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Diversity–The Competitive Advantage

Diversity – The Competitive Advantage is the first-phase experiential awareness program in the Innovations’ Diversity Series. It is designed in different formats for those in leadership, management, supervisory, and individual contributor roles. The program content focuses on diversity education, experiential awareness of personal diversity- related activities, and organizational transformation.

The overall objectives of the program are to:

1. Define diversity and show how it is related to business success.
2. Create breakthroughs in high performance by resolving and coaching interpersonal and workplace conflict resulting from diversity differences.
3. Show why the achievement of diversity and empowerment are necessities for creating a high-performance organization.
4. Learn how cultural exclusion occurs and how to create an inclusive, culturally competent organization.
5. Learn your unique leadership style and how it relates to leading inclusion and performance.
6. Define your unique role in designing a leadership support system for achieving diversity and inclusion.

Since there are three major categories of diversity dimensions — Human, Cultural, and Systems — the course is designed to experience each of these categories. The program begins by establishing responses to four major questions: What is diversity?; What are the major dimensions unique to your organization?; What are the unique business connections?; and What are the objectives of a diversity initiative? It concludes by showing that the ultimate objective of diversity is to create a high-performance organization.

After establishing substantative responses to the four questions above, human diversity is explored in the module titled Personal Discovery – Creating Breakthrough Performance. This module is designed to have participants learn the conscious and unconscious ways we individually and collectively support diversity or prevent its achievement. A systematic process is presented for resolving conflict and promoting a diverse and inclusive environment. The third module — Diversity, Empowerment, and High Performance — focuses on the relationship of diversity, empowerment, and high performance. A case study exercise shows how responsibility and accountability are key congnitive skills for succeeding in spite of diversity barriers and providing the support necessary for everyone’s success. It concludes by outlining a stepwise process for mentoring, coaching, and managing a diversity of employees. The fourth module — Cultural Diversity – Creating an Inclusive, Culturally Competent Organization — focuses on learning your personal workstyle orientation and how we include others or exclude them in unconscious ways. The module concludes by showing how to create an inclusive, culturally competent organization. The final module — Leading Inclusion — focuses on everyone’s role in providing a leadership support system for the effective implementation of diversity and inclusion.

This learning program is exceptionally hands-on, interactive, and focused on real-world business and organizational scnearios. It is designed to engage individual, paired, and team participation that directly relates to situations participants experience on a day-to-day basis. The program can be presented, with modification, in half-day, one-day, or one and one-half
day modes. It can be delivered by Innovations’ facilitators or a Train-the-Trainer format.

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