Human Resources: Book Review: Creating the Multicultural Organization

Creating the Multicultural Organization: A strategy for capturing the power of diversity.

Author: Taylor Cox Jr.

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Price: $24.95 US

"For many companies, efforts to manage diversity have produced disappointing results." If you are one of these companies or if you want to avoid being one of these companies, you should take a look at Taylor Cox Jr.´s Creating the Multicultural Organization: A strategy for capturing the power of diversity.

Some of the topics covered and the questions answered in this book include:

How to leverage diversity for the benefit of individuals and the organizations?
The systematic five-part model for developing a diversity-competent organization.
How to achieve measurable results?
Aims to help you and your organization meet the challenges of diversity faster and do it more effectively.
Explains that Managing diversity involves understanding its effects and implementing behaviors, work practices, and policies that respond to then in an effective way.

Target Audience
This book will appeal to those responsible for planning and implementing efforts to manage diversity - meaning everyone in the organization. In particular, "Creating the Multicultural Organization" speaks to recognized leaders in managing diversity. For example, a CEO, member of diversity steering committee, human resource professional, line managers, a work group manager, or a team leader.

Features of the Book
There are a number of features that standout and make it easy to read and understand the book. For example:

It includes an integrated study on managing diversity efforts at Alcoa - one of the world´s largest companies.
There are chapter endnotes that highlight the relevant research
Each chapter ends with a set of questions designed to provoke dialogue and support action planning

Contents
Chapter 1: Challenge of managing diversity

Chapter 2: A Strategy for Meeting the Challenge

Chapter 3: Leadership: The requirement of change

Chapter 4: Leverage research, development measurement plans

Chapter 5: Create effective education

Chapter 6: Align organizational systems and practices

Chapter 7: Follow up for sustainable results

Summary
Globalization, increased use of teams and change in workplace demographics are three factors that have made diversity training a necessity. According to the author, such an effort requires "transforming monolithic cultures into multicultural organizations". The author explains that the problem is that "most employers have an organizational culture that is somewhere between toxic and deadly when it comes to handling diversity".

Cox Jr. uses his experience at Alcoa, one of the world´s largest companies, in developing and implementing a process of organizational change to ´minimize diversity´s potential to act as a barrier and to maximize its potential to enhance performance.´ Through the seven chapters, Cox attempts to touch on all aspects of a proper design for your organization´s Diversity Program.

The structure of the book is based on Cox´s Change Model for Work on Diversity. This is a circular-flow model based on the notion of ´continuous loop learning". The five inter-related factors of the model are as follows:

A. Leadership
Leadership is an absolutely essential element for the success of managing any diversity change work. Cox emphasizes the following key points about leadership.

Leadership starts at the top
It takes many leaders to make the change effort work
Leadership can´t be delegated

B. Research & Measurement
The point emphasized here is that change must be data driven. It´s explained that the term data needs to be defined broadly to include everything from survey feedback to quotations.

C. Education
Effective education is necessary for any organization change effort - including diversity.

D. Alignment of Management Systems
Diversity change can only happen if the organizational culture is changed to reflect your efforts.

E. Follow up
It´s essential to ensure accountability and provide an environment for continuous improvement.

The book concentrates on giving a detailed overview of each of the factors and how they come into play in designing a Diversity program that really works.

Cox explains that there are a number of reasons that Diversity initiatives fail:
1. Misdiagnosis of the problem
- most employees are forced to assimilate rather than being allowed the opportunity to maintain their diversity.

2. Wrong approach
- Unlike the Systems Approach, which requires that, any new inputs must be accompanied by changes in other systems. (13), in most organizations, the toxic culture of the organization remains the same even after introducing the diversity initiative.

3. Misunderstanding the learning curve
- The mistake is made when Diversity initiatives are abandoned because they don´t lead to change overnight

- It is not realized that for diversity, the learning curve is flatter rather than steep. That is, it may take months if not years before the organization can reap the benefits of their diversity program.

In addition to the academic explanation of his Diversity model, Cox also provides advice on particular topics such as criteria for diversity teams, and components of diversity climate.

Why would an HR professional be interested in this book?
If your organization has been struggling to harness diversity to attain a competitive advantage or if none of your so-called diversity programs seem to be working, Creating the Multicultural Organization by Taylor Cox Jr. is worth a look. Being a consultant who has done work for a lot of the major organizations like General Motors, Shell, Exxon, in addition to Alcoa, Cox Jr. can offer a lot of good advice that you can use. Creating the Multicultural Organization provides a really good opportunity to use the best approaches employed by industry benchmarks and implement them into your own organization.

Although Cox explains that the leader or the CEO is the most important player in ensuring the success of any diversity program, the HR professional also plays an important role in this initiative. The HR person would want to read through this book in order to learn about the responsibilities of upper management in managing diversity programs as well as her own duties in carrying out the initiative successfully.

HR.COMmentary
Overall, Creating the Multicultural Organization is a well-written book that provides a lot of ppractical advice. It also offers a list of materials that can be used in educating employees about diversity. In it you will find a quiz to test how your organization fares in implementing programs that promote diversity. The questions at the end of each chapter to get you start thinking about the issues in depth rather than just moving on to the next section. The book offers a lot of value.

My only concern is that even though the book shows how to increase diversity and how to harness the power of being different by using Alcoa´s efforts as a guide, I didn´t come across the name of even one female executive or manager from Alcoa. Although it is hard to tell from just the names, I think it would probably be safe to bet that most of the executives at this company are or were "white males". The author talked a lot about his work with the various members of the Alcoa team but not one of the names is of a female. I guess even Alcoa has a long way to go but at least they have started on the right path.

It seems that managing diversity is a more difficult task then it might seem. But hang in there and don´t give up - there is bound to be a change some day.

About the Company
CREATING THE MULTICULTURAL ORGANIZATION: A strategy for Capturing the Power of Diversity is published by Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Company, as part of the three part University of Michigan Business School Management Series. The other two titles include: Getting Results by Longnecker/ Simonetti and Managing the Unexpected by Weick/ Sutcliffe.

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