DiversityInc - Spring 2006

managers and supervisors. Nielsen worked with its outside contractor to develop the program, “Cultural Leadership—A Proactive Approach to Workforce Diversity.”

Part of the program consists of a 90-minute video by Jane Elliot, a former school teacher who devised the famous “blue-eyes and brown-eyes” exercise with third-graders in 1968, a day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Elliot

can be a better contributor to the company regardless of the background of the customer, employee or manager,” he says.

Tulin urges companies not to market diversity training with words such as “risk management,” “ sensitivity” and “morale boosting.” Instead, he suggests emphasizing it as part of a concerted effort to “drive the CEO and organization’s values, the company’s business mis-

The Best Behavior

Chubb started its diversity-training initiative in 2004 for mid-level managers on down. Kathleen P. Marvel, chief diversity officer and senior vice president for the insurance company, says the “Count Me In” program isn’t about how race or gender influence relationships and is instead designed to focus on identifying behaviors that devalue others and ways to correct those behaviors.

The program aims to reach 9,000 managers and employees by the end of this year.

“Some of the success sto-
ries we heard about later
had to do with people treat-
ing people differently