To be truly effective, diversity programs must do more than promote awareness, repair conflict, and assure equity. Diversity programs must inspire a new spirit and new patterns of interaction among organization members. They must help your organization grow stronger and more capable of achieving its core mission.

As we begin the training process, we bring organization members together and collectively define what about the status quo needs to be changed and why, and assess your organization’s resources to meet the challenge of change. With the onset of organizational change comes fear—fear of losing power, fear of altered status, fear of losing control over how an issue is defined or addressed, and fear of investment in a painful, difficult process that involves growth and sacrifice. Without a clear understanding of what is and what is not working, unified action cannot be taken.

• Identify what about the institution’s culture needs to change and why.
• Explain how and why this change is possible.
• Teach participants to operate in a learning mode (i.e. plan, act, review, act again).
• Train participants to be a group bound by common purpose who pool resources and experiences to achieve its goal.
• Establish clearly defined rules of engagement and responsibility that challenge traditional forms of interaction, exclusion, and preexisting social hierarchies.
• Demonstrate why inclusion is more valuable than exclusion.
• Illustrate how moving from habits of exclusion to habits of inclusion cause a shift in perspective which participants can use to become progressively more inclusive.
• Make open access a goal of community life.
• Clarify that defining the terms under which others can participate is assimilation and a form of exclusion.
• Foster a growing diversity of thought about what participants are capable of achieving and the roles they can play, which will reinforce the organization’s inclusive nature.
• Transform traditional organizational leadership into servant leadership to reflect the ideology of inclusion.
• Coach servant leaders to guide the assessment of thought and action, impart and reinforce community values, and promote a sense of worth among participants.

Uniting the diverse groups in your organization is directly connected to all measures of success and progress. Different views foster patterns of dynamic problem solving, deeper analysis, and more effective and comprehensive means of implementation. In addition, effective diversity management brings more strengths and energy to bear when members are faced with your organization’s challenges.

We’ll outline our approach to diversity training by demonstrating how we examine race, one of the most difficult elements of diversity to manage well. Your organization already has many of the strengths needed to address this issue. We will help you identify these strengths, provide customized training to meet your particular needs, and show you how to make these strengths deeply rooted and sustainable within your organizational culture.

• What race is.
• How race works.
• The work race does.

Race can no longer be usefully understood within the dichotomy of black versus white because America has made great strides towards racial equality. However, much more work is needed to build organizations and a society that is united in its diversity. The questions of what race is, how race works, and the work that race does have become complicated and confusing.

Race is not a universal force, like gravity, or an integral part of our physical function, like breathing. Instead, it is a set of ideas that our society developed and modified over time to form groups, distribute resources, and establish social hierarchies. If we recognize that concepts of race were created at particular moments for specific reasons, rather than viewing race as a force or function we cannot control, then we can change our understanding of race to fit our current needs.

To understand the work race does, think about the way that race has been used to order the people and resources that make up our society. Now, if the work race has done in our society has thus far promoted separation, discrimination, inequality, and prejudice, as we work to foster equality and integration we learn to use race to build bridges, foster inclusion, and strengthen our organizations and communities. This seems impossible unless you understand how race works.

If race is a system of beliefs, then we see how race works by recognizing that race operates and evolves in society as society itself operates and evolves. We have changed race because society itself changed as our economy, our levels of education and technology, and our understanding of civil and human rights grew. If we accept that every effort we make to improve race relations will include aspects that facilitate continued progress and aspects that hinder progress, race relations will continually evolve towards equality, justice, and integration because we will discover how to systematically dismantle patterns of entitlement, suspicion, subconscious superiority, and prejudice.

Race no longer uniformly restricts or offers opportunities. Nor does it consistently impact those who share a racial identity but not a socio-economic status. But, by the same token, American organizations are largely tolerant of difference without actively accepting and integrating people of color. These organizations want their members to assimilate to majority standards—in culture, values, assumptions, and behaviors rather than willingly upset the racial status quo, relinquish white-skin privilege, and welcome diversity.

We offer a series of workshops on race and other aspects of diversity that we customize to fit the needs of your organization and be easily retained and understood by its members. We explore the questions of what race is, how race works, and the work race does to provide insight into racial issues that impact your organization in order to build knowledge and tools to promote effective communication and partnership among diverse people. This lays the foundation for the development of an inclusive organizational culture with a clear sense of how to utilize the best practices of diversity management to promote trust, high performance, and effective problem solving.