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Recruitment & Retention

Published February 2008

What Is Real Diversity? (And Why Do Most Organizations Hate It?)

Michael Rosenberg

Growing up in a Jewish home, I never really understood what it was like to know the disappointment a child feels when they finally learn there is no Santa Claus. That was, until recently. After 11 years of having my own consulting practice, I decided a little while ago to join a large and fast-growing human resource consulting practice. A friend who worked there told me it was a good place to work, and I went through four months of interviews and psychological assessments. I had read the books that they had written and was familiar with their good reputation for teaching leadership and best employment practices to many organizations. They were a very high-end consulting firm that charged top dollar and seemed to have a good reputation. I was going to be working with people who would understand and value what made me different. I was going to learn how these great thinkers were able to apply what they taught to create what should be the perfect workplace, which I was going to be joining.

Boy, was I wrong! No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.

My "onboarding" and "welcome to the company" consisted of my manager greeting me on the first day with "There is your desk. I know today is going to be a write-off. I've got to go." My next opportunity to sit down with her one-on-one was a month later, when she blasted me for "not fitting in" and then fired me a week later because "I didn't have the 'X' factor." What is the "X" factor? It is some nebulous, nonmeasurable intangible that I seemed to be inoculated against. "You just don't fit in here," I was told. "You are too different." I was terminated even though I had to finish my only client assignment through them because the client liked my work. Now I really understand why people don't like consultants.

It was at the moment that I was let go for not having the "X" factor that I truly understood what diversity really meant and why so few organizations understand and promote it.

Superficial Diversity

Ask any organization about diversity, and they will show you these wonderful, colorful pie charts (boy, do organizations love colorful pie charts), and they will tell you how many people are in various age ranges, of different nationalities, backgrounds, colors, religions, sexes and whatever other breakdown you want. "Hey, look how diverse our organization is," they proudly proclaim. They even hire a high-priced consultant, like my former manager, who has a Ph.D. and will share with them some insight gleaned by an academic doing research and tell them how to create a "diverse" workforce and how important that is to doing business. What they neglect to tell anybody, or even realize themselves, is that this is not real diversity. Real diversity is not measured by skin color, religion, age, sex or a number of other superficial benchmarks. Although having a different background may help people to think differently, it does not necessarily mean that people do differ. For instance, there is less diversity between George Bush and Condi Rice or between Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry than there is between my older brother and myself.