Government, Courts, and the World of Work

A major study has reported that most diversity training efforts at American companies are ineffective and even counterproductive because it focuses too much time on compliance and not enough time on organizational culture and change.  

Several experts offered two reasons for this: The first is that businesses are responding rationally to the legal environment, since several Supreme Court rulings have held that companies with mandatory diversity training are in a stronger position if they face a discrimination lawsuit. Second, many companies, with the implicit cooperation of diversity trainers, find it easier to offer exercises that serve public relations goals, rather than to embrace real change.

I have trained thousands of supervisors at hundreds of companies since 1995 and I generally concur with the study’s findings.

For the most part, companies see diversity as a legal compliance issue, not as a meaningful opportunity to create a more productive working environment. Our research indicates that employers get sued regardless of training because of this.

In response, we have developed training that gets at the root causes of conflict and treats diversity as a corporate value, rather than as a legal necessity.  This type of value-based training is really not for everyone. By and large, it’s for employers that already get it.  Short of that, there is something to be said for preserving a defense to a discrimination suit.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Management and Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.