Keep your mind open to change all the time. Welcome it. Court it.
—Dale Carnegie
While sensitivity is crucial for a leader, so is a willingness to challenge people with expectations and responsibilities. For newcomers to the American economy, work is most likely a very big part of their lives. They want to be involved. They need to be engaged. They deserve to be challenged and stretched. They don’t want their opinions and their talents to be ignored or patronized. A Silicon Valley software executive deals frequently with people from India and Sri Lanka. She says, “What people want is a feeling of importance. They want to make an impact. They want a sense of influence.”
How can a leader bring this about with an increasingly diverse work force? Different people require different approaches, but there are certain common denominators. As the software executive explains, you’ve got to assess people’s talents as well as how they rate their own capabilities. Then you should ask them for just a little bit more than it seems they can comfortably give. Stretching an employee’s comfort zone has to be handled diplomatically, of course, but a good leader can make that kind of challenge seem flattering. Raise your own expectations just a notch and almost anyone will respond.
Earlier we discussed a large corporation in the home products industry that enlisted the support of employees and community members to enhance its business. In that corporation, that same leader continued to take raising expectations to a whole new level.
He called upon those same workers from the local community to stretch themselves into areas when highly technical expertise was required. When the company needed to design a multimillion-dollar piece of new equipment, the decisions were not made exclusively by top executives and engineers. A task force was created, made up entirely of production workers. The task force did most of the research on new equipment. Task force members visited companies that could build the machine and made evaluations. Later the task force issued a recommendation about where to buy. As it happened, the selected builder was in Europe, so task force members spent time overseas consulting and being trained. Then they returned with personnel from the builder and further work was done. In the end the new equipment was largely procured, scheduled, and quality-controlled by line workers (many of whom didn’t even speak the same language as the supplier). This kind of cross-cultural enterprise will inevitably become more common in years to come. The most successful companies and leaders will be those who can take advantage of it.
This leads to a principle that can be stated very clearly: Leadership masters must humanize their organizations in ways large and small. On the surface a word like humanize might not seem to bear on issues like profitability and stockholder return. Unless the philosophical concerns are addressed effectively, however, the financial numbers will inevitably be brought down.
Symbolic efforts can play a big role here. The big executive desk should become a thing of the past, at least for meetings or one-on-one discussions. Most high-ranking leaders now use small conference tables or an arrangement of chairs with a sofa. In meetings with customers or employees, it makes the encounter more casual and informal, and it shows respect for their time. The whole purpose of any meeting is to share ideas and viewpoints. A more relaxed setting can generate creativity and robust discussions.
The chairman of a large pharmaceutical company has moved beyond symbolism. He feels that humanizing an organization is so important that he’s even structured the physical plants of his companies with that in mind. “I think employees working in a single location with 10,000 other people is a recipe for disaster,” he says. “It defeats all your efforts to make people feel like important and unique individuals. When you get out of your car in the morning and walk through the parking lot with an army of other employees, it’s only natural to feel devalued as a human being. You think, ‘If I disappeared right now, would anybody notice?’”
For the pharmaceutical company, the solution is maintaining thirty-two physical locations. One of them is large, with nineteen hundred employees, but the rest range from three to six hundred people. “As a result,” says the chairman, “we have people who walk through the parking lot knowing other people’s names, and working in an atmosphere like that is fun and exciting. There’s a sense of shared endeavor, which is wonderful to see in any diverse workforce.”
More and more companies are beginning to agree. Facilities of four to six hundred people are replacing the gigantic physical plants. “It’s not really a matter of saving money,” says one executive. “The thing we feel that is really crucial is that people build relationships. When you start getting close to a thousand employees, the understanding and the empathy goes away, especially at the supervisory level. You start having to create a whole department to deal with problems that should be handled spontaneously at the individual level. And putting together a department is expensive. So, from both a humanistic and a pure cost viewpoint, it’s best to keep down the number of people in any given location.”
Decisions like this are vitally important, and they are not just for top managers. Today, everyone must be a leader in addressing issues of the new workplace. All of us, regardless of job title, will get further and accomplish more by respecting and understanding one another. Although this is perhaps more important now than ever before, it’s hardly a new concept. Years ago Dale Carnegie applied it to people all over the world. “It’s strange,” he once said. “People in one country feel they’re superior to everybody in a second country, but the people over there are convinced that they’re the superior ones. It’s a situation where both can’t be right and in fact both are very wrong. Nobody’s superior to anyone else in basic human terms. Leaders should make certain they understand that, and that they get that conviction across to everyone they meet.”
As we approach the end of this session it’s important to realize that some of its basic assumptions will soon have to be revised. So far, for example, we’ve adopted a perspective that leaders in the new workplace come from the same demographic as thirty years ago, and that the only changes have come among line workers or middle managers. That, of course, is far from the truth and it’s becoming less true every day. Outstanding leaders from every race, gender, generation, and ethnicity have gained prominence in recent years. Such leaders include the late Roberto Goizueta of Coca-Cola (born in Cuba), former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (born in Czechoslovakia), and the hugely popular Oprah Winfrey (who has been called the most influential woman in the United States). Not long after his playing days ended, Michael Jordan became part owner of a MBA team, joining one of the most elite clubs in America. All in all, the presence of these and many other widely diverse leaders is going to bring big changes.
For the new groups now taking up the reins of influence, the challenge is more complex and perhaps even more difficult than for their predecessors. Unless you’re of Native American ancestry, your forebears were likely immigrants at one time or another. As leaders emerged from what were minority groups, they often felt pressure to shed their ethnic identity in keeping with their newfound positions of power. The United States was often described as the melting pot in which the true expression of Americanism was dissolving into the molten mass. The new groups of minority leaders feel no such need. Within the context of their power and responsibilities, most are determined to retain and celebrate their diverse backgrounds. It will be interesting to see how this trend changes our expectations of leaders.
As you read this chapter, you may be one of those new leaders or you may be one of the people who make new leadership possible in the changing workplace. You may just be starting out in this exciting new landscape. In any case, from top to bottom, opportunities abound.
1. In one of the above examples of effective leadership, the owner of a company had several members of his staff research and implement systems into the organization. This tactic proved to benefit all involved. On a scale from one to ten, rate how good you are at delegating responsibilities and empowering others.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| I delegate very little | I delegate often | ||||||||
2. Research current or past leaders who are women or belong to minorities (in race, religion, or other). Find at least two whom you regard highly, and write a short list of reasons why you respect them. Then incorporate those traits into your leadership style.
3. One CEO actually separated his company into several smaller plants to make sure his employees did not feel lost in a crowd. While taking such drastic measures may not be necessary in your organization, what small steps can you take toward making your employees feel unique, important, heard, and like contributors to the bottom line of your business? List three new action steps you can take to create a greater sense of belonging in your organization.