Diversity in management means having a character of acceptance and a sense of respect for others. A manager who has such a character can understand that people are unique and can recognize their individual differences. This enables the manager to deal with employees and clients who belong to different sexual orientations, races, and gender, and even ethnicity. He can handle employees and clients of different economic statuses, religions, ages, different political divides, and even those with different physical abilities.
Such a manager can explore all these differences in a safe and nurturing environment. a manager who is under the influence of diversity understands every stakeholder and moves beyond tolerance that many people would expect and embrace rich dimensions contained in each individual. (Gentle, 1998 pp29-31)
The common challenge to all the managers is to see that diversity is maximized in every workforce. This offers the managers a greater opportunity and a wide choice of ideas and better solutions. A manager who embraces diversity first becomes the role model and also welcomes representatives from other levels of the organization. He or she supports such representatives by organizing training programs to instill a diverse culture in every employee.
The manager requires assessing past practices and determining their present value or liability before building the culture of diversity in his or her organization. In this way, the manager affirms those practices that contribute to business objectives positively and identifies those barriers compromising performance in the organization. Sense of diversity helps the manager to integrate its value in all leadership aspects and training programs of employees without segregating that value to only some special programs. The manager requires doing this with caution especially when determining exercises to be undertaken during training because research has shown that, some exercises used in past have caused stress instead of being appreciated and learning taking place. (Lawson, 2001 pp43-44)
(Lawson, 2001 pp40-42) argues that, Diversity is fairly challenging to most managers, the managers must incorporate external resources to assist them in understanding its influence on the goals of the business. Such external resources help the managers to determine their strategies and goals in coming up with their own diversity. It is therefore recommended with emphasis that external instructors for such training be experienced before conducting any diversity program. The initiative has to communicate to the managers about their roles and must assist them to tap various benefits of his diverse workforce as well as his customer base.
References
Gentle M. (1998): Managerial excellence through diversity: Waveland Press, pp. 29-31.
Lawson G. (2001): Diversity management for the 21st century: McMillan Publishing, pp. 40-44.