Class themes this week were Implementation in SP and How does a leader create a diverse workforce? in SHRM

Table of contents

Strategic Planning

• Bryson, Chapter 9 - Implementing Strategies and Plans Successfully
• Bryson, Chapter 11 - Leadership Roles in Making Strategic Planning Work
• A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations, Alvesson and Spicer (2012)
• Designing Performancestat, Behn (2008)
• Introduction to Performance Measurement and the Balanced Scorecard, Niven (2008)

Strategic Human Resources Management

• Making Differences Matter, Thomas & Ely (1996)
• Moving mind-sets on gender diversity: McKinsey Global Survey results (2014)
• Managing Ethically Cultural Diversity: Learning from Thomas Aquinas, das Neves & Mele (2014)

Strategic Planning (SP)

Bryson, Chapter 9 - Implementing Strategies and Plans Successfully

• Well-executed implementation (Step 9) furthers the transition from strategic planning to strategic management
• Developing effective programs will bring life to strategies
• The implementation process itself should allow for adaptive learning as new information becomes available and circumstances change.
• with effective implementation the enacted strategies and strategic plans become “not only persuasive, but constitutive … of community, character, and culture.”
• The transition to new order will be achieved via more instrumental outcomes:
  • creation and maintenance of the coalition necessary to support and implement the desired changes
  • avoidance of failure
  • development of clear understanding of what needs to be done and when, why, and by whom
  • a debugging process to identify and fix difficulties
  • summative evaluations that often differentiate between outputs and outcomes
  • retention of important features of the adopted strategies and plans
  • creation of redesigned organizational settings that will ensure long-lasting changes
  • establishment or anticipation of review points during which strategies may be maintained, significantly modified, or terminated
• If the real public value has been created via these subordinate outcomes, then additional outcomes are also likely to be produced.
  • increased support for, and legitimacy of, the leaders and organizations
  • individuals involved in effective implementation of desirable changes are likely to experience heightened self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-confidence
  • organizations (or communities) that effectively implement strategies and plans are likely to enhance their capacities for action in the future.
• For these various benefits to accrue, a number of implementation vehicles are likely to be necessary. These include performance measurement and management, programs, projects, and budgets.
• To be effective, performance measures must help inform and guide strategy implementation.
• Doing so requires actually developing a useful strategic management system, including linking mission and vision, performance measurement, budgeting, program and project management, and periodic reviews and reassessments
• Conceptually, it is useful to view strategic planning as the front end of strategic management
• Program and project plans are a version of action plans
• Budget allocations have crucial, if not overriding, significance for the implementation of strategies and plans.
• What can be done about the divide between budgeting and planning? Suggestions:
  • Have strategic planning precede the budget cycle
  • gain control of the master calendar that guides formal organizational planning and budgeting efforts.
  • Build a performance budgeting system
  • Prior strategic planning efforts can provide many of the premises needed
  • Pick your budget fights carefully
    • Each budget issue can be treated separately
    • Particular issues can be selected in advance
    • Budgetary issues can be examined in the light of a comprehensive analytical framework
  • Consider implementing entrepreneurial budgeting concepts
    • involves a blend of centralization and decentralization. Control over broadscale goal setting and monitoring for results is retained by policymakers, and managerial discretion over how to achieve the goals is decentralized to operating managers.
  • Make sure you have good analysts and wily and seasoned veterans of budgetary politics on your side.
  • Develop criteria for evaluating the budgets for all programs
