Posted: 06/18/2014 10:50 pm EDT Updated: 06/18/2014 10:59 pm EDT, Huffington Post

President Obama’s executive order banning discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Americans in federal contracting should be a lightning rod for professional sports to do the same. Yet, notwithstanding the “coming out” of players in the NBA and NFL, the evolving views of the American public, and state courts’ interpretation of the 14th Amendment to provide equal protection to LGBT persons, professional sports commissioners and team owners largely have been silent on their commitment to LGBT equality.

As significant as the president’s executive order has been, it is merely a step in the right direction on a much longer road. Americans may be surprised that in 2014 there are no federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination against LGBT persons. And while twenty-nine states explicitly prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, none has enacted laws to protect LGBT workers. Eradicating LGBT workplace discrimination is the most significant civil rights issue of our time — equal in weight to breaking color barriers, suffrage, and integration — but it is an issue on which professional sports lag behind.

Commissioners like the NBA’s Adam Silver, who have been stalwarts in the advancement of racial equality, particularly in light of racist remarks by L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, have been silent on LGBT equality. While granting that the league has been less proactive in engaging the LGBT community than is preferable, Silver has offered no change in policy. In preparing for Michael Sam to join the National Football League, Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a memo to teams reiterating the NFL’s code of conduct and banned use of the “n-word” by players and management, but left unattended discrimination against gays. He did nothing to assure that Sam would be treated with the respect and fairness accorded other players, or to protect him against being fired because he is gay. According to Goodell, in the NFL: “we do things the right way. We will give them that education and training. I hope that will solve the problem.” But Goodell’s deduction is flawed, for if education and training solved discrimination we surely would have educated and trained our way beyond it by now. As with racial and gender bias, laws must be constructed and enforced to ensure equal protection to LGBT professional athletes. Goodell welcomed Sam onto the field of play without providing him the protection from discrimination that other players have, thereby leaving him uniquely and unfairly vulnerable. Goodell codified the NFL’s right to discriminate when he should have had the courage, like President Obama, to ban it.

Both Silver and Goodell missed their “Branch Rickey moment” by not ushering in a culture change in the NBA and NFL, respectively. Branch Rickey was the Major League Baseball executive who hired Jackie Robinson to join the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey wanted the best players, and to make a difference in the game and country he loved. Knowing Robinson would be targeted for racial harassment as the first player to break professional sports’ color barrier, Rickey set in motion a chain of events that would fundamentally reshape the MLB and the nation. He declared an end to racial discrimination in the MLB. He went on to hire the league’s first Afro-Hispanic player, Roberto Clemente, and to develop the minor league farm system, which helped other minority players enter the game. Rickey, a white man and champion of civil rights, was to the integration of professional sports what Martin Luther King, Jr. was to the integration of lunch counters, stores, schools, and government. Professional sports commissioners and team owners have an opportunity now to continue this inspiring legacy by declaring an end to LGBT discrimination in professional sports.

Our nation is undergoing tremendous, structural progress on a number of social fronts. The commissioners and owners should recognize the positive shift in public opinion on LGBT issues, particularly same-sex marriage, and the likelihood that the Supreme Court will strike down laws denying people equal protection on the basis of their sexual identities. They should understand the implications for professional sports that in 2004 same-sex marriage was supported by 38 percent of the American people; today that number is 59 percent, and 77 percent among 18-29 year olds; 19 states have approved marriage equality; state courts across the land have consistently struck down statutes advancing LGBT discrimination; and 50 percent of Americans now believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees LGBT Americans equal protection in the law.

