Читать книгу Accountable Leaders - Vince Molinaro - Страница 31

One hundred seventy years. That’s how long the World Economic Forum estimates it will take to realize true diversity in the workplace.²⁵ What?! That’s not good enough. Every leader I speak to and work with agrees that diversity and gender parity are critical business issues. So why are we moving at a snail’s pace? I got part of the answer to this question a while back when I had the opportunity to spend some time with Laura Liswood. She’s the founder and secretary-general of the Council of Women World Leaders, a group of 72 women presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state. It’s the only organization of its kind in the world. Liswood has been a strong voice for diversity for decades and even wrote a book on the topic: The Loudest Duck: Moving Beyond Diversity While Embracing Differences to Achieve Success at Work.²⁶

In our discussion, I asked her to give me her sense of whether things were getting better when it comes to diversity. She said they are, but ever so slowly. Liswood believes how we think about diversity slows down the progress toward it. Some of us compare it to, as she calls it, Noah’s Ark: “Let’s just get two of everything on board, and things will be okay.” This approach, however, is just too simplistic.

Liswood believes that diversity is a path to innovation for organizations and society. However, it doesn’t happen by accident. First, you need to make it a priority. You need to go beyond superficialities and create a culture in which everyone’s voice is heard—really heard. All people must feel included, involved, and valued—only then will they be engaged. Liswood says this is a challenge she has repeatedly seen in the corporate world. Everybody wants diversity, but they don’t know what to do with it once they have it, which slows down progress. We need to take inclusion seriously. We need to go beyond all the hype and understand the mission-critical importance of this issue. We need to deliver diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organizations and in our world.