  • involve the same people in both strategy formulation and implementation if you can. Doing so clearly can help bridge the action-control gap.
• implementation structures that coordinate and manage implementation activities are likely to consist of a variety of formal and informal mechanisms
• Leadership guidelines
  • Consciously and deliberately plan and manage implementation in a strategic way.
  • Develop implementation strategy documents—including key indicators —and action plans to guide implementation and focus attention
  • Try for changes that can be introduced easily and rapidly.
  • Use a program and project management approach wherever possible.
  • Build in enough people, time, attention, money, administrative and support services, and other resources to ensure successful implemen­tation.
  • Link new strategic initiatives with ongoing operations.
  • Work quickly to avoid unnecessary or undesirable competition with new priorities.
    • Cheapness should not be a selling point. Instead, program designers and supporters should sell cost-effectiveness
  • Focus on maintaining or developing a coalition of implementers, advocates, and interest groups intent on effective implementation of the changes and willing to protect them over the long haul.
  • Be sure that legislative, executive, and administrative policies and actions facilitate rather than impede implementation
  • Think carefully about how residual disputes will be resolved and underlying norms enforced
  • Remember that major changes, and even many minor ones, entail changes in the organization’s culture
  • Emphasize learning
  • Think carefully about how information and communication technologies can help support implementation and ongoing learning efforts
  • Create an accountability system that assures key stakeholders that political, legal, and performance-based accountability needs are met
  • Hang in there! Successful implementation typically requires large amounts of time, attention, resources, and effort
• Communication and Education guidelines
  • Invest in communication activities
  • Work to reduce resistance based on divergent attitudes and lack of participation.
  • Consider developing a guiding vision of success
  • Build in regular attention to appropriate indicators.
• Communication and Education guidelines
  • As much as possible, fill leadership and staff positions with highly qualified people committed to the change effort.
  • Give the planning team the task of planning and managing implementation, or establish a new implementation team that has a significant overlap in membership with the planning team.
  • Ensure access to, and liaison with, top administrators during implementation.
  • Give special attention to the problem of easing out, working around, or avoiding people who are not likely to help the change effort for whatever reason.
• Direct Versus Staged Implementation guidelines - two basic approaches to implementation
  • Consider direct implementation when the situation is technically and politically simple, immediate action is necessary for system survival in a crisis, or the adopted solutions entail some lumpiness that precludes staged implementation.
  • In difficult situations, consider staged implementation.
    • The more technically difficult the situation is, the more necessary it is to have a pilot project to figure out what interventions do and do not work.
  • Design pilot projects to be effective.
  • Design demonstration projects to be effective
  • Carefully transfer tested changes to other implementers.
  • Finally, when the implementation process is staged, give special attention to those who will implement changes in the early stages.
• Implementation should be viewed as a continuation of the Strategy Change Cycle toward the ultimate goal of addressing the issues that prompted change in the first place
• Direct implementation works best when the time is right, the need is evident to a strong coalition of supporters and implementers, critical issues and adopted strategies are clearly connected, solution technology is clearly understood, adequate resources are available, and a clear vision guides the changes.
• Staged implementation is advisable when policymakers, leaders, and managers are faced with technical or political difficulties. It often involves pilot projects, or demonstration projects
• Learning is a major theme underlying successful implementation efforts