Why should the commissioners and team owners be trailblazers for LGBT inclusion and protection? First, it’s good business. There are 8 million LGBT Americans, many of whom support professional sports, with an estimated economic value of $800 billion, enough to grow the fan base of our national sports franchises for generations to come. Second, it is a vital moral issue. With LGBT youths four times more likely than “straight” youths to attempt suicide, often stemming from a sense of being shut out of the game of life, our national sports leaders can help reverse the scourge of lost hope and lives by embracing all youths, irrespective of their sexual orientation. Third, it is a unique opportunity to lead on social progress. Where religion and politics have failed, professional sports have historically succeeded in unifying disconnected people to an idea of excellence based on shared values that enriches our national culture. Fourth, it is a practical decision. There is little risk in banning LGBT discrimination, far less risk than Branch Rickey took on when he signed Jackie Robinson. The transition to acceptance of the gay community is well underway, the president has provided a roadmap, the American public is marching toward full inclusion, and the courts have hinted to the inevitability of LGBT equality.

Given these factors, professional sports commissioners and team owners should follow President Obama’s lead and ban LGBT discrimination on the field and in the locker room, in boardrooms and contracting, among fans and employees — and they should do it now, in this national month of Gay Pride.

Posted: 06/17/2014 1:22 pm EDT Updated: 06/17/2014 1:59 pm EDT, Huffington Post

The dirty little secret of corporate America and the practice of diversity is that 25 years after establishing “diversity” offices, most companies have not developed a mature understanding of how diversity can contribute to their bottom lines. Diversity management has a complicated history arising, as it does, from a sequence of discrimination lawsuits that unsettled corporate America in the early 1990s. As the list of individual and class action lawsuits grew, led by Texaco’s race discrimination case and First Union’s age discrimination lawsuit, both in 1994, a public relations backlash against the companies created a crisis of confidence among shareholders.

CEOs sought to address the problem by hiring what they considered to be a “safe pair of hands,” usually a minority or a woman, as head of their efforts to counter public perceptions that they discriminated in hiring by systemically denying employment to classes of workers. Led mainly by the CEOs themselves and mission-driven diversity practitioners who held the CEOs accountable, along with federal monitors, these companies went about defining hiring goals to increase their minority employee head-counts.

In the mid-2000s, corporations began to open up their purchasing to minority suppliers, hired Chief Diversity Officers, and developed “employee resource groups” to give minority employees a voice in the companies. From these occurrences developed both the work and professionalization of “diversity.” And, in many companies, that is where the story ends. Indeed, although the field of “diversity and inclusion” exists and nearly three-quarters of large American corporations have diversity offices, corporations have shown little interest in diversity as a strategic business tool.

To these companies, “diversity” is limited to counting the number of minorities and women in categories of employment, avoiding legal liability, and buying good public relations for the price of table sponsorship at community, civic and social functions. They spend billions of dollars each year to produce results that do not move their businesses forward materially, and remain silent on issues of diversity’s business applications in generating revenue, containing cost, and structuring change.

Their diversity strategies are stuck in an “affirmative action” matrix of guilt, fear, conflict avoidance, and head-counts packaged as “diversity management.” They hire Chief Diversity Officers who are untrained and disengaged, give them no power or resources, treat them as appendages to senior management, and decouple diversity management from business strategy. For their part, many Chief Diversity Officers are happy not to press the boundaries of their corporations’ awareness of higher levels of diversity management because they too are stuck in old paradigms and afraid of being held accountable to new standards. These corporations and executives give the allusion of racing toward diversity when in fact they are on a treadmill to nowhere. Visible here is a dual complicity of ignorance and trepidation that devalues diversity in large corporations.

Leading-edge CEOs are practicing “strategic diversity” to harness business value. They recognize that diversity is not just about people; it is about every complex situation, decision, task, and perspective that imbues their companies. They know that their companies’ effectiveness is predicated on interlocking systems of diversity mixtures, and that diversity is evident in everything their companies do. Strategic diversity is not about advancing the numbers of minority groups and women per se, but rather leveraging diversity mixtures to support corporate business strategy, solve business problems, and contribute to business growth. In a newly released study on the evolution of diversity management that includes a dozen Fortune 500 businesses and national sports organizations, I found that only 25 percent of the organizations have achieved a level of diversity maturity that can be called “strategic.” The others are engaged in a charade, pretending to add business value when in fact they can point to little objective evidence of return on investment.

