Just a few weeks ago, I received this email, "Our company is trying to implement a new set of core values. One being that of Integrity. A team has been formulated to come up with some sort of methodology in order to spread this value throughout the company. Do you have any suggestions? Can you point me into the right direction? Thanks so much."
My response was somewhat curt, but honest: "I don't normally answer questions from non-clients or non-subscribers, but yours was interesting. I would be less than honest if I didn't respond by stating that implementing integrity as a core value is one of the silliest things I've ever heard. If you cannot accept that statement, then you won't be able to understand why integrity cannot be spread among adults as though it were some sort of peanut butter.
Perhaps if you were running a preschool or religious academy, you might be able to be so moralistic, but I assume that you're running neither.
Integrity is a parental value, as are most other values that we learn in life. By the time we are adults, we either accept or reject them, and there is no methodology for spreading them in a corporate culture. The best you can do is to behave the way you want employees to behave, and that goes double for your senior managers and officers. You teach by example, even in a corporate world.
This is much as teaching "trust." You don't teach it; you don't spread it; you receive it because of your actions. Same goes for loyalty. I have a number of articles on site which discuss the latter and I think you can extrapolate to get an answer to your question, but it will be no different than what I have just discussed. P.S. I have been a licensed psychologist and counselor.
This is a philosophical question, not one for HR. But you're welcome to scour the Web in search of an answer that is more to your "liking." My feelings will not be hurt."
[I was please to receive a positive reply, especially since the writer was afraid of being labeled "The Integrity Czar."]
So, what has this to do with cultural diversity? Plenty especially since I consider teaching cultural diversity to be a matter for the home, the neighborhood, the church ... whatever ... but not for the company. We are what we are and, by the time we enter the world of work, we either embrace the diversity which exists or we don't. Truth is that the best place to learn cultural diversity is in local restaurants: if you want to know about a people, try the food. (Who could not love the Italians? Even watching The Sopranos makes me hungry and so does Everyone Loves Raymond... Oh, hell, everything makes me hungry.)
In the early 1960's a sociologist whose name I've forgotten said that America has never been a melting pot (as espoused by an earlier 20th Century sociologist whose name I've also forgotten), but rather a "salad bowl" where the pieces were mixed but distinct. Well, welcome to America in 2002. It's even more of a salad bowl with even more distinct ingredients. What makes these elements more distinct is the lack of a common language. It is language which binds a culture and make no mistake, America has a culture, however weakened by the lack of a common language.
I've called us "Americans" because I want to include Canadians in this mix. (Why not? Aside from the fact that my dad was born in Toronto, half our comedians and one-third of the newscasters in the U.S. are Canadians.) More important, I want you to realize how the fight over making French the second national language of Canada has torn the country, almost to the point of a separatist Quebec. At least in Canada, the separatism is localized, although you will find labeling in two and sometimes three languages from coast to coast. If Quebec had been smart and dropped this nonsense, they could have had a baseball team, paid in U.S. dollars albeit without a single Canadian on the team.
English is a requirement to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. While many coming to these shores do learn English, many more never do, and never make the attempt. In the great influx of immigrants between 1880 and 1920, I propose that a greater proportion of those immigrants, however ghettoized, learned English in greater numbers than those in the same neighborhoods today. Why? Because our government has failed us. We have all manner of forms in any number of languages. The driver's license exam in this state can be taken in English, Spanish, and Farsi. Although not a law yet, there is an actual push to have all employment posters in Spanish and English in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida, and there has been some reference to it in Massachusetts and New York.
Our federal and state governments want to make it easier for non-citizens to navigate through our culture but in doing so they've made it too easy to never learn how to become part of this culture. In the early 20th Century, if you wanted to survive, you became bilingual ... and relatively quickly at that. It is now possible to live here for 40 years or more without every learning the language.
Now, I ask you: why should we teach cultural diversity in business when those that we're supposed to learn about don't want to become part of us? Perhaps a better question is who ever came up with the idea that all employees in a company had to learn to live in peace and harmony with people of other cultures? When did getting along at work spill over into getting along in life? When did American businesses become our kindergartens. "Now, children, we want you to get along. Otherwise, we can't be as productive." Last month it was baby-sitting. This month it's teaching core values and diversity.
If we're doing business with a foreign company, then the company's management should certainly know something about the other company's country's culture. Knowing that white is a color which has very different meaning in Asia than here is quite important; that an innocuous gesture here can be very rude in another country, but on an assembly line in Kalamazoo?
My suspicion is that cultural diversity training is the first step by some group that has figured out that if we take all other nations' holidays, we could have 52 three-day weekends a year. Lessee...just taking our subscribers' national holidays into consideration, there's Boxing Day in Canada and England and Aruba and Bermuda (which is okay 'cuz that's my birthday), Victoria Day, Cup Match Day, Anzak Day, Sjaelvstaendighetsdagen, Midsommarafton, Kenkoku-kinen-no-hi, Kokumin-no-kyujitsu, Day of the Proclamation of Mongolia, Koninginnedag, Dia de la Raza, Fête de la Victoire 1945, National Women's Day (SA), Guldensporenslag, Indonesian Independence Day, St Maroon's Day, Berchtold's Day. And, yes it's true, Evacuation Day.
Most nations' holidays revolve around either Christian holidays or independence days. Seems to me that if we learn their holidays, eat their food, and listen to their music, that should satisfy the requirements of "cultural diversity training." Now, how about "them" learning our ways? If it has to be learned at all, cultural diversity is a two-way street. Anyone not willing to become culturally diverse in either direction must listen to accordion music and eat haggis for a full week. That should do it.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2002. E. A. Winning Associates, Inc.