How Corporate Leaders Can Embrace Diversity

The findings of numerous studies agree that a robust company culture is directly correlated to successful business outcomes. However, getting companies to comprehend the culture of a company, as well as what values and purposes drive that culture, can be a more difficult endeavor.

Sabrina Clark, managing partner at the consulting firm SYPartners, told attendees at a recent business gathering that “sometimes we describe [culture] as how things work around here and how does that make you feel.”

All of the participants on the panel shared the opinion that developing a prosperous culture necessitates a concerted effort from everyone involved. It cannot be handled solely by the HR department or by a single executive at the top level. For everyone to be able to contribute fresh ideas, there must be room and a willingness to do so. The workforce needs to undergo fundamental change in order to become more accepting of diverse points of view. Keeping an eye on the progress being made is also very important, but using scorecards as a panacea for addressing problems with the company’s culture is not a realistic expectation.

There is an effort being made at Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, to change the culture of the company by both embracing what makes it a great company and evolving for the future. According to Holly Walters, who serves as the chief information officer and group vice president of information Systems at Toyota Motor North America, “Everything from the past may not be what you want to carry with you into the future.”

Toyota is a worldwide player, and its culture reflects both the Japanese roots of the firm and its place in the international community. Kaizen is a Japanese word that means “continuous improvement,” and it serves as a core tenet in Toyota’s way of thinking about how its culture is changing through time.

Walters was quoted as saying, “You have to have the bravery to let go of something that’s there, and replace it with something that’s better.” “You have to be willing to be unsuccessful. And if you are going to fail, what are some ways that you can fail quickly while still making progress?
On the other side of the cultural spectrum is a company called Overjet. It was established only four years ago by graduates with doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including the cofounder and CEO Wardah Inam. Inam stated that she was able to establish the kind of business and environment that she desired to be a part of, and that she must eventually accept responsibility for the common thread that binds the entire organization.

According to Inam, “this cannot be the responsibility of a few; it must be the responsibility of everyone.” Startups such as Overjet, which is a global leader in dentistry artificial intelligence, are frequently challenged with contemplating the function that culture plays in the creative process. Trust, time, and tools are the three components that come to mind for Inam as she considers this topic. Trust among members of a team to facilitate their ability to collaborate, while also encouraging them to push one another. The amount of time essential for creative endeavors. And the appropriate instruments to guarantee Overjet’s capacity for rapid innovation. The panelists were in agreement that score-carding can help organizations stay on course, but they stressed the importance of adding nuance to measurements of this kind. Who is doing the evaluation of the progress? Not only in terms of metrics, but also in terms of practice, how does this transformation manifest itself?

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This activity has the potential to bring about significant and far-reaching societal shifts over the period of many years, and it is frequently quite personal to each person. In the middle of any kind of change, according to Clark, it is crucial to ground individuals in what isn’t changing while simultaneously describing what is moving.

She told me that I shouldn’t be afraid of change all the time. “You have a dread of losing.”

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