CHAPTER NINE

THE NEEDS OF THE MANY OUTWEIGH THE NEEDS OF THE FEW

Leveraging the Skills of Multiculturals and Building an Innovative Organization

The quotation in the chapter title is perhaps the most famous line in the history of the television series and movie franchise Star Trek.¹ It is of course attributed to Mr. Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy), the pointy eared, green-blooded, half Vulcan and half human first officer of the starship Enterprise. Spock, like the multicultural people discussed in this book,² was constantly forced to confront his multicultural identity. Spock’s difference forced his culturally diverse crewmates to be self-aware and to examine their own assumptions about the way in which their own cultural programing influenced their perspectives. Spock often demonstrated his skills in boundary spanning between the crew of the Enterprise and the alien species of the moment. Also, their organization, the Enterprise, was an environment that got the best, not only from the multicultural and ever so logical Spock but also from the mercurial Captain Kirk, not to mention Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, and a cornucopia of crew members from the far reaches of the planet and the galaxy. While the Enterprise operated within the confines of the defined rules of its parent organization, Starfleet, the flexible situation on board the starship allowed the creativity that was often required to deal with the many unexpected encounters of space exploration.

Creating an innovative organization involves recognizing as a valuable asset the cultural diversity that exists within individuals, like Mr. Spock, in the same way that we have come to treat the cultural diversity between individuals. These individuals, who are often marginalized, must be integrated into the knowledge sharing and decision systems of the organization. It also means that training and development programs should focus on modeling the multicultural experience so that everyone in the organization can develop the mental skills to be more creative. This concluding chapter sums up the organizational interventions that, based on an understanding of multiculturals, engages them, leverages their unique skills and abilities, and models their development in the organization.

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways. (Nick Negroponte, Greek American founder of MIT Media Lab)

You never know where the next innovation will come from. New ideas can circle the globe in an instant.

True innovation, we have found, comes from this beautiful fusion of cultures, ideas, beliefs, and experiences. (Muhtar Kent, Turkish American CEO of Coca Cola Company)³

Diverse and unexpected pools of talent are emerging around the world. To succeed in today’s global economy, we must acknowledge them, understand them, and make them part of our talent strategies. (Bob Moritz, US chairman and senior partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers)

The principles for achieving innovation are not a secret,⁴ but the secret weapon in leveraging today’s culturally diverse workforce for innovation may be the multicultural mind. The creativity of individuals and teams, combined with a supportive organizational climate, is the key to innovation. Multiculturals, with their unique skills, are an underutilized resource in today’s multicultural organizations. Effectively utilizing the skills of multicultural individuals requires that organizations engage with them effectively.

Engaging Multiculturals

Like Spock, multiculturals are sensitive to the fact they are different. They will be looking for organizations where their multicultural background is valued. Organizations seeking to attract multicultural individuals must create visible signs of an inclusive environment. And, of course, to retain them this expectation that the organization creates in new employees must turn out to be the reality. The recognition that organizations cannot succeed without managing diversity, and that it leads to innovation, is apparent in the following statements from the websites of several industry leaders.

IBM: IBM’s enduring commitment to diversity is one of the reasons we can credibly say that IBM is one of the world’s leading globally integrated enterprises. We also understand that diversity goes beyond fair hiring practices and protection for all employees. It also includes a focus on how those disparate pieces fit together to create an innovative, integrated whole. We call this approach “inclusion.”

While our differences shape who we are as individual IBMers, our shared corporate culture and values remain central to our mutual success. IBMers around the world work in an environment where diversity—including diversity of thought—is the norm, which yields a commitment to creating client innovation in every part of our business.⁵

Apple: At Apple, our 98,000 employees share a passion for products that change people’s lives, and from the very earliest days we have known that diversity is critical to our success. We believe deeply that inclusion inspires innovation.

Our definition of diversity goes far beyond the traditional categories of race, gender, and ethnicity. It includes personal qualities that usually go unmeasured, like sexual orientation, veteran status, and disabilities. Who we are, where we come from, and what we’ve experienced influence the way we perceive issues and solve problems. We believe in celebrating that diversity and investing in it.⁶

Cisco Systems: Today’s organizations face increasing demands for responsiveness, adaptability, innovation, speed, and responsible corporate citizenship. No organization can afford to dismiss the potential benefits of having a diverse and inclusive culture.

