A new study reveals that Diversity Training has little or no effect on the racial and gender mix of a company's top ranks, reports Time Magazine.
The study is the result of three sociologists sifting through decades of federal employee statistics provided by companies.
What causes this dismal state of affairs?
In the words of social psychologists:
- when diversity training is made mandatory, it actually activates a bias
- some biases are so deeply ingrained that they simply can't be taught away in a one-day workshop
But here is the most important part. The sociologists specifically investigated only whether current Diversity Training practices succeed. They did not investigate whether the problem was the nature of the training itself.
Most Diversity Training is like all the other training we see in the corporate world. They teach: do this ... think that ... follow these rules ... learn these laws ... adopt these habits.
All great trainers know that this is one of the most ineffective ways of teaching. When you spell out what your students should DO or THINK, they don't easily assimilate the training. But show them how to see things so that they can figure things out on their own and the training begins to stick.
The problem is ... there aren't very many trainers who teach in this way. There simply aren't very many great trainers.
And this problem permeates through not only Diversity Training but also Leadership Training and Teamwork Training and Effectiveness Training and Innovation Training and Customer Service Training ad infinitum. All of them teach What To DO and What To THINK but not ... How to SEE the world differently.
Over the years, the lack of great trainers hasn't given anybody any heart burn because there hasn't ever been any objective way to measure the effectiveness of any of the training. "What we don't know doesn't hurt us."
Now, with this new study, for the first time, someone has figured out a way to actually measure the results — at least for Diversity Training.
And the results
should not be a surprise to anyone.
When the training methodology is fundamentally flawed, the results will be hard to come by.
Look at this another way ...
Diversity, as a goal unto itself, cannot be taught. Diversity comes only as a result of people changing their WORLDVIEW. When people's way of looking at the world changes, then diversity becomes a non-issue.
Strange, how everything comes down to how we see things!
Start spreading the change!