Bryson, Chapter 11 - Leadership Roles in Making Strategic Planning Work

• At its best, strategic planning and strategic management help leaders pursue virtuous ends
• Whether strategic planning helps or hurts depends on how formal and informal leaders and followers at all organizational levels use it—or misuse it.
• what is leadership? We define it as “the inspiration and mobilization of others to undertake collective action in pursuit of the common good”
• Effective leadership is a collective enterprise involving many people playing different leader and follower roles at different times,
• The following interconnected leadership tasks are important if strategic planning and implementation are to be effective:
  • Understanding the context
  • Understanding the people involved, including oneself
  • Sponsoring the process
  • Championing the process
  • Facilitating the process
  • Fostering collective leadership
  • Facilitating the process
  • Fostering collective leadership
  • Using dialogue and deliberation to create a meaningful process
  • Making and implementing policy decisions
  • Enforcing rules, settling disputes, and managing residual conflicts
  • Putting it all together and preparing for ongoing strategic change
• Leaders should help constituents view their organization and organizational change in the context of relevant social, political, economic, technological, and ecological systems and trends.
• Leaders’ understanding of the external and internal context of their organizations is important for recognizing emergent strategies,
• Leaders can stay attuned to the organization’s external and internal environment through personal contacts and observation, attention to diverse media, continuing education, use of the organization’s monitoring systems, and reflection.
• Leaders should be in touch with the possibilities for significant change in order to know whether strategic planning should be used
• Understanding oneself and others is particularly important for developing the strength of character and insight that invigorates leadership
• Leaders should seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the people who are or should be involved in strategic planning and implementation, including themselves.
• Perhaps the most important strength is a passion for fulfilling the organization’s mission and contributing to the well-being of multiple stakeholders.
• Effective strategic thinking, acting, and learning seem to depend a great deal on intuition, creativity, and pattern recognition,
• Process sponsors typically are top positional leaders. They have enough prestige, power, and authority to commit the organization to undertaking strategic planning and to hold people accountable for doing so.
• Sponsor guidelines
  • Articulate the purpose and importance of the strategic planning effort
  • Commit necessary resources—time, money, energy, legitimacy—to the effort
  • Emphasize at the beginning and at critical points that action and change will result
  • Encourage and reward creative thinking, constructive debate, and multiple sources of input and insight
  • Be aware of the possible need for outside consultants
  • Be willing to exercise power and authority to keep the process on track
  • Another danger with strategic planning is that people are likely to fight or flee whenever they are asked to deal with tough issues or failing strategies, serious conflicts, or significant changes Sponsors have a key role to play in keeping the process going through the difficult patches;
• champions are the people who have primary responsibility for managing the strategic planning process day to day
• Champions, especially, need the interpersonal skills and feel for complexity noted earlier
• Sometimes the sponsors and champions are the same people, but usually they are not
• Champion guidelines
  • Keep strategic planning high on people’s agendas
  • Attend to the process without promoting specific solutions
  • Think about what has to come together (people, tasks, information, reports) at or before key decision points
  • Organize time, space, materials, and participation needed for the process to succeed
  • Pay attention to the language used to describe strategic planning and implementation
  • Keep rallying participants and pushing the process along
  • Develop champions throughout the organization
  • Be sensitive to power differences
• The presence of a facilitator means that champions can be free to participate in substantive discussions without having to worry too much about managing group process.
• skilled facilitator also can help build trust, interpersonal skills, and conflict management ability
• Facilitator guidelines
  • Know the strategic planning process and explain how it works at the beginning and at many points along the way.
  • Tailor the process to the organization and the groups involved.
  • Convey a sense of humor and enthusiasm for the process and help groups get unstuck.
  • Ensure that participants rather than the facilitators are doing the work.
  • Press groups toward action and the assignment of responsibility for specific actions.
  • Congratulate people whenever possible.
• Collective leadership approaches
  • Rely on teams
  • Focus on network and coalition development
  • Make leadership and followership development an explicit strategy
  • Establish specific mechanisms for sharing power, responsibility, and accountability
• Leaders become visionary when they play a vital role in interpreting current reality (often in light of the past), fostering a collective group mission, articulating desirable strategies, and shaping a collective sense of the future
• As truth tellers and direction givers, they help people make sense of experience, and they offer guidance for coping with the present and the future
• Visionary leadership methods
  • Understand the design and use of forums.
  • Seize opportunities to be interpreters and direction givers in areas of uncertainty and difficulty.
  • Reveal and name real needs and real conditions.
  • Help co-leaders and followers frame and reframe issues and strategies.
  • Offer compelling visions of the future.
  • Champion new and improved ideas for dealing with strategic issues.
  • Articulate desired actions and expected consequences.
• Public and nonprofit leaders are also required to be political leaders—partly because all organizations have their political aspects
• heart of political leadership, is understanding how intergroup power relationships shape decision making and implementation outcomes.
• Political leadership responsibilities
  • Understand the design and use of arenas.
  • Mediate and shape conflict within and among stakeholders.
  • Understand the dynamics of political influence and how to target resources appropriately.
  • Build winning, sustainable coalitions.
  • Avoid bureaucratic imprisonment.
• Leaders are always called upon to be ethical, not least when they are handling conflict.
• residual or subsidiary conflicts must be handled constructively,
• Ethical leadership tasks
  • Understand the design and use of formal and informal courts.
  • Foster organizational (collaboration, community) integrity and educate others about ethics, constitutions, laws, and norms.
  • Apply constitutions, laws, and norms to specific cases.
  • Adapt constitutions, laws, and norms to changing times.
  • Resolve conflicts among constitutions, laws, and norms.
• Effective strategic planning is a collective phenomenon, typically involving sponsors, champions, facilitators, teams, task forces, and others in various ways at various times.
• for strategic planning and management to be effective, caring and committed leadership and followership are essential.