The forward-leaning CEOs who keep strategic diversity in mind are as concerned about diversity’s business value as they are about diversity’s social value. They structure their organizations around a different set of diversity expectations built on advancing core business concerns. They have reframed their understandings of diversity away from human differences to an idea of integrative excellence that can permeate their organizations from top to bottom. Not only can everyone be part of integrative excellence, it can be developed to render tangible results because it is structured around business strategy rather than human resources.

While the possibilities of strategic diversity management are immense, CEOs must re-imagine diversity and be unafraid to hold their diversity offices to the same standards they do their business units. Chief Diversity Officers who are unprepared to lead the way forward must be jettisoned. Operational leaders and managers must adopt a new diversity mindset, and be skilled at identifying and integrating excellence in new ways and from unlikely sources.

Can such a paradigm advance us as a more inclusive nation? Perhaps not, but it can ensure that by linking diversity management with business strategy, companies are practicing the most advanced form of business inclusion possible and generating maximum value for their shareholders. Although we have not entered a post-racial period in our nation, and a need for socially-constructed diversity paradigms certainly remains, there is much more value that a re-conceptualization of diversity can bring to corporate strategy and operations. Every CEO should know what that value is for his or her company.

Posted: 06/16/2014 9:50 am EDT Updated: 06/16/2014 9:59 am EDT, Huffington Post

Americans are rightly dismayed that Google, one of our most iconic technology companies, has possibly the worst “diversity” employment record of any Fortune 500 company. According to Google’s workforce statistics, globally 70 percent of its employees are male, and in the U.S., 91 percent are white and Asian, 3 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Google’s executive management is even less diverse.

Google grants that its lack of workforce diversity is a problem, which it attributes to “unconscious biases” within the company that cause hiring managers to act on unrecognized racial and gender preferences to the exclusion of candidates who do not fit their archetype. The company further states that there is an insufficient supply of Latino and black computer technologists to substantially increase their numbers. However, Google misstates the problem, which is not “unconscious bias” or inadequate supply but rather a culture of institutional discrimination and exclusion so pervasive in Silicon Valley that it trumps sound business practice.

Silicon Valley, the hub for technology innovation, has long lagged behind on diversity. The most recent diversity statistical analysis of Silicon Valley firms — including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay and AMD — shows that while the collective workforce of the 10 companies reviewed grew by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, the already low number of Latino and black employees at those firms declined by 16 percent during the same period, a double-dip net loss. Furthermore, nationally Latinos and blacks made up 12.4 percent of computer workers, but only 6 percent in Silicon Valley. Even more startling is a report by the AFL-CIO indicating that the Great Recession and other factors resulted in 20,000 fewer blacks employed as computer programmers and systems analysts in 2011 than there were in 2008, when black employment in the tech sector peaked.

These numbers come into focus as reflecting poor business strategy when considered in light of the shifts in U.S. demographics. Today, Latinos and blacks make up 29 percent of the U.S population and represent a $2.8 trillion annual economy. By 2040, Latinos and blacks will increase to 42 percent of the population and minorities will become the majority, not just in terms of raw numbers but also in terms of intellectual capital, innovation, workforce supply, and the sustainability of our national economy. Given these realities, Google and other Silicon Valley companies reject diversity at their peril.

Many new technology companies look upon “diversity management” as antithetical to the cultures of merit they have created and adding little to their bottom lines or productivity. They see diversity as the “management of human differences,” and the simplistic inclusion of women and minorities. They do not want to be saddled with the negative vestiges of “affirmative action” or to have their cultures altered. And why should they change who they are to accommodate a race- and gender-based idea of diversity? They have the right to want people to fit in, to assimilate. They have the right hold high their standards and require all who would join their ranks to meet those standards. And they have the right not to see diversity as an obligation in business, but as a driver of productivity and innovation.

So what should these companies do? Develop a slew of ineffective, affirmative action-based programs to increase their women and minority headcounts? No. They should adopt a business model of diversity management called “strategic diversity,” which is not just about increasing the numbers of women and minorities; it is about generating business value and facilitating business strategy from diversity management. Strategic diversity is about improving innovation, resource management, and technology optimization to drive performance. It is less concerned with political correctness than with adding business value. Companies that practice strategic diversity understand that diversity makes companies work better. They see diversity in everything they do — from their products and services, to process design and business development — and they seek to leverage diversity along all those vectors.

