My work deals with intangibles and I am a fierce advocate for prioritizing them.  I am in the minority.  I see tangible assets as being the stuff that really matters.  Love, passion, loyalty, creativity, curiosity, influence, empathy, organizational culture, social and emotional intelligence, ethics, integrity, diversity, inclusion….all incredibly important and all intangible.  Try as we might, we can never measure these things the way we can measure a pound of flour or the size of our bank account.

I think that organizations tend to make two very real mistakes regarding how they view the assets and resources that they have access to:

1.)    Focus too much on tangible assets, which actually tell us a lot less than we think they do.

Take profit for example…

The mother of all priorities.  A great deal of emphasis is placed on profit…what will generate a profit, are you profitable now, what is the bottom-line, yadda, yadda, yadda.  I am not going to say that profit is not important, I do understand numbers and how business works…but profit is greatly overrated as an indicator of how you are doing as an organization. Whether you are profitable today does not tell me whether or not you made a profit ethically, it does not tell me whether or not you did it in a way that adds to your ability to be profitable tomorrow it actually tells me very little other than for the time frame that we are considering you made more money than you spent.  Looking at profit is kind of like looking at the speedometer when you are driving…it is clearly important to know our speed, but the speedometer does not tell me whether or not I have any gas left or whether I am even traveling in the right direction.  Placing too much attention on tangibles can easily lead to compromising on the really important stuff.  Over emphasizing profit will always lead some people and some organizations to sacrifice people and principles to get more profit.

2.)    Try to measure intangible assets as if they were tangible.

There are countless examples of this.  There are probably about eleventy gazillion consulting agencies that have some neat shiny metric for employee engagement, organizational culture, inclusion, influence and it is all hogwash.  You cannot quantify these things anymore than you can quantify love and the more that you try to quantify them and rely on these metrics the more you distort them and turn a real and dynamic thing into a one-dimensional commodity that actually tells you very little.  You can use metrics as indicators of engagement or indicators of wha the culture of an organization is like, but unless they are part of a larger conversation they can easily do more harm than good.

What are the conversations about “what matters” like in your organization or community?  What metrics, numbers or ratios do you pay attention to?  What are your indicators of success? Do you measure your "success" based on what you truly value as an organization or community?

Be good to each other.



This Friday, July 30th I will on the Proactive Employer Podcast and will be talking about "Resetting the Diversity and Inclusion Conversation."

I am also going to be a regular on the Workplace Diversity Network.  I have posted some stuff there in the past, but have recently joined their Experts Forum and have my first piece up titled "What Shall We Weave With These Two Strings."

You may also be interested in joining the Diversity + Inclusion group on LinkedIn.

And, last but not least, I have a relatively new slidedeck with some thoughts about the basic characteristics of diversity and inclusion up on slideshare, called ten things.

Be good to each other.

Be good to each other.

I have mentioned both Jamie Notter and Rosetta Thurman several times here and they continue to be highly, highly, highly recommended. Big brains, fat hearts, warm souls.

Some others to read / follow / observe / politely stalk...

Jason Lauritsen | Practicing HR:  Jason is a close friend and collaborator, he was the best man in my wedding and is in many ways the Beavis to my Butthead...that does not change the fact that he is one of the smartest people that I know and as someone leading an HR function always helps me stay grounded with my work and the work that we do together.  If you follow and care about HR issues, his is probably the best blog that you have not yet heard of.

Shelly Alcorn | Association Subculture:  Shelly is a wonderful blogger, she consistently puts heartfelt and thoughtful stuff out and I always look forward to her posts.  She is really, really smart and she reps Gen X (the beautiful ones) very well.  If Gen X ever actually throws down with those damn Baby Boomers, Shelly will probably be one of our commanding generals.

Nilofer Merchant:  Nilofer is also really, really smart (picking up on a theme here?), and puts it all out there in her writing which I find very refreshing.  She gets organizational culture and collaboration and does a really good job of taking things from idea / belief / theory to something that is actually practical and actionable.

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer | Socialfish:  More smarty pants, these ladies are overflowing with insights on all things social media, but especially how it can interact with and invigorate associations.  This is where I get some of the most valuable perspectives on the what, why and how of social media.

Race Talk | A Kirwan Institute Project:  Really good insight on issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, culture and diversity and really good reporting on stuff that does not make it into the mainstream news media. This site has one of the most amazing teams of contributors that you will find, a lot of brilliance, a lot of different perspectives, a lot of wisdom.

Paul Smith | Welcome to the Occupation:  I have gotten to know and know of a lot of HR bloggers over the past couple of years and there are a lot of smart people putting out good stuff.  Sometimes it does feel a bit like an echo chamber though and I really enjoy Paul's blog because I think he consistently shares unique and personal stuff. 

Enjoy!

Be good to each other.

One of the reasons we have a really hard time having conversations about issues related to diversity and inclusion is that we are all talking about different stuff.  Even when we are using the same words, we are talking about different things and those conversations are almost always doomed from the beginning.  We are almost using different languages as we try to examine these very contextual and complex issues that are woven throughout our society, our organizations and our communities. 

Common language.  Clarity.  Alignment of language and beliefs and actions.  These are maybe the greatest challenges facing this body of work today.  Organizations that want to have real conversations about diversity need to find some agreement on what that word means for them (and why), so that the conversation can mean something for them.  Sometimes what we need to discuss is mostly about power and privilege.  Sometimes what we really need to discuss are issues related to race or gender.  Sometimes what we really need is to examine are some of the dynamics of diversity, but people think diversity is really code for race, or orientation or gender.  Regardless of what it is that we need to or hope to talk about, a little more precision with our language will go a long way.

Of course part of the problem is that people often enter these conversations afraid of saying the wrong thing, which also gets in the way of saying anything that actually matters.

Want to “do diversity” in your organization or community?  Want to drive change, launch an initiative, make waves?  Start with the basics.  Clarity, simplicity, defining the terms, developing a common language.  Often overlooked, this is really, really, really important stuff.

Words do matter.  Language is messy by nature, which is why we must be careful in how we use it.  As leaders, after all, we have little else to work with.  We typically don't use hammers and saws, heavy equipment, or even computers to do our real work.  The essence of leadership -- what we do with 98 percent of our time -- is communication.  To master any management practice, we must start by bringing discipline to the domain in which we spend most of our time, the domain of words.

-Peter Senge

“But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that’s the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you … some of the great moral figures of history … Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi … that’s what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn’t pass it on.”

I do work with a number of organizations locally, but most of my diversity and inclusion work, both working with client organizations and contributing to conferences, takes place outside of Omaha.  I think that this will always be the case and that makes sense to me, but beyond my paying work, I feel an obligation to advocate regarding issues of diversity and inclusion in Omaha and I am struggling to determine how to best do that.

Something that continues to make me scratchy about Omaha, is that diversity and inclusion simply are not a part of the conversation on the community level here.  There are people, organizations and events very dedicated to issues related to diversity and inclusion, but those issues rarely get attention on a community level unless somethig bad has happened.  There are a few times of year when business and community leaders have very happy and shiny things to say about diversity and inclusion, but on the other 352 days, these issues are simply not among the talking points.

Omaha has a lot of things going for it.  I really like Omaha and I believe in its potential, but it also has some serious work to do when it comes to diversity and inclusion…and we are not likely to change what we do not acknowledge.  

So.

Help me try to figure this out.

How do you change a community conversation?

How do you change what a community pays attention to?

How do you contribute to a community examining what it values?

Thanks.

Be good to each other.