Embracing Difference, Creating Belonging

• Business educators have a responsibility to create diverse environments for their students—and ensure that students understand the value of that diversity in the workplace.
• Being able to express authenticity in the workplace not only improves employees' productivity but also brings more creativity into their work.
• To engender a culture of belonging, business schools can broaden representation among their faculty and students, expose students to different ideas, review their course content for inclusivity, and teach students to handle conflict constructively.

Transcript

Lisa Ordóñez: [0:14] All of education has a responsibility to make sure that the next group of leaders are diverse, because our communities are diverse.

[0:26] To have the best people in the workplace that are bringing their experiences, their culture, their diverse thought is to create environments in which people can bring their authentic selves to work. They can have a psychologically-safe environment to interact and to bring ideas.

[0:50] To have those environments, we need to teach our future business leaders how to create environments in which people feel that their ideas are welcome, that they can bring different opinions.

[1:02] This is how we get better because we know that diverse environments are more creative, they're more productive, and at the end of the day, they're more profitable. Why wouldn't we want more diverse environments?

[1:14] This is no longer the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do for organizations is to create a diverse environment in which people can come up with new ideas and look at problems in new ways.

We need to teach our future business leaders how to create environments in which people feel that their ideas are welcome.

[1:48] What we've done at the Rady School of Management is built a program we call the Belonging Initiative, which opens up our education to people who wouldn't normally think of themselves as business school students: first gen, low income, women, minorities, LGBTQ.

[2:09] We wanted to create an environment where everyone felt like they belonged, including our majority students. This is an issue that we need to take to the workplace as well, that people belong there and that we need all voices heard.

[2:26] When we have diverse environments, while they're more creative and more productive, they're also more challenging. You need people who have been trained in an environment with many diverse individuals who don't necessarily agree with you, because it's hard to work with people who think differently and come with different experiences.

[2:51] The best place to learn how to work well with a diverse group of people is, I believe, in school, in business schools in particular, so that we're ready to make the best out of a diverse workplace environment.

We have to teach people to be comfortable with conflict. Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[3:11] There are many ways that we can expose people to different perspectives. One is through diversifying our faculty and students. It's in terms of looking at the content we're teaching.

[3:28] We have, at the Rady School, something we call the inclusivity review. When our faculty put the materials up before the class begins, we ask them to take a look at the cases that they're covering, the content that they're discussing, think about how they're interacting in class. Are they making it inclusive to lots of different viewpoints?

[3:51] It's global trips. It's many things. It's not one single thing that we can do. We need to work to make sure that we have those environments in which people are exposed to different ideas, to maybe challenged how to have those crucial conversations and civil discourse in a constructive way.

[4:17] We have to teach people to be comfortable with conflict. Conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. Conflict can be very productive if it's about the task we're doing, not about the relationship we're having with the other individual.