It can help people relate better to each other in the workplace, but it tends not to help managers be more effective in managing a diverse workforce. It looks at the culture of the organization and how it manages people, its assumptions about development, and how it then either facilitates or inhibits the negative dynamics around diversity in the organization. The other is staying too long in the same middle-management functional area. Depth early in your career is what's most important. Then, as you reach middle management and move to senior management, breadth.
Many people get to middle management and become very good at something.
The organization rewards them for it, but they're not being broadened in the way that executives need to broaden. We found that minority executives had diversity in both of those dimensions. Minorities who plateaued in middle management frequently had networks that were either all white or all other minorities, or networks that depended totally on people who were senior to them, or peers. Corporations can do their own version of the study we did, to find out what the flow of people through their pipeline looks like. The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.