accident liability, the company chose not to serve liquor, but instead, let employees buy it at a cash bar. Many employees only made slightly above minimum wage and found the charge per drink high and consequently complained about the party. While the employees from the higher socioeconomic levels did not find the drink charge a problem. The two groups also approached the party attire differently. The more affluent group enjoyed dressing up for the occasion while the rest were annoyed about having to purchase a dress or suit. To further complicate matters, the affluent group didn't anticipate the needs of or even perceive the problems felt by their co-workers at the Christmas party. A small third faction objected to Christmas altogether and stayed away from the party. The result was groups of workers who became more distant from each other. This distance further eroded the closeness necessary for building teams. As a result, a company function that was designed to build teams actually ended up dividing the employees into three camps.

Diversity Activities

See Leadership Diversity Activities.

References

1. Wells, G.L. and Petty, R.E. "The effects of overt head movement on persuasion: Compatibility and Incompatibility of responses." Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1980, 1, 219-230.

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