How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation
Curious about how diversity at the top is particularly key for driving inventiveness and creativity?
Who’ll win the ’20s? Companies that excel at innovation and rebound from shocks. Diversity in the workplace—in gender, race, work experience, age, education, cultural background, problem-solving style—confers these vital advantages.
To achieve these benefits of diversity in the workplace, executives and managers must understand the link between diversity, innovativeness, and resilience. What’s more, they have to deploy best practices for leading a diverse workforce, while crafting a company culture that lets diversity thrive.
Diversity in the workplace supercharges companies’ innovation prowess—vital for success in the new decade. How? People with multifaceted backgrounds and experiences contribute a wider range of ideas and options—making it easier to craft winning offerings that accelerate growth. Diversity fosters resilience, too. With a broad array of perspectives, people can adapt to and bounce back quickly from unexpected shocks.
Curious about how diversity at the top is particularly key for driving inventiveness and creativity?
Don’t keep recruiting the same kind of people, who look just like you, warns Miki Tsusaka. Diversity makes for better outcomes.
LGBTQ employees have changed, and companies need to upgrade their HR policies to match. The main challenge? Creating the right working environment.
Understanding the perspectives of diverse employees is essential to designing successful and inclusive programs.
“To successfully capture the benefits of diversity in the workplace, companies need true leadership commitment—which is much more than superficial words or platitudes.”
Companies that incorporate diversity, in all its many forms, in their workforce can’t stop there. To reap all the benefits of diversity in the workplace, they must also foster an inclusive organizational culture that allows diversity to thrive. That means making everyone feel welcome, supported, and part of a community characterized by open communication.
In too many organizations, women don’t step off the leadership track so much as they’re pushed off—by negative corporate cultures. By applying these best practices for leading a diverse workforce, CEOs can help their companies avoid this mistake.
As employees share more family responsibilities, companies will have to support dual-career couples if they hope to retain valued talent. Four initiatives provide a roadmap for doing so.
Companies can’t capture the full advantages offered by diversity in the workplace until they create an organizational culture that welcomes everyone—truly everyone—to participate.
Winning the ’20s
How should leaders prepare their companies to thrive in the new decade?
GlaxoSmithKline’s chief digital officer talks her love of technology, digital transformation as a business issue, and the benefits of diverse teams.
GDP growth and LGBT+ inclusion go hand-in-hand. The evidence is gradually building that countries, companies, and individuals are more productive when LGBT+ people feel included.
To retain their best performers, companies will need to rethink hiring, change how work gets done, encourage sponsorship of women, and publicize the actions they’re taking to improve equity.
Despite some high-profile female executives, the A&D workforce is still largely male. With growth looming and companies struggling to fill key roles, that needs to change.
How to build the diverse, resilient workforce that will fuel your organization's innovation engine? Apply these three tactics.
As career paths become less linear and people change jobs more frequently, diversity in the workplace will grow even richer. To benefit from employees' diverse experiences, companies must actively recruit former employees and people re-entering the workforce.
