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Diversity Isn’t Just the Right Thing to Do.

It’s Good for Business, and Here’s Why.
By David Casey

B
Vice President and Diversity Officer
CVS Caremark

By now, every seasoned diversity practitioner appreciates the
importance of making the case for diversity in this way—using
the language of business, tying proposed investments to results,
and following up with quantitative analyses of how the needle
moved and why that mattered to the bottom line.
It is critical that we as diversity practitioners and champions
continue to build on our successes in establishing diversity as
a true business imperative. But in and of itself, this argument
is not enough; not anymore. As we continue appealing to “the
head” with the strong business case for diversity, the time has
come to also renew our focus on “the heart” of the matter—
the personal and emotional underpinnings of the diversity
conversation.
Why now? Because the balance sheet no longer tells the
whole story for any company. Organizations today increasingly
are judged as much for their contributions to society as they
are their returns to shareholders. The pursuit of profit without
regard for a company’s broader role in society today is a losing
strategy in the marketplace, where stakeholders, ranging from
customers to employees, increasingly say they prefer companies
that share their values.
We should also understand that the people in our companies
are thinking about the moral and emotional aspects of diversity,
whether or not their diversity teams acknowledge them. If
we don’t openly and proactively acknowledge this and create
opportunities to explore the emotional experience of difference
in our workplaces, then we are not having a very complete
conversation about diversity at all.
And so we find ourselves as diversity practitioners in a very
interesting place, one that our predecessors may not have antici-
pated, coming out of the Civil Rights movement. In those early
years of our field, diversity practitioners learned that the moral
argument by itself was not enough to move business leaders to
action. Today, having thoroughly established the business case
for diversity, and with the C-suite focusing both on value and
values, we can start framing our message this way: Diversity isn’t
just good for business. It’s the right thing to do, and here’s why.
I have had some of these discussions over the course of my
career. I remember them as “courageous conversations,” because
they required me to leave my comfort zone—my spreadsheets,
my PowerPoint decks, my org charts—and to ask senior execu-
tives also to leave their comfort zones so we could have frank
and thorough conversations
about managing diversity
and its related tensions and
complexities.
Let’s face it—if we, the
people responsible for driv-
ing the conversation about diversity in our organizations, don’t
make the connection between the numbers and the people they
represent, who will? It takes courage to talk openly and construc-
tively in a business setting about personal topics like religion,
ethnicity, and gender identity. And it’s up to diversity profession-
als to foster these conversations by modeling this courage and
making it easier for others to follow suit.
How to Have Courageous Conversations
• First, establish a foundation of trust.
- Don’t preach or scold,
- Admit that none of us gets it right all of the time,
- Provide personal examples from your own life when you
fell victim to cultural assumptions or stereotypes and
“got it wrong.”
• Explain that the goal isn’t the suppression of assumptions
and stereotypes, but rather a process for acknowledging
them and dealing with them.
- Give people the right tools to feel more comfortable in
discussing these issues openly.
• Explain the critical importance of emotional intelligence
for managers and employees in diverse environments.
- People are not robots—we cannot turn off our emotions,
- It is possible to talk about emotions in the context
of business,
- There is no either/or choice to be made between rational
and emotions-based conversations about diversity—both
types of thinking are necessary for diversity work to be
truly sustainable and strategic.
Business cycles evolve and the practice and discipline of
diversity management is no different. We have gone from
making it all about the “heart” to doing our level best to leave
the emotions out of it and “get to the business.” There is no
better time than now to not only engage the spreadsheet, but to
also get to the heart of the matter. PDJ

Prof iles in Div er s it y Jou r na l M aY / J u n e 2 0 1 0 63