So for Cisco, building an inclusive and diverse organization is an ongoing and essential business imperative. We truly believe it is our responsibility to:

Empower our teams

Eliminate biases

Create an environment where everyone feels welcomed, valued, respected, and heard.⁷

The idea of creating a positive climate for diversity is not new, but it is as important in attracting, engaging, and motivating multiculturals as it is in a diverse workforce overall. It is an umbrella under which all organizational policies operate.

Providing an environment in which multiculturals will be engaged in the process of innovation goes well beyond just creating a positive climate for diversity. Engaging multiculturals in a way that their natural talents will emerge involves promoting an organizational culture that creates flexible situations, fosters strong communication, and provides sufficient resources.

Flexible Situations. Organizations can have a dramatic influence on the way their members think, feel, and act. In order to engage multiculturals in the process of innovation, organizations need to promote flexible situations, as opposed to strong situations. Strong situations are created by policies, procedures, and norms for behavior that prescribe what is expected (recall the guards and prisoners in the Stanford Prison Experiment). These situations will stifle the expression of the roles that feel natural to multicultural individuals and suppress their skills and abilities. What is needed for the expression of creativity and for the talents of multiculturals to emerge is an organizational culture that allows unofficial activity, that encourages tinkering and experimentation, and that recognizes the role that serendipity plays. Organizations that encourage members to take risks must also have a tolerance for failure. To evaluate the culture of your organization, ask yourself the following questions:

♦ Does your organization have a rigid organizational structure?

♦ Is unofficial activity legitimate? How do managers react if employees engage in activity outside their job descriptions?

♦ Does your organization have policies or practices that prevent members from taking risks? Are there strong sanctions for failure?

♦ Is there a strong sense of the type of behavior that is “appropriate” in the organization? Is there one best way to do things?

♦ Does your organization have a climate of inclusion in which everyone feels valued and respected?

Strong Communication. Innovation in organizations requires the free exchange of information. Strong communication that supports innovation involves messages sent by top management as well as communication across organizational units and among members from different cultures. Strong communication begins with top management sending the message that the organization has an orientation toward innovation and that all organization members have equal status in that process. Since it is impossible to predict where the next novel idea will come from, everyone in the organization needs to feel that they have a stake in the creative process and that their ideas are just as good as anyone else’s ideas. The channels through which to share these ideas need to be open to them. Filling the organization with multiculturals does no good if they don’t fully participate in roles that are consistent with their skills. Organization members who feel that they will not be understood or that their ideas will not be valued will not be motivated to engage. This is particularly critical in multicultural workforces where a significant number of employees may be less than fully fluent in the corporate language (typically English). In order to perform their boundary-spanning roles, multiculturals need open communication channels to the broader organization. How strong is the communications climate in your organization?

♦ Are you confident that novel ideas are brought to the surface and widely discussed? Does everyone in the organization know the expertise of other organization members?

♦ Does your organization have an effective system (either formal or informal) for communicating across cultural (language) groups, across organizational units, upward to top management?

♦ Is it clear that requests from other organization members for information should be given a high priority no matter where they come from?

♦ Are informal groups of people who have a common interest encouraged? Are there ways for people who don’t normally interact to come together?

♦ Do all employees feel comfortable in expressing themselves in the language in which they feel most comfortable?

♦ Does your organization have a climate of inclusion where everyone feels their ideas are valued and respected?

Sufficient Resources. Individuals and teams cannot innovate without the minimally sufficient resources to complete their tasks. However, simply throwing resources at problems may not be the best way to create an engaging environment for multiculturals. Sometimes the most innovative solutions occur when individuals are making do with what is at hand and are forced to consider alternative solutions. This often requires different paths to the desired organizational goals. It is important to recognize that in culturally diverse environments, a key resource is time. Multicultural groups and teams, while often providing superior solutions, typically take longer to be productive. An additional requirement for getting the most out of multiculturals is access to diverse resources. One of the talents of multicultural individuals is their ability to generate novel ideas. However, they have numerous other roles to play in getting the most out of a culturally diverse workforce. Are sufficient resources available to multiculturals in your organization?

♦ Do all employees have a good understanding of how to acquire the resources they need?

♦ Is time flexibility built into project plans?

♦ Do managers and team leaders have operational flexibility in achieving organizational goals?

♦ Are teams and workgroups made up of culturally diverse and diversely skilled individuals?

