1 - ...adding a different employee: You can have an increase of diversity practice with staff you already hold onboard, considering, primarily, their level of openness towards learning something 'different' or viewing things 'differently'; therein lies the in-house investment.
2 - ...balancing your ratios. Making sure there are equal levels of representation in your worksite as there are in the surrounding community doesn't mean much if those 'representatives' don't represent the actual community. Centralize community recruitment for truer community lenses.
3 - ...promoting someone based on their color: Promotion should still be tied to the effort put forward. Visual diversification is short lived if it doesn't hold wholistic diversification. Create holistic employees by centralizing the power of their differences in their daily tasks.
4 - ...inclusion through smiling: interest in the different is interest in the self. Inquiring about what is outside of your norm will likely yield unexpected results. Smiling to be nice only lasts so long, but showing genuine interest in differences will expose you to much deeper learning opportunities, and more genuinely inclusive interactions.
5 - ...only where you want it to be: Communicating to kids that diversity exists on a field trip to the forest, but ignoring it in your social interactions is either ignorance at play or hypocrisy in practice. Ignorance can be worked on/with, hypocrisy is a choice. Diversity is inevitable, integral, and everywhere; remember that the field trip is a daily excursion.
6 - ...nodding in agreement: Discomfort and Insecurity is part of inviting in differences. Agreeing only to remove discomfort removes the possibility of growth, growth invites change, and change is what challenges biases - the process by which minds are opened.
7 - ...crayon box meetings: Such practices look great in photos but are empty if their contributions to the round-table are not considered beforehand. Ruminate over what each member brings to a meeting and how they differ in considerations and then find ways of activating those considerations. This IS diversity in practice.
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