Diversity is each time more and more present in our life. We cannot assume that diversity is only having people from different countries and cultures in our workplace, diversity is much more than that and in most of the cases we cannot notice that. First of all we have to understand this diversity, and it means understanding both differences and similarities between yourself and each people around you. Doing so we will be able to see that diversity is present all the time (in higher or lower degree) because diversity takes as many aspects as:
— Gender
— Race
— Age
— Religion
— Physical abilities
— Sexual orientation
— Education
— Functional background
— Experience
— Status
After knowing this it would be easier to identify diversity surrounding us. We must know that not all the aspects are easy to notice, there are dimensions of diversity that we can easily see (race, gender, age, physical attributes, etc.) but there are also some invisible aspects (education, skills, work and life experiences, status, etc) that we would have to identify after knowing the person, and finally there are core aspects (character of personality, work style, sexual orientation and personal truths) that we would only know after establishing some kind of relationship with the other person or that we won’t even know.
Nevertheless, it is extremely important to identify, explore and understand the diversity in the world, not only in the workplace but also in our daily life in order to avoid making common mistakes that can be really problematic.
Not recognizing the diversity can bring us a lot of problems that we see every day. The most common of these problems is the discrimination (gender discrimination, race discrimination, age discrimination, religious discrimination, etc). Having a deep understanding of the diversity can help to avoid these problems in which you can also be the victim.
This can lead you to acquire cultural intelligence, which is the ability to operate in a variety of situations crossing through meta-cognitive intelligence (knowledge about culture); cognitive intelligence (knowledge about the environment); motivational intelligence (desire to learn about cultural differences); and behavioral intelligence (ability to exhibit appropriate actions) for finally using your head, heart and body to understand other cultures.
References:
Class presentation
http://www.allstate-jobs.com/content/diversity/
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