A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations, Alvesson and Spicer (2012)

• what we call functional stupidity are an equally important if under-recognized part of organizational life
• refers to an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic ways, and avoidance of justifications
• functional stupidity is prevalent in contexts dominated by economy in persuasion which emphasizes image and symbolic manipulation
• it structures individuals’ internal conversations in ways that emphasize positive and coherent narratives and marginalize more negative or ambiguous one
• can have productive outcomes such as providing a degree of certainty
• can have corrosive consequences such as creating a sense of dissonance among individuals and the organization as a whole
• positive consequences can give rise to self-reinforcing stupidity, negative consequences can spark dialogue
• Instead of engaging in these debates about what knowledge ‘is’, we want to question the assumption in this field that sophisticated thinking and use of advanced knowledge is a core characteristic of many contemporary organizations.
• effective organizational functioning calls also for qualities that do not easily fit with the idea of smartness
• Functional stupidity is organizationally-supported lack of reflexivity, substantive reasoning, and justification. It entails a refusal to use intellectual resources outside a narrow and ‘safe’ terrain.
• Functional stupidity contributes to maintaining and strengthening organizational order.
• can also have negative consequences such as trapping individuals and organizations into problematic patterns of thinking
• approach may help to illuminate key experiences of people in organizations, that are often masked by dominant modes of theorizing which emphasize ‘positive’ themes
• There is a long history of work in organization theory that encourages caution in relation to rationality and smartness in organizations. Perhaps the best-known strand is the work that charts the limits to rationality in organizations. The concept of ‘bounded rationality’
• Some studies point to how much work is conducted in ‘mindless’ ways
• prevalence of ‘skilled incompetence’ in large organizations
• The garbage-can model of decision-making places a greater emphasis on ambiguity, dynamics, and unpredictability in organizations.
• ‘pseudo-knowledge’ allows people to confuse superficial familiarity with a deeper understanding of the subject matter. A belief in mastery and knowledge, then, hides a ‘deeper’ level of ignorance.
• These concepts take us some of the way to understanding the borders of smartness
• research does not consider how issues of power and politics may fuel the disinclination to use intellectual resources.
• functional stupidity is characterized by an unwillingness or inability to mobilize three aspects of cognitive capacity: reflexivity, justification, and substantive reasoning
• Functional stupidity is not a purely cognitive issue. It is also related to affective issues such as motivation and emotion.
• functional stupidity is inability and/or unwillingness to use cognitive and reflective capacities in anything other than narrow and circumspect ways
• Stupidity management is typically underpinned by blocking communicative action
• Stupidity management can also work without direct intervention. It can entail setting the agenda around what can and cannot be raised during collective deliberation.
• A final way that stupidity managers might seek to exercise power is through the propagation of particular subject positions.
• In sum, stupidity management involves a wide range of actors seeking to restrict and distort communicative action through the exercise of power
• process of stupidity self-management, involving the individual putting aside doubts, critique, and other reflexive concerns and focusing on the more positive aspects of organizational life
• A crucial part of this involves focusing on more positive and ‘safer’ aspects of organizational life. Individuals do this through using representations that are officially sanctioned
• positive evocations frequently clash with the realities of work
• Functional stupidity is a mixed blessing for organizations and the people in them. It can have positive results for both, but also less desirable outcomes.
  • positives: sense of certainty, discourages difficult questions
  • negatives: dissonance between official sponsored discourses, mis-recognition of problems
• In sum, functional stupidity can be an advantage and/or a disadvantage. For instance, the norm of criticizing only if you have a constructive proposal, can lead to functional outcomes such as a good organizational climate and efforts to be creative. But it can have negative outcomes such as the suppression of awareness of problems, narrow instrumental orientation, and lack of learning.
• it works as a doubt-control and uncertainty-coping mechanism.
• can help to marginalize sources of friction and uncertainty.
• supported by organizational norms, and facilitates smooth interactions in organizations.

