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Urgent and important agenda for Korean companies
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Park Gyong-me, CEO of |
Recently I took an opportunity to give a series of lectures about diversity and women at an electronics firm, one of the largest Korean multinational companies. The program is designed to develop future women leaders and each of the seven sessions I ran was filled with 50 to 60 women middle managers. They are well experienced with about 10 to 15 years in the job and they appeared to be very excited about the development opportunity. To help introduce the concept of ‘diversity', I started by giving them a very short quiz.
Imagine a situation where you want to hire a critical candidate from a competitor company, let's say Apple or Hynix. You are the hiring manager and you have met the candidate two times already. While there is still a risk that he or she may not accept the offer, you are meeting the candidate today to persuade them to sign the contract. Which is the right answer among the following options?
- You only need to consider confidentiality for intellectual property, but you are allowed to have a benchmark discussion or talk about company information to convince the candidate to join the electronics company.
- Confidentiality and benchmark information should be reviewed with management before the interview. Reference to a candidate's race or gender internally is encouraged.
- Treat all information as confidential, you are not allowed to have benchmark discussion. Any reference to candidate's race or gender is internally prohibited.
The correct option is No. 2. Several smart students raised their hands for No. 2. I asked again why they thought the reference to candidate's race or gender is internally encouraged, during the process of hiring a critical candidate? The responses that I heard were something like "The company should know if the candidate is Korean or non-Korean and male or female before making a decision because the fact is important to the candidate as well as the organization." So I asked again, "if the candidate is non-Korean, for instance, Indian, and/or the candidate is female, then what do you think would happen after you report the fact to the company?"
This is the moment that I hear wrong answers every time in any organization. The audience tells me that the company would hesitate to hire a non-Korean or a female if this was a critical position. In reality in Korea, that is true, very true. I have to admit it.
However, the correct answer is that this company encourages hiring managers to report actively during the process if the candidate comes from minority because this company wants to hire more and more diverse talents. Therefore if the candidate comes from minority, such as a different ethnic background, the candidate is hired as priority. That is the company's diversity strategy.
The quiz comes from a real case. This is part of the leadership training targeted to the very senior executives within the organization. This company is headquartered in the US and is aggressively targeting growth globally. Globalization for US companies means expanding the business outside of America, such as Asia and Africa, etc. This company set it's talent strategy to be aligned with it's business strategy. If you go to Asia, then hire more Asians. You have to have employees to understand Asia, Asian culture and Asian customers. You will be reputed as a very outdated brand if you still plan to send many expatriates to the local markets in your globalization process.
Working with diverse people
I decided to make a fun part of the session, since it was three hours long! Anyway I had to make sure people could enjoy as well as learn through my session. Each table had around 10 people in the class. I asked each table to discuss and list up the characteristics of different groups in the organization. Those different groups are set for the tables such as male, female, baby boomers, X-generation, Y-generation and younger generation of less than two years with this large company.
A representative of each table presented what they discussed and the characteristics they had listed. One group presented the characteristics of male colleagues and the other group presented those of ‘female' colleagues. The third group spoke about baby boomers, which are mostly their bosses. With most of the people in the sessions belong to X-generation or Y-generation. The last group discussed their subordinates. Every time, the descriptions are quite live and interesting.
The women middle managers described male colleagues as typically being flattering to their boss and proud of their drinking capacity. They described baby boomers as hierarchical, not going home early, and technologically inefficient. They described the younger generation as often feeling that it would be easy to move to another job, paying too much attention to other things, freedom not to join after-work party, etc.
On the other hand, the table for female colleagues felt that women are generally more multi-tasking, flexible in working, etc. The tables for X-generation and Y-generation though that they are very capable of working with technology, learning fast of advanced technology, etc.
The happiest moment of the exercise was the message came out of the attendees. I asked "what did you learn from the exercise?" Before giving the message I planned to deliver. They were smart enough to instantly say "we are positive about X-generation, Y-generation and female employees," and "we are negative about other generations and male coworkers".
The results are obvious and very similar to any other organization. People think and list up mostly positive and sympathetic words about their own group, while being mostly more cynical and judgmental about other groups. People are typically positive about themselves, while being more negative about others. With this small exercise, the audiences can see how much they have biases their perception to other colleagues, managers and subordinates in the organization.
Inclusion is making the mix work.
The real barrier to inclusiveness is the negative perception people may have about others when we are trying to achieve diversity and inclusion. Many companies have been trying to equip themselves with diversity through recruiting diverse talents including women, but they often fail to retain them. They fail to fully support those diverse talents achieving the performance they expect.
It is time to make the transition from programmatic diversity toward sustainable diversity. So far companies may be trying to recruit 30 percent of women by a certain date, or the CEOs may have announced that they will promote women to have 10 percent of women executives in the organization. Those are one-off programs. What about sustainability? How do you help these talents succeed in achieving their full potential? How do you help the existing majority employee group work effectively with them? Are you ready for them?
Paradigm shifts in diversity and inclusion is required. It means transitioning from work and life balance towards work and life integration. It means transition from sensitivity and tolerance about diversity towards cross-cultural competence in organizations. Inclusive leadership becomes one of the key elements of leadership competence.
Let's look into the impact of diversity and inclusion on team performance. Assuming that mono-cultural teams produce average performance, multi-cultural teams produce different results depending on the level of inclusiveness. When a company has diverse talents but leaders ignore or suppress cultural difference, the cultural differences become obstacles to performance. At the end of the day the company experiences lower performance.
When a company has diverse talents and leaders acknowledge and support cultural difference, the cultural difference becomes an asset to performance. At the end of the day the company produces higher performance than under a mono-culture environment. Without doubt, one of the key advantages that diverse talents can bring is creativity.
Closing
When we look at Korean companies today, they are far behind in terms of diversity and inclusion. Aon Hewitt has conducted the best employers in Korea & Asia survey since 2001. One of the questions included in the employee survey as part of this study is as follows: this organization is committed to creating a work environment that is open and accepting of individual differences. In our 2011 study, we found that employees' positive perception of the question (i.e. strongly agree or agree) was 70 percent from the Best Employers in Korea and 44% from the Rest of the participant companies.
I believe that it is an urgent and important matter for Korean companies to start incorporating diversity and inclusion into their people agenda. Korean companies have been proud of their speed and can-do mindset, which has been very successful so far. Today and tomorrow we need a creativity and globalization mindset from our people assets so we can continue growing our businesses. Many Korean companies are going global and competing with giant multinational companies where creativity is essential to succeed.
Leaders are strongly recommended to create inclusive cultures in their organizations. Managers are recommended to focus on managing performance in the right way to engage and retain diverse talents in their teams. Employees are recommended to develop and improve their cross-cultural competence which is required to work with effectively different people. Human Resources are recommended to focus on leading diversity and inclusion agenda as top priority. They will need to start with setting the right target for the coming years as well as developing a diversity and inclusion strategy along with a suitable plan for implementation.
