Diversity as a business strategy for growth through cultural competence

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Issue

Consider this question: Do you already have the ideal workforce and are your employees already able to work together so well that everyone is already doing everything possible to grow your business over the next few years?
If so, you may have no need for a Business-Aligned® diversity and inclusion strategy.	If some further improvement might enable even more successful business outcomes, that gap is the business case for your Business-Aligned® diversity and inclusion strategy.

All organizations have measures of sustained business or operating success. For example, CEOs of most for-profit organizations focus on some combination of:

Growing or increasing sales, profitability, market share, productivity, innovation, teamwork
Improving safety, customer or investor satisfaction, community relationships
Reducing operating expenses

The same idea applies to not-for-profit, professional service, governmental, academic, and all other organizations.

Your operating challenge is having the right people working together effectively to understand and meet your customers’ needs with world-class productivity and innovation. In this era of rapidly-increasing societal and workforce diversity, this holds true:

For local, national, and global organizations
Whether your customers are consumers or other organizations

With global competition, your local market may be other companies' new growth opportunity. This raises the bar on your need for productivity, innovation, and creativity.

Finally, your growth opportunity may be in new local, regional, or international markets. Product / service design and marketing calls for an ever increasing knowledge and experience base about these new markets.

Solution
The best companies have a business growth strategy that builds organizational culture, productivity, creativity, and innovation. As the figure illustrates, such organizations apply a people and workplace lens to their business objectives, actively determining these key business success factors:

The required mix of experience, skills, market knowledge, and perspectives
The high level of communication, teamwork, and customer focus skills required of leaders and employees

Applying a workforce and workplace lens to key business objectives highlights the direct connection to diversity and inclusion

The figure illustrates the straight-line connection between sustained business growth, workforce diversity, workplace inclusion, and intercultural competence. It shows diversity and inclusion as a core business strategy.

Key to success in creating such a workforce and work place is a diversity and inclusion strategy that is guided by and aligned with your key business goals and that fully engages your CEO and senior executive team.

We call this Business-Aligned® diversity and inclusion. MDB Group has special expertise in developing or reinvigorating such a strategy. To learn more about Business-Aligned D&I strategic planning:

Listen to an audio overview	Business-Aligned® diversity and inclusion strategic planning
Subscribe to a podcast	(paste link into your media manager)
Read an article	Designing Accountability into a Business-Aligned® Diversity and Inclusion Strategy

A solid core business strategy is an essential precursor to developing a Business-Aligned diversity and inclusion plan. If you are looking to first develop or refine your core business strategy, MDB Group joins with and recommends our strategic partner, Profit Solutions Associates, for such work. Please visit PSA's website to learn more about developing core business strategies (PSA's website will open in a new browser window).

We are ready to work together with you to develop and implement the Business-Aligned diversity and inclusion strategy that will help ensure your organization’s continued business success.

Sample results
See representative results achieved by MDB Group's principals at Business Growth through Diversity and Inclusion.

Related links
Many aspects of diversity and inclusion help drive business growth. Click the links below for further insight:

Diversity add-ons	As you make progress and markets change, you must adapt and expand your strategy to continue moving forward.
Diversity strategies	A leading-edge diversity and inclusion strategy helps sustain business growth.
Executive briefings and workshops on diversity	Briefings and workshops define the linkage between business and inclusion, and build engagement with Business-Aligned strategies.
Lawsuit vulnerability	Vulnerability to lawsuits stemming from work environment and people processes is an unnecessary business risk.
Metrics and scorecards	Metrics and scorecards must support business growth.
Morale and turnover / retention	Addressing morale and retention allows your workforce to better focus on growing your business.
Reputation of your company	A pristine reputation as a good corporate citizen and as a preferred employer is an important success contributor.
Strategic planning off-sites for diversity and inclusion	A strategic planning off-site brings together the people, knowledge, and perspectives needed to define a Business-Aligned® diversity and inclusion strategy.
Workforce productivity, innovation, and creativity	High productivity, innovation, and creativity are essential to long-term business growth.

Next steps
Please call us so that together we can start planning your future growth.

Your business success is our most important objective.