VALUE DIVERSITY

The B Team is committed to cultivating and celebrat-ing diversity at all levels of business. Diversity is an opportunity to create dynamic and successful organisations of the future, which better reflect the society we live in. There is a compelling and irrefutable business case for diversity but even more fundamen-tally, valuing diversity ensures there are equal opportunities for all enabling everyone to thrive.

There’s a significant body of research that proves the business case for diversity so, in partnership with Virgin Unite, we have compiled a compendium of the ‘best bits’ in our report ‘Diversity: Bringing the Business Case to Life’. We hope that this will help you understand how diversity and inclusion can transform your business to make it more innovative, more competitive and ultimately more successful.

Despite the fact that we know that diversity is good for business, we also know that progress towards more diverse organisations has been slow, so we have sought to understand why. In partnership with the Boston Consulting Group, our report ‘The Diversity Paradox: Capturing the Value of Differ-ence by Looking Beyond the Numbers’ provides insight into the common pitfalls as well as suggesting ways in which you could advance diversity in your organisation.

Our research illustrates a ‘Diversity Paradox’: That exclusively focusing on the representation of minority

“I have seen time and time again that employing people from different backgrounds and who have various skills, viewpoints and personalities will help you to spot opportunities, anticipate problems and come up with original solutions before your competitors do.”

RICHARD BRANSON

“Depriving ourselves of half of humanity’s talents means depriving ourselves of new ideas, new ways of working, and of the ability to continually improve our response to expectations in our markets.”

FRANÇOIS-HENRI PINAULT

groups in an effort to create a more diverse workforce fails to achieve that end. To overcome this paradox, leaders should focus the bulk of their efforts on reframing diversity within their organisation by:

• Broadening the definition of diversity, so it is notjust about numbers or labels. It is about valuing the unique contribution of all individuals.

• Fostering a culture where people cooperate, are inclusive, respectful and hold themselves personal-ly accountable.

• Accelerating diversity by applying four leadership enablers (i) demonstrate commitment and account-ability, (ii) develop a rich fact base (iii) embed diversity and inclusion in the organisation and (iv) encourage and reward experimentation.

• Celebrating and scaling what works – including interventions that are not obviously linked to diversity.

This is just the start of a journey. To truly ‘Value Diversity’ and ensure greater equality of opportunity we need to encourage an honest, open dialogue in our organisations and beyond that drive real change. Throughout 2015, we will be hosting a series of discussions to change the conversation on diversity – we hope you’ll join in, as changing the conversation starts with you.

VALUE DIVERSITY