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Diversity
November 18, 2010

I was extremely fortunate to have been educated at a culturally diverse and progressive international school. I grew up believing that your work speaks for itself. I grew up understanding that people had different strengths, spoke many languages, followed various religions, and that this is okay. It might have meant your roommate woke you up at 4am for a few weeks during Ramadan, but you made allowances for people to be themselves. My school gave scholarships for a whole range of activities including sport, the arts and music, and it never occurred to me as a teenager that everyone needed to be the same or belong to a particular group in order to be successful. I married a German, my brother married a Mexican, and at our family weekends you will hear ‘Darling, please don’t put that in your mouth/up your nose/in your sister’s ear’ being said in three different languages to the four toddlers (two of mine and two of my brother’s).

I am also of the generation of women who were told by our mothers ‘we’ve done the hard work for you, it’s a level playing field now’. We went to university full of confidence in our academic prowess and we graduated into fairly evenly balanced graduate classes at the large organisations we joined.

My interest in corporate diversity began when I hit my own personal career roadblocks. I realised that diversity was not, in fact, part of the human DNA. So when people ask me why I am so involved in diversity initiatives I tell them it’s simple: Diversity of thinking, diversity of experience, diversity of culture and every other aspect of what makes people tick is what makes the world an exciting place. The most innovative solutions are forged by the most diverse groups. When people become too comfortable in a homogeneous group they become blind to faults that seem obvious to someone looking in from the outside.

Truly accepting diversity requires hard work. Human beings are naturally programmed to want to find similarities and fit in with one another. The most skillful leaders (and I’ve been lucky to have worked for a few) find and communicate the common vision and associated goals towards which the team is striving, at the same time as inviting different perspectives. When people are willing to accept differences amazing things can happen and the strongest teams emerge.

I am particularly concerned about the ongoing imbalance between the genders in our large organisations. Sex equality legislation has been in place for so many years now it seems ludicrous that we still have so few women reaching the boardrooms of our top companies. I’m afraid that we are a very long way from having the level playing field that my mother’s generation talk about, and for that reason I am passionate about gender diversity and I am actively supporting the current Lord Davies enquiry into how we can achieve higher numbers of women in our Boardrooms. I hope that Your Loss will make its own contribution towards organisational balance.

I would like my daughter to grow up to find glass ceilings, glass cliffs and issues around gender diversity truly are a thing of the past. I have also promised my father and ex male colleagues that when the tables turn, and 96% of senior roles are occupied by women, then I will be an equally passionate advocate for promoting men in order to redress that balance!

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