The word "diversity" is in grave danger of becoming another piece of mindless corporate jargon. Why? A big part of the reason is that only a small proportion of people understand diversity as a concept.
The process of education has many challenges.
To begin with, diversity is not just about gender or race. Most diversity experts, and organisations that style themselves as diversity champions, recognise no less that seven diversity strands: race, age, gender, transgender, sexuality, religious belief and disability.
Understanding that diversity isn't about women getting equal pay or opportunity, or minority ethnicities breaking through the glass ceiling, is the first educational challenge.
The second key challenge revolves around the fact that organisational diversity statistics don't tend to be broken down into levels of seniority.
Raj Tulsiani
While many organisations are proud to point that their diversity levels have increased across one or two of the seven diversity strands, they are equally reticent about disclosing diversity percentages at board or senior leadership levels.
It is easy to point to high profile role models, but the fact is that those individuals are exceptions to the rule. So the reports of improvement need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Unfortunately, the third major challenge lies squarely at the feet of the recruitment industry. Traditional recruitment methods are biased against diverse candidates.
It isn't deliberate, but unconscious bias is still bias. My own experience tells me that advertising for senior roles across both the private and public sectors will deliver less than 10% self-certified diversity, excluding gender.
That challenge is compounded by the fact that recruitment firms augment advertising with proactive search of their own established networks.
The problem is, the recruitment industry is notoriously "undiverse" – so they tend to reach out to networks of similar composition.
The result? The usual suspects get presented to organisations looking to recruit senior roles, and the minorities cool their heels, without even having the chance to compete.
Harriet Harman, leader of the house of commons, recently made headlines by laying the blame for the financial crisis squarely upon male shoulders – announcing that more women in boardrooms would have mitigated the risk taking and cavalier attitudes.
I agree with that, but it isn't just about mixing women with men – it's about building leadership teams that are representative of society.
However, the main diversity challenge is building understanding that diversity isn't just the right thing to do, or a way to avoid bad publicity. People from different backgrounds bring new perspectives to age-old challenges, new solutions to problems, and fresh life to ongoing debates.
Diversity creates diversity of thought, taking objective viewpoints and applying new approaches to solve problems, generate ideas and strategies, or find innovative ways to improve processes.
Diversity isn't an obligation, but an exceptionally powerful opportunity to generate competitive advantage. When we understand that, the word "diversity" will take on a whole new meaning.
Raj Tulsiani is chief executive of Green Park Interim & Executive Resourcing