In a recent study of the diversity strategy of over a dozen Fortune 500 companies and national sports organizations, our team found that only 25 percent of the companies surveyed had a business-based diversity strategy. The best example of strategic diversity among these organizations is Major League Baseball, which has integrated diversity as a strategic element across all areas of operations. Unlike most companies, Major League Baseball has taken diversity out of the realm of human resources and put it into all aspects of business operations. The difference is that Major League Baseball does not see diversity as just about race and gender but about its ability to compete, attract a new and growing fan base, and deliver maximum return on investment. It has galvanized all thirty teams around an idea of strategic diversity that is driving productivity, resource allocation, and long-term strategy.

IBM is another company practicing strategic diversity. IBM has partnered with the New York City Public Schools to create P-TECH High School to give students in a poor section of Brooklyn an opportunity to earn their high school diploma and associate degree in computer technology with an option to join IBM upon graduation. IBM is building its technology workforce of the future by investing in strategic diversity now. The P-TECH model is being replicated nationally, garnering praise from President Obama as the future of workforce readiness. With a fraction of Google’s seventy-four percent reach to U.S. consumers, IBM is setting the pace for diversity management in computer technology that Google and other Silicon Valley companies should seek to surpass.

The Google diversity problem is not one of unconscious bias but of poor business strategy that decouples diversity management from the long-term health of the company. But in breaking its silence, Google is demonstrating its readiness to forge a new way forward.

Groundbreaking Diversity Series and Research Released

by Dr. John Fitzgerald Gates, the Nation’s #1 Thought Leader in Strategic Diversity

NEW YORK, N.Y., May 29, 2014 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Criticality Management Consulting announces today that it is releasing the groundbreaking Strategic Diversity series from Dr. John Fitzgerald Gates, Ph.D., America’s most insightful and transformational diversity thought-leader. Dr. Gates is blazing new trails in the practice of Diversity & Inclusion. He leads the Strategic Diversity Management Movement, which places diversity in the realm of organizational strategy rather than human resources as a lever to improve business performance.

According to Dr. Gates: “Any organization that sees diversity as simply about human difference is woefully behind the curve. Diversity is an expression of excellence, which shows up as the differences, similarities, complexities and tensions that can be found in any complex situation, task, decision, group, or person. Accordingly, a Strategic Diversity paradigm includes everyone and everything.”

His groundbreaking research and thought leadership series, “STRATEGY: The Evolution of Diversity and Inclusion Thought and Practice,” is changing the way major corporations understand diversity. The series features Dr. Gates’ two decades of research and practice in the field of Strategic Diversity as well as the commentary of diversity executives from 20 leading companies, sports franchises, and nonprofit organizations. The STRATEGY series has been heralded as the authoritative word on contemporary diversity management.

About Dr. Gates:

Dr. John Fitzgerald Gates is an esteemed organizational scientist, expert in Strategic Diversity Management, and in-demand corporate strategist. His engagements include a host of Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions. He teaches executives to re-image diversity management within the contexts of their business strategies, which is influencing how companies worldwide practice diversity management.

Dr. Gates is Principal and Chief Strategist of Criticality Management Consulting, a full-service Strategic Diversity and Complexity Management Firm, and its subsidiaries, The Human Relations Group and Campus Diversity Agenda. Prior to founding Criticality, Dr. Gates was Associate Dean of Harvard College and a Member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he was chief diversity, finance and human resources officer. He served as Chief of Staff at the University of Vermont, where he led institutional diversity. He also served as Assistant Provost and Executive Director of Global Operations at New York University, where he led global diversity and operations in Great Britain, France, Spain, the Czech Republic. Argentina, and Ghana.

Dr. Gates holds a Bachelors degree in English from Morehouse College; a Masters degree in Administration from New York University; a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the University of London; and an Advanced Certificate in Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.