♦ Does your organization have a climate of inclusion where everyone understands, values, and respects others?

Motivating Innovation

One of the most consistent findings in research on creativity is that people are more creative when they are doing work that they find interesting (intrinsically motivating).⁸ Unsurprisingly, multiculturals are most likely to contribute to innovation when they are engaged in work that they love and in roles in which they feel comfortable. We have long known how to create work that is intrinsically motivating;⁹ it involves designing jobs that have high levels of autonomy, require a variety of skills, and have meaningful outcomes. To get the best out of multicultural employees, the organization needs to assign them complex and challenging (but achievable) tasks that require the use of their unique skills.¹⁰ They will excel on tasks that require their broader worldview, higher sensitivity and perceptual acuity, greater empathy, and ability to engage in more complex thinking to problems. They will then be excited about their work and interested in completing tasks without external controls or constraints. Assigning multiculturals to relatively simple and routine tasks, or tasks with unrealistic expectations, will be unlikely to yield the kind of innovation organizations are seeking. Because of the difficulty of matching multicultural individuals to tasks, it may be necessary to rotate them through a number of assignments until a good fit is found.

The contribution of multiculturals to the process of innovation is also influenced by the way in which they are supervised.¹¹ Controlling supervision in which employee behavior is closely monitored and employees feel pressure to conform has a negative effect on innovation. In contrast, supportive supervision in which employees are encouraged to speak up about their ideas and concerns, and which provides positive informal feedback, encourages multiculturals to assume roles that feel natural to them and that will support innovation. So it’s not just doing what you love that is important to innovation; it is also being allowed by your organization to do what you love.

Developing Multicultural Minds

There are two aspects to developing multicultural minds in the service of innovation within organizations. First, multiculturals are often unaware of their special skills and abilities. So it is important not only to create an environment that allows these skills to emerge but also to provide feedback mechanisms to multiculturals about their performance in specific roles. It is critically important that this feedback be developmental as opposed to evaluative. It should focus on:

♦ Helping multiculturals understand and develop their skills

♦ Diagnosing any individual or organizational problems that are hindering their creative performance

♦ Enhancing their commitment through recognition for their performance

Second, instead of relying solely on the existing pool of multiculturals in the organization (or those who can be recruited in the short term) as the engines of creativity, a longer-term solution to improving innovation is to develop more multicultural minds in the organization. The question then becomes, Can we create multicultural minds by designing development activities that model the way in which multiculturals develop their special skills? The answer lies in understanding how the multicultural mind develops. As discussed in chapter 3, the final stage of multicultural development is the conscious consideration of one’s own values, attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about appropriate behavior in contrast with people who are culturally different. In order to resolve these differences, we must become aware of them, consider the merits of alternative perspectives, and form reasonable trade-offs between them. Resolving these differences is how the multicultural mind is formed. The multicultural mind is created by transforming our experiences with people who are culturally different into knowledge and more complex ways of thinking.¹²

Many organizations offer the day-to-day contact with people who are culturally different that is needed to develop a multicultural mind. This contact includes overseas assignments, cross-cultural teams, and interaction with people who are culturally different at home.

You can get some good multicultural management skills by working on international projects inside many organizations, even if you are based in your own country. Some people are mobile to go abroad, some people are not. If you are not, because you have family constraints or health constraints or for whatever reason, you can still have international exposure and a multicultural experience by working on a project which involves people from other countries, or involves people in different companies. You can be based in Paris and have a job in which you only work with French people, and only with French people who are engineers and who went to the same school as you did. Or you could be in Paris, sitting at your own desk but working with colleagues who are Russian, Japanese, or Brazilian, working with people from sales and finance and engineering, and communication. I would encourage people to take these types of challenging assignments—those that have international flavor and cross-cultural contact. . . . The key point is to get people out of their comfort zone, learn new languages, travel to different countries, go to places where you don’t understand the culture, and expose yourself to situations where you have to deal with uncertainty. All of this helps you put yourself in the shoes of people who are different from you. (Carlos Ghosn, chairman of Renault-Nissan Alliance)¹³

Not all contact with other cultures results in the required mental development. These experiences need to provide the opportunity for deep reflection on culturally different meaning systems. Based on the simple idea that people learn the most from doing things they have not done before, we have long known that challenging experiences produce the most learning. Based on the optimal contact strategy discussed in chapter 6, we know that positive effects of contact between dissimilar groups occur when they are involved in an active goal-oriented effort. However, these types of situations come with the risk of failure, which must be managed.

