Reference no: EM132172751

Managing Diversity

Situation

Jennifer, a supervisor for the food safety division within the Health Department of a major metropolitan area, wanted to throw her hands up and shout at the next employee who walked through her office door to complain. She had reached her limit in hearing complaints from her staff members over other coworkers in the department. It seemed like every other day a staff member would come into her office and tell her about a coworker making an insensitive comment or not doing their work the way they “should.” Although Jennifer was sensitive to reports of any activity contributing to a hostile work environment, she started to think that her employees were being too sensitive and intentionally looking out for comments to support their cases. When her employees joined the department, they participated in diversity training as part of their orientation session, but the lessons they learned seemed to have dissipated. Supervising a diverse team of employees has its rewards and challenges. Jennifer appreciated the wide range of perspectives and views on public health concerns. The overall staff at the health department was, what Jennifer liked to call, “truly cosmopolitan.” The staff was reflective of the diversity of the metropolitan area. In Jennifer’s department, the cultural diversity was even more pronounced. Jennifer supervised the program responsible for monitoring food service workers and inspecting community restaurants for food safety and health violations. The diversity of her workforce was absolutely necessary to interact successfully with the multicultural restaurant workers within the city. Her employees’ diversity contributed greatly to the success of the food safety division. Jennifer had recently selected a group of her employees to work on a team to evaluate new policies and procedures for restaurant and food safety inspection. She felt the policies-and-procedures team would give coworkers a better opportunity to get to know each other and improve their working relationships. The objective of the team was to standardize a set of restaurant policies among different counties within the greater metropolitan area. The team needed to discuss what policies worked and which didn’t, and then agree on a set of recommendations. The work would require team members to share their cultural perspectives of the food and restaurant practices within the city. Selecting the team was a challenge, as Jennifer wanted to make sure members represented the city’s diverse ethnic communities. The final team included Meihui, a Chinese woman; Manual, a Catholic Hispanic Latino; Susan, a Caucasian lesbian; Knitasha, an African-American, who was a recent hire from a public health school graduate program; Tom, an Indian, who was a veteran with the department and near retirement; and Alima, a female Sunni Muslim. Since inception, the team has been dysfunctional. Certain team members refuse to speak directly to other members. Members make insensitive comments to others, leading to arguments and members storming out of meetings. Other members are completely silent and don’t participate during meetings. The animosity between team members has bled over into the general atmosphere of the department, contributing to the increased frequency of complaints arriving at Jennifer’s office door.

Background

Many managers feel unprepared to lead departments and project teams comprised of diverse individuals of different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, educational levels, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and other heterogeneous mixes. This discomfort can manifest in a lack of understanding and recognition of the competencies necessary to manage a diverse workforce and project teams. The result can be a dysfunctional work environment, with workers becoming less productive, motivated, and easily offended. Low-satisfaction levels can increase employee turnover and lead to formal complaints against coworkers, contributing to hostility and suspicion. Managers need to proactively refine and improve their techniques to recognize diversity and improve the overall climate and encourage cooperation. Enhanced skills are required not only to manage a diverse workforce, but to lead productive teams comprised of diverse members. Effective teamwork offers obvious benefits to team members, including a chance to be creative and share ideas, an opportunity to build stronger working relationships with colleagues, an opportunity to learn new skills or enhance existing ones, among many others. The satisfaction gained from working in teams and creating a collective work product can be very rewarding. Facilitating and managing a team, however, requires education and experience. Most teams go through four development stages before they become productive, as identified by Bruce W. Tuckman: forming, storming, norming, and performing. The stages can be cyclical, and individual team members may be at different stages with other team members. The project manager needs to lead the group through these four stages and keep the members focused on their objective. Incorporating additional levels of diversity into the mix of a team places greater responsibility on the project manager to effectively facilitate the team and root out underlying hostility and insensitivity.

Next Steps

Jennifer is growing increasingly concerned that the team will not succeed in meeting its objectives. Moreover, she is upset that many of her employees seem to be contributing, directly or indirectly, to the heightened level of animosity towards each other in the department. Her department and the policies-and-procedures team have become dysfunctional. If this continues, her boss and other supervisors at the health department are going to think she is not capable of managing and she may lose her job.

Discussion Questions

How would you handle this situation?

How could Jennifer manage diversity more effectively in the department?

What steps should be taken to reduce the animosity within the department?

How would you facilitate the policies-and-procedures team and get it back on track?

Create a cross-cultural sensitivity training program, using the current team members as the audience, to serve as a tool for career development.