Designing Performancestat, Behn (2008)

• PerformanceStat is the class of performance strategies exemplified by CompStat, created by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), and CitiStat, created by the City of Baltimore, Maryland
• agency is employing a PerformanceStat performance strategy if it holds an ongoing series of regular, frequent, periodic, integrated meetings
• different subunits use data to analyze the unit’s past performance, to follow up on previous decisions and commitments to improve performance, to establish its next performance objectives, and to examine the effectiveness of its overall performance strategies.
• To make an intelligent use of the PerformanceStat strategy, to create a version that will, indeed, help improve performance, the leaders of the adopting organization need to craft the details of their approach with conscious attention to the key design considerations inherent in the strategy:
  • specify the performance purpose they are trying to achieve
  • decide what performance data they will collect and analyze
  • build a small staff to analyze these data
  • assemble the necessary infrastructure
  • determine how they will conduct the meetings
  • build the requisite operational capacity
  • create an explicit mechanism to follow up on the problems identified, solutions
  • oposed, and decisions made at these meetings
  • think through carefully how they can adapt the features and principles of other versions of PerformanceStat to their own situation.
• PerformanceStat is a leadership and management strategy designed to improve the performance of an individual public agency or the set of agencies within a governmental jurisdiction. It is not managerial magic
• leadership team of the agency or jurisdiction first defines the nature of the performance that they seek to improve
• need to think through carefully what they are trying to accomplish. What is the “performance deficit”
• PerformanceStat requires data–data that capture those aspects of performance that the leaders of the jurisdiction or agency are trying to improve
• Any version of PerformanceStat requires an analyst or team of analyts. The job of any PerformanceStat analyst is to examine the data, to clarify past performance, to identify specific performance deficits, to offer one or more explanations for each such deficit, and to suggest possible strategies for eliminating one or more of them
• Making comparisons is the PerformanceStat analyst’s core task
• Any PerformanceStat strategy requires two key pieces of infrastructure: (a) some technology to help collect, analyze, and display the data and (b) a room in which to hold the periodic meetings. Neither needs to be fancy
• A PerformanceStat meeting is designed both to pressure the low-performing units and managers to improve and to help them to improve
• PerformanceStat meetings cannot be strictly show-and-tell
• A PerformanceStat meeting can serve one additional purpose: It can help people from different subunits learn from each other.
• PerformanceStat meetings often begin at the macrolevel, with an examination of recent trends as revealed by the data. Yet, the discussion can quickly move from macro trends to micro problems
• Inherent in any effective PerformanceStat strategy is the delegation of operational responsibility to the managers of subunit
• PerformanceStat cannot work in a strict, command-and-control bureaucracy. For any subunit to improve its performance, it needs the flexibility to experiment with new approaches
• the leadership team will need to educate both the old and the new about the concepts underlying its PerformanceStat philosophy and about how to adapt and apply these concepts within their own subunits
• Any strategy for improving the performance of any unit of government, whether it is something that looks like PerformanceStat or is completely different, needs to provide the help that the people in the subunits need to do a better job
• requires persistent follow up
• PerformanceStat is not a model, or a template, or an algorithm that can be simply imported without adaptation or thought
• The decision to develop a PerformanceStat strategy is a significant one. For the strategy requires a major commitment of resources of both money and time.
• to create an effective PerformanceStat, the director of the agency or the chief executive of the jurisdiction must be willing to devote personal time plus the time of his or her top staff to designing a personally well-thought-out, carefully specified, internally consistent, and uniquely appropriate version
• adaptation cannot end with the launch. No one will get it precisely right the first time. Indeed, no one will ever get it precisely right. They will have to experiment, learn, adapt, and experiment again

Introduction to Performance Measurement and the Balanced Scorecard, Niven (2008)

