Navigating Diversity & DEI: Own Your Behavior
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This is a really key, personal element to DEI and your impact on others.
In workplaces, it’s a given that we will all naturally encounter diversity on different levels — the people you interact with are inevitably going to differ in race, gender, communication style, personality type, socioeconomic background, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, age, political beliefs, etc.
The diversity that we have on teams and inside organizations gives us our strength; it allows us to see different perspectives, to fill different roles, to find better solutions, etc. It’s not just valuable — it’s vital to the success of an organization. But diversity can also create fault lines and divisions due to differences of personalities and opinions.
In the past number of years, many companies have been doing a lot of great work to making their organizations more diverse, inclusive places to work. However, I want to talk about navigating DEI on a more individual level.
A critical piece of diversity and inclusion that is relevant to every person:
You get to choose how you treat other people.
“The reality is that you are not going to be best friends with everyone you work with.”
The reality is that you are not going to be best friends with everyone you work with. But you as an individual get to choose how you impact others — how you speak to them, about them, your body language and tone of voice towards them, how you respond to someone’s request for help, and a number of other ways that you can make someone’s day a little better or worse based on how you show up and treat them.
In a lot of ways, the people that you work with are like your family. And I don’t mean that in the corny, “we’re all family here” type of way, I mean it in the sense that you don’t get to choose them — they’re just there. Unless you do all of the hiring inside your company, you don’t get to choose the people you work with.
You get to control how you treat people that are different from you.
You have the choice to approach others with compassion and empathy, to avoid static and conflict, or resolve it when it happens. Taking ownership of the way you impact others —inside and outside of work— is such an important thing to do.
Extending kindness toward someone, or withholding it, is something you have the power to do many, many times every day in many interactions. Make the choice to be kind.
Some parting thoughts:
“Extending kindness toward someone, or withholding it, is something you have the power to do many, many times every day in many interactions.”
Of course, this is easy to do with the people at work that you like and get along with. When this really matters is in instances when you’re interacting with someone you don’t necessarily get along with, or who is very different from you, or that you historically butt heads with, etc.
For example, you don’t have to say fake, positive things about other people that you don’t mean — but when it comes to speaking about others, you can keep quiet and not say anything vs putting someone down or intentionally making them look bad.
It takes a lot of emotional intelligence to do this, and it’s worth it on a personal level and a much larger scale to take accountability for the way you talk about/to other people and how you treat them.
Look for ways to say yes to other people when you can. Come from a place of trying to make others look good, make them feel listened to and considered. Specifically go out of your way to make people feel included and welcome, honor other people’s differences and the diversity that they bring to the table.
If everyone would adopt this mentality, work would be a better place for everyone across the board, including you.
Related Blogs:
How to Get Along With Anyone at Work
Understanding and Embracing Diversity on Teams
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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop
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