A temporary period of living and working in a foreign country provides an opportunity for the intense experiential learning required to develop a multicultural mind. Recent research shows that international assignees show the kind of mental development required in as little as one year.¹⁴ However, the typical expatriate assignment is often much more concerned with accomplishing some task or with exerting control over a foreign subsidiary than it is with development of the individual.¹⁵ Programs that include all the requirements for the development of a multicultural mind are the global experiential programs used by some leading companies, in which high-potential employees work in multicultural groups to solve problems in developing countries. An example is Project Ulysses at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) consists of legally independent firms in 150 countries and employs more than 160,000 people (5 percent of whom are partners). Project Ulysses is an integrated service learning program initiated by PwC in 2001. It involves sending participants in teams to developing countries to work with NGOs, social entrepreneurs, or international organizations. These multicultural teams of three to four people work on a pro bono basis in field assignments for eight weeks helping communities deal with the effects of poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation. As of 2008, 120 PwC partners from 35 different countries had participated in the program. The overall goal of the project was to develop global leaders in PwC’s worldwide network of firms. In reporting on the leadership needs of PwC, Ralf Schneider, a PwC partner based in Frankfurt and head of global talent development said, “It was clear it was not going to be a standard business model with a standard leader. We needed to take people outside of that box.” Knowledge gained by individuals is transferred back to the organization not only as participants resume their jobs but also through formal debriefing sessions; that knowledge permits PwC to continuously refine the Ulysses model.

Examples of project teams are the following:

Brian McCann, a PwC client service partner from Boston who specializes in mergers and acquisitions, was the only US member of the 2003 Belize team that included colleagues from Malaysia, Sweden, and Germany. Their mission was to work with Ya’axche Conservation Trust to evaluate the growth and income-generating potential of the ecotourism market in southern Belize, where 50 percent of the population is unemployed, and 75 percent earn less than US$200 a month. Brian reported that the learning experience from both a personal and a professional perspective was profound.

Dinu Bumbacea, a PwC partner from Romania, and his teammates from Thailand, Australia, and the United Kingdom worked with the Elias Mutale Training Centre in Kasama, Zambia, along with the United Nations Development Program and Africare on a strategy for economic diversification in the region. Dinu said that the experience gave him new insight into operating in a multicultural environment and team and in dealing with the public sector.¹⁶

An independent assessment of the outcomes of the project was conducted with 70 participants approximately two years after they returned. The results indicated the participants had developed knowledge and skills similar to those held by multiculturals.¹⁷ They had multicultural minds!

Ulysses and similar programs incorporate all the activities that model the way in which the multicultural mind develops. These programs present an experience similar to the subconscious and involuntary way in which multiculturals have learned about and ultimately internalized more than one cultural meaning system. Through this significant exposure to other cultures and to colleagues from other cultures, they will develop the broader world view, higher levels of sensitivity and perceptual acuity, greater empathy, and more complex ways of thinking that make up the multicultural mind.

Summary

The principles for achieving innovation in organizations are well known. However, what is less well recognized is that the key to leveraging today’s culturally diverse workforce for innovation is the multicultural mind. Unleashing the skills of multiculturals requires recognizing the cultural diversity that exists within individuals in the same way we have come to treat cultural diversity between people as an asset. Creativity is the first step in innovation, and the multicultural mind is more creative. However, for creativity to result in innovation, novel ideas must be implemented. The unique skills of multiculturals lend themselves to important roles that support innovation both in teams and in the larger organization. Because it is difficult to understand the specific talents of any single multicultural individual, organizations are best advised to try to attract a wide range of multicultural individuals and create an environment that allows them to assume roles that feel natural to them. Engaging and motivating multiculturals includes creating a positive climate for diversity. It also means designing intrinsically motivating jobs and promoting an organizational culture that creates flexible situations, fosters strong communication, and provides sufficient resources. Developing multicultural minds in the organization involves making multiculturals aware of their unique skills and abilities. It also means developing more multicultural minds in the organization, through well-thought-out experiential programs that model the way in which the multicultural mind develops in multicultural individuals. More multicultural minds mean more opportunity for innovation. By modeling the multicultural experience, we can all develop a multicultural mind.