Look around your classroom (or your workplace). You’re likely to see young/old, male/female, tall/short, blonde/brunette, blue-eyed/brown-eyed, any number of races, and any variety of dress styles. You’ll see people who speak up in class and others who are content to keep their attention on taking notes or daydreaming. Have you ever noticed your own little world of diversity where you are right now? Many of you may have grown up in an environment that included diverse individuals, while others may not have had that experience. We want to focus on workplace diversity, so let’s look at what it is.

Diversity has been “one of the most popular business topics over the last two decades. It ranks with modern business disciplines such as quality, leadership, and ethics. Despite this popularity, it’s also one of the most controversial and least understood topics.”79 With its basis in civil rights legislation and social justice, the word “diversity” often invokes a variety of attitudes and emotional responses in people. Diversity has traditionally been considered a term used by human resources departments, associated with fair hiring practices, discrimination, and inequality. But diversity today is considered to be so much more.

We’re defining workforce diversity as the ways in which people in an organization are different from and similar to one another. Notice that our definition not only focuses on the differences but also the similarities of employees, reinforcing our belief that managers and organizations should view employees as having qualities in common as well as differences that separate them. It doesn’t mean that those differences are any less important, but rather that our focus as managers is in finding ways to develop strong relationships with and engage our entire workforce.