Dear subscribers,

Welcome to the latest edition of Reach the Top Connects. Here you’ll find pragmatic, useful information about leadership development, coaching and cultural diversity you can put to use immediately in your daily interactions with staff, supervisors, co-workers, vendors and clients.

My goal with Connects is to offer you an online resource that will help you achieve a greater sense of self-satisfaction on the job — one that may even carry over into your personal life.

To help me serve you better, please provide me with feedforward. This effective leadership communication tool, created by Marshall Goldsmith, is more positive and encouraging than feedback and can dramatically improve the quality of communication. It ensures the right message is conveyed, and those who receive it are more receptive to its content. To give me feedforward about my newsletter, I welcome any suggestions you—my customer—have for making this a newsletter that brings you value. I will listen carefully to your comments, and in advance, I thank you.

If I may be of help coaching or facilitating a leadership or cultural diversity workshop for your people, please call me at 724-935-1397 or contact me via email at donna@reachthetop.net

Donna Billings

“Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?” --Parker J. Palmer

Diversity in the Workplace:
How Coaching Can Help Organizations Positively Change Behavior

Global thoughts, words and deeds
Personal integrity, inspiring and communicating a shared vision, customer satisfaction and a strong focus on results are hallmarks of effective leadership. However, the list is growing to include additional leadership skills taking shape in a global economy, especially a leader’s ability to value culture diversity.

What is cultural diversity?
Cultural diversity is defined as “diversity of leadership style, industry style, individual behaviors and values, race and sex.”

How do I integrate cultural diversity into my leadership style?
As a global leader, you will need to:

• Understand social and motivational issues that are unique to a specific cultural group.
• Grasp economic and legal differences within each group.
• Be flexible and learn to adapt!
• Listen to all points of view and treat them as non-threatening.
• Develop and nurture a culture at your workplace where multiple work styles may flourish.
• Create and support multigenerational workgroups and teams.
• Establish a mentoring program that crosses generations and cultures.
• Teach the value of diversity to current and new employees.

How do I encourage others to embrace diversity in the workplace?
The best way to illustrate the value of diversity to your people is to embrace it by forming work groups and teams that are made up of people from different races, cultures, generations and backgrounds. As you do this:

• Concentrate on the unique perspective each team member brings to problem solving.
• Focus on what the diverse group has in common, such as certain backgrounds, cultural knowledge and skill sets.
• Assess team members’ different learning styles, strengths and talents — then use them to the group’s advantage.
• Recognize, reward — and publicize —successes that are the direct result of valuing diversity.

To make leadership decisions on a broader level:

• Seek input from a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds.
• Encourage people to lend their expertise in solving a specific problem or developing a new opportunity.
• Eradicate stereotypes and prejudiced behavior and let your people know this type of thinking is not acceptable.
• Manage performance – not personalities.

How do I—and my organization— benefit?
By placing a high value on cultural diversity in your workplace, you will:

• Create work groups or teams whose members are more open and encouraging.
• Experience a collective positive attitude that’s a direct result of your ability to include and use everyone’s talents.
• Enjoy higher productivity that comes from people who are happier, more trusting and respectful of each other and customers.

Partner in the consulting firm Tusori & Priskich Ingrid Priskich serves as a liaison between international IT outsourcing personnel and American host companies. According to Ingrid, one of the most important mindsets of a global leader is his or her ability to be open to new ideas and thought processes. “It’s helpful to cultivate a self awareness that there are multiple ways of getting from point A to point B — not just one way,” she states. “When you’re dealing with people from diverse backgrounds, your success as a leader depends upon your ability to listen and hear other people’s ideas and input — and to keep your agenda out of the mix.”

How can coaching help me to become a more global leader?
One of the most effective ways to connect with world-class talent is to perfect your interviewing skills across cultural boundaries, including interpreting what you see and hear, understanding your own stereotypes so you can prevent them from influencing your decision and assessing and comparing competing candidates from different countries and educational systems.

Coaching will help you gain the skills you need to conduct interviews with confidence. That includes learning how to integrate immigrants into your workforce, which will help your business continue to remain competitive in the current flux of offshoring, the graying of America and the loss of baby boomers to retirement.

In next month’s Connects, we will look at how mentoring—in organizations and for you personally—can be THE major catalyst in allowing you to live the life that wants to live in you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article incorporates ideas from Global Leadership The Next Generation by Marshall Goldsmith, Cathy L. Greenburg, Alastair Robertson and Maya Hu-Chan, Prentice Hall, 2003, ISBN 0131402439.

See a complete list of Reach The Top workshops, including “Connect with World Class Talent — Interviewing Skills Across Cultural Boundaries.”

Global Leadership The Next Generation, Marshall Goldsmith, Cathy L. Greenberg, Alastair Robertson and Maya Hu-Chan, Prentice Hall, 2003, ISBN 0131402439.

Giraffe and Elephant, A Diversity Fable. 2001 R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr, 2001, R. Thomas & Associates, Inc. The fable is about the challenges of Diversity Management and is designed to provoke thought, stimulate dialogue and explore diversity concepts.

The Web of Inclusion. Sally Helgesen. 1995 Currency/Doubleday: New York, ISBN 0385423640.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen & Roger Fisher. 2001. Penguin USA: New York, ISBN 014028852X.

Two Wolves

A Native American grandmother was talking to her granddaughter about how she felt about the tragedy. She said, "I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one."

The granddaughter asked her, "Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?"

The grandmother answered, "The one I feed."

DIVERSITY

I believe,
that diversity is a part of the natural order of things
-as natural as the trillion shapes and shades of the flowers of spring
or the leaves of autumn.

I believe,
that diversity brings new solutions to an ever-changing environment,
and that sameness is not only uninteresting but limiting.

To deny diversity is to deny life,
with all its richness and manifold opportunities.
Thus I affirm my citizenship in a world of diversity,
and with it the responsibility to…

Be tolerant. Live and let live.
Understand that those who cause no harm should not be feared,
ridiculed, or harmed - even if they are different.

Look for the best in others.

Be just in my dealings,
with poor and rich, weak and strong,
And whenever possible to defend the young, the old,
the frail, the defenseless.

Be kind,
remembering how fragile the human spirit is.

Live the examined life,
subjecting my motives and actions to the scrutiny of mind and heart
so to rise above prejudice and hatred.

Care.

--Gene Griessman

About Donna Billings and Reach the Top

We work with key leaders, helping you define and identify meaningful work, craft strategic career development plans, hone and develop your leadership and management competencies, including embracing cultural diversity — and eventually help you phase into retirement.

My leadership coaching and development practice is called “Reach the Top.” We all climb many mountains over the course of our lives — some are physical, some are mental, some are emotional. Sometimes we are successful. Sometimes we are not. Through coaching and leadership development, we help you reach powerful, new heights as you traverse whatever life transition you’re now experiencing. Together, we will form an alliance that is mindful of where you are on your journey right now.

To supplement my coaching practice, I am affiliated with the Center for Leadership Studies, one of the premier leadership training organizations in the world. We are committed to helping people develop their inherent potential as leaders and to helping organizations succeed and prosper.

A publication of Reach the Top and Donna Billings. To reproduce or reprint information contained in this e-zine, kindly contact me at donna@reachthetop.net.