• Three factors have fueled the need for improved performance reporting: the recent spate of corporate accounting scandals, a longstanding reliance on financial measures of performance as the one true way to gauge success, and the inability of many organizations to successfully execute their strategies.
• we require balanced performance information to fully assess an organization’s success
• criticisms levied against the over-abundant use of financial measures:
  • Not consistent with today’s business realities
  • Driving by rear view mirror
  • Tendency to reinforce functional silos
  • Sacrifice of long-term thinking
  • Financial measures are not relevant to many levels of the organization
• What is needed is a system that provides real insight into an organization’s operations, balances the historical accuracy of financial numbers with the drivers of future performance, and assists us in implementing strategy.
• Once considered the exclusive domain of the for-profit world, the Balanced Scorecard has been translated and effectively implemented in both the nonprofit and public sectors.
• We can describe the Balanced Scorecard as a carefully selected set of quantifiable measures derived from an organization’s strategy.
• three elements: measurement system, Strategic Management System, and communication tool
• The Balanced Scorecard allows an organization to translate its vision and strategies by providing a new framework, one that tells the story of the organization’s strategy through the objectives and measures chosen
• uses measurement as a new language to describe the key elements in the achievement of the strategy.
• While the Scorecard retains financial measures, it complements them with three other distinct perspectives: Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning and Growth
• For many organizations, the Balanced Scorecard has evolved from a measurement tool to what Kaplan and Norton have described as a “Strategic Management System”
• To successfully implement any strategy, it must be understood and acted upon by every level of the firm. Cascading the Scorecard means driving it down into the organization and giving all employees the opportunity to demonstrate how their day-to-day activities contribute to the company’s strategy.
• Developing your Balanced Scorecard provides an excellent opportunity to tie resource allocation and strategy together.
• The human and financial resources necessary to achieve Scorecard targets should form the basis for the development of the annual budgeting process.
• The building of a Balanced Scorecard also affords you a great opportunity to critically examine the current myriad initiatives taking place in your organization.
• Initiatives at every level of the organization and from every area must share one common trait: a linkage to the organization’s overall strategic goals.
• The Balanced Scorecard translates your vision and strategy into a coherent set of measures in four balanced perspectives
• The results of your Scorecard performance measures, when viewed as a coherent whole, represent the articulation of your strategy
• To prove meaningful, the measures on your Scorecard must link together to tell the story of, or describe, that strategy.
• Important to consistently use the term Balanced Scorecard when describing this tool, because the concept of balance is central to this system, specifically relating to three areas:
  • Balance between financial and nonfinancial indicators of success
  • Balance between internal and external constituents of the organization
  • Balance between lag and lead indicators of performance
• Many leaders feel they know what is most critical to the success of their organizations. However, it is only through the measurement of these vital indicators that they can accurately reflect their progress on an ongoing basis.

Strategic Human Resources Management (SHRM)

Making Differences Matter, Thomas & Ely (1996)

• This article offers an explanation for why diversity efforts are not fulfilling their promise and presents a new paradigm for understanding—and leveraging—diversity.
• transformation requires a fundamental change in the attitudes and behaviors of an organization’s leadership; will come only when senior managers abandon an underlying and flawed assumption about diversity and replace it with a broader understanding
• thinking of diversity simply in terms of identity-group representation inhibited effectiveness.
• one of two paths in managing diversity: blending in and setting apart
• Diversity should be understood as the varied perspectives and approaches to work
• Two perspectives have guided most diversity initiatives to date: the discrimination-and fairness paradigm and the access-and-legitimacy paradigm
• new, emerging approach: the learning-and-effectiveness paradigm
• this new model for managing diversity lets the organization internalize differences
• members of the organization can say, We are all on the same team, with our differences—not despite them
• eight preconditions that help to position organizations to use identity-group differences in the service of organizational learning, growth, and renewal
  1. The leadership must understand that a diverse workforce will embody different perspectives and approaches to work, and must truly value variety of opinion and insight.
  2. The leadership must recognize both the learning opportunities and the challenges that the expression of different perspectives presents for an organization.
  3. The organizational culture must create an expectation of high standards of performance from everyone.
  4. The organizational culture must stimulate personal development
  5. The organizational culture must encourage openness.
  6. The culture must make workers feel valued.
  7. The organization must have a well-articulated and widely understood mission.
  8. The organization must have a relatively egalitarian, nonbureaucratic structure.
• All eight preconditions do not have to be in place in order to begin a shift from the first or second diversity orientations, but most should be
• When there is no proactive search to understand, then learning from diversity, if it happens at all, can occur only reactively
• Employees often use their cultural competencies at work, but in a closeted, almost embarrassed, way. The unfortunate result is that the opportunity for collective and organizational learning and improvement is lost.
• Companies in which the third paradigm is emerging have leaders and managers who take responsibility for removing the barriers that block employees from using the full range of their competencies, cultural or otherwise.
• Leaders should test their own assumptions about the competencies of all members of the workforce because negative assumptions are often unconsciously communicated in powerful—albeit nonverbal—ways.
• Few things are faster at killing a shift to a new way of thinking about diversity than feelings of broken trust
• as people put more of themselves out and open up about new feelings and ideas, the dynamics of the learning-and-effectiveness paradigm can produce temporary vulnerabilities.
• important to sett a tone of honest discourse, by acknowledging tensions, and by resolving them sensitively and swiftly
• a shift toward this paradigm requires a high-level commitment to learning more
• not an easy challenge, but we remain convinced that unless organizations take this step, any diversity initiative will fall short of fulfilling its rich promise.

Moving mind-sets on gender diversity: McKinsey Global Survey results (2014)

• cultural factors at work are more than twice as likely as individual factors to link women’s confidence that they can reach top management_
• mind-sets and company culture are significant in affecting women’s confidence to achieve their career goals
• particular aspects of corporate culture make it more difficult for women to reach the top
• notable gap in how men and women regard gender-diversity problems
• no gender difference in level of career ambition
• collective, cultural factors weigh more than twice as much as individual factors on women’s confidence to reach top management
• no single way for companies to make change happen; need a whole ecosystem of measures
• Looking ahead: increase male sponsorship, diversify performance models

Managing Ethically Cultural Diversity: Learning from Thomas Aquinas, das Neves & Mele (2014)

• This paper aims to offer suggestions to certain problems facing managers in dealing with cultural diversity through the inspiration of Thomas Aquinas
• Aquinas focuses on the common human ground, which allows for the indispensable dialogue between different positions
• Aquinas’ approach is neither rigid ethical universalism with no consideration for diversity nor moral relativism
• The choice of this 13th century philosopher and theologian may seem awkward but we assume that if we attempt to bridge this chasm, we may make valuable discoveries
• Several insights on cultural diversity can be found in Aquinas’ writings. The first is his sympathy for diversity
• The second pertinent insight regards the influence of culture and education on moral behavior, on one hand, and rational morality, on the other.
• The three previously-mentioned elements essential in Aquinas’ ethics–the primacy of love, practical wisdom, helping practical reason, and natural law–provide guidelines for dealing with diversity, and more specifically, for making decisions related with diversity.
• Thomas Aquinas was very much aware we live in a pluralistic and diverse world. This is exactly the reason he states for the existence of positive laws: ‘‘The general principles of the natural law cannot be applied to all men in the same way on account of the great variety of human affairs: and hence arises the diversity of positive laws among various people.’’
• Natural law, being based on human nature, is a basic reference for dealing with diversity, since we all are human beings
• in the diversity of cultures, the natural law remains as a rule that binds men among themselves and imposes on them, beyond the inevitable differences, common principles
• To sum up, Aquinas’ ethics provides universal principles through natural law, which includes, on one hand, an absolute respect for human dignity, along with the existence of natural rights, human values and virtues; and on the other hand the consideration of particular situations, including diversity, and their evaluation with practical wisdom.
• Last, but not least, Aquinas suggests not only a normative approach for making moral judgments but also practical suggestion for an ethical dialogue,
• All conversations are only virtuous if the participants have the right intention. If in the discussion someone aims only at attacking truth, profiting from distortions or creating confusion, the dialogue is better avoided
• second very useful rule we can learn from Aquinas has to do with the kind of reasoning we should use. If, as was stated above, cultural differences are relevant due to differences in world view, then it is very important to find the common ground
• According to Thomas Aquinas, cultural differences are a part of the perfection of the universe, their impact on ethics proceeds mostly through their world visions, and they exist over a common ground of human nature
• Aquinas systemic approach aids us in placing the problem in its proper context, where it can be reflected on from the perspective of virtue ethics,
• Aquinas’ moral system may be useful for modern managers who face ethical issues and dilemmas raised from cultural diversity
• Our finding show, however, some basic attitudes for managing diversity:
  1. deal with diversity with sympathy
  2. being tolerant with other positions without adopting a skeptical or relativistic position in searching the truth
  3. remembering that everybody has some aspect of truth to be considered
  4. applying neighborly love toward everyone as a first principle of morality
  5. developing practical wisdom to be able to apply universal principles to specific situations risen from diversity
  6. Balancing universal and permanent basic standards (first principles of natural law) with local customs and particular context
  7. trying to proceed though conversation and debate, finding a consensus with good arguments, but always with respect for human dignity and rights