We've talked about the essential role that leaders play in shaping group identity, in effect, setting the boundaries for inclusion and giving them meaning. Now this is not some swarthy, half-crazed Goliath on horseback swinging raw meat before enemies, it's a function of leadership that we see or we sense every day. We can reflect on how important this is for leaders in higher education. After all, with campuses sometimes spread out over several miles or even across an entire state, thousands of faculty, staff, and students, tens of thousands of alumni of all different ages pursuing any number of careers and sometimes living time zones away. It may be that a college or university is, in the end, only what people think it to be and what they want it to be. There may not be a social institution that is nearly as dependent as higher education on fostering a shared belief about who we are and what makes us us. It's important for faculty, staff, alumni for the public and especially for students. Inclusion in the maintenance of group identity matters deeply, but any group, any collective, that fails to enrich itself by involving new members, new talents, and even shaping new identities will not last long. Logically, mathematically, it wouldn't be expected to last beyond a generation, right? And that sense of a generation can be the type commonly associated with one living cohort that must be replaced, or a generation can be a technological generation or the generation created around a way of thinking or a worldview. Diversity is essential not only because it's interesting, stimulating, and biologically essential. Diversity eventually comes to matter to the future of any group because it is central to the process of adaptation. To say we love diversity in our lives can be a statement made with absolute and full conviction. I would not want to live without it, but that's the key point. We could not live without it. From the cellular level out to every aspect of our social ecology, we are diversely composed, and we thrive only because we are. Now because diversity is critical to survival, leadership requires that this carefully defined identity that we've discussed is necessarily and mindfully disrupted. Even though there will be forces nurtured within the group to hold fast to the agreed terms of inclusion and even though for many breaking down those arrangements will feel very painful, even like a sense of betrayal. The leader has a responsibility to nurture diversity within the group just as she does to build the sense of inclusion. Can you see how these two values can be, are, in tension with one another? We speak of inclusion and diversity in a single breath, but when we go to achieve them together, how often do we feel unease, uncertainty, or ambiguity? And how often may we even experience outright resistance? Maybe this explains why work of this sort is so difficult. Few people would say they're opposed to diversity and inclusion, but even fewer recognize, at a conscious level, that the two goals can generate conflict or at least create a form of withdrawn engagement. You see that's what people do, after all, when they're trying to go in two directions at once. They become, using the Latin word ambivalent, ambivalent walking two ways at the same time. And just as the process of creating inclusion, doing so, creating points of exclusion falls to leaders. Leaders also play a critical role in shaping and promoting diversity within and on behalf of the group. So there is a logical tension here – it requires leaders who can see past this tension, hold on to a vision, and move toward it with purpose, determination, and creativity. The only way to do this, short of forcing the group to absolute tatters, the only way to serve the group in these two inescapably important ways that otherwise would pull at one another is to honestly and convincingly tie the benefits of diversity to the most important values and goals of the group. This is really a creative act, not in the cynical sense of that term. It is explicitly creative – it's a construction of two active realities putting them together in the same place and at the same time. It can't be a charade. Everyone can spot false commitment to diversity because we've all seen it often enough. There must be a clearly articulated, carefully reasoned, and a plausible connection made between the important benefits of diversifying the group and the group or in this case the institution's most important shared goals. Survival is a goal. Enrichment is a goal. Distinction through innovation and increasing resonance with emerging demographic groups can be a goal. Expanded capacity for influence is a goal. Any one of these is dramatically enhanced, if not made outright possible, by the internalization of new talents and new identities. The new individual identities have to be taken in and meaningfully influence the creation of what is in effect a new group identity, not through assimilation, but through intentional transformation. All of these important objectives somehow need to be woven into the group's very fabric. Diversity is not a patch. And during a time when expansion and duplication comes at a real cost, incorporation of diversity cannot be accomplished by simply sewing on a new sleeve or placing it straight down the middle of a monochromatic outfit. So here is the challenge of authentic diversity leadership: a leader needs to loosen the timeworn structures of the existing institution in order to bring in new strands which will reinforce and eventually renew the whole canvas of the organization, and the leader needs to do this in full view and with the understanding of both the old and the new. Look, is there a tension suggested by this analogy? Yes. Just as there is tension in the process that a leader must sustain, sometimes over a long period of time when the organization will feel stretched and sometimes strung out. There will be problems as new members with new ideas and different expectations, begin to appear first at the fringes and then become increasingly more visible and actively a part of what is emerging. The old boundaries, and with them the standards on which so much of the sense of inclusion and exclusion depends, may seem to some to be fraying. Thought of in this way: re cognized – recognized. By way of a metaphor, however imperfect, we can see why leadership for inclusion and diversity is such a challenge and a worthy test of the best of us. It's not a challenge that can't be met, but it can't be met in one sweeping gesture. There's boldness that is required with an artist's hand too. One of my colleagues suggest that we'll only know when we have replaced the old identity, which is based on who is excluded, with one that is more inclusive. While maintaining the sense of unity and purpose, this will only occur when the alumni arrive at university events wearing the same weird pants, waving the same colors in different sizes but with similar pride. There are times when we see this. There are times when it is clear that the music just sounds better, when the piccolos march in synchrony with the tubas and everyone is following the same beat. It is often the old, traditional songs that inspire us, but they can be rendered by new musicians who may even introduce a different cadence. But this dilemma, this tension, between differences and similarities, old and new, shouldn't be minimized or romanticized by the noble vision that may inspire it. It brings tension. And sometimes it's at the heart of significant and even ugly conflict as cultures and structures seem to be threatened. It's a lesson in the underlying dynamic which is at work, and it invites some questions for us too. Please take a look at this brief video where one university leader tries to respond publicly to just such a challenge. Listen for the cues that signal inclusion and the cues that maintain a commitment to differentiation within the institution-- inclusion, diversity. The interplay of inclusion and diversity clearly raises some interesting questions, doesn't it? For me, it makes me want to think about how is it that leaders optimize the vitality and tremendously important adaptive qualities that diversity brings to the organization while at the same time building and sustaining identity? We can even drill deeper into this. For instance, you might want to ask yourself, are there times when a group identity needs to be challenged or changed in order to encourage greater diversity and broader inclusion? How do leaders do this? It's important that leaders really think about the possible tension between creating a group's identity, creating boundaries for inclusion, and how this relates to the need for greater diversity within the group. And as we move forward into this, we'll try and determine how equity plays in to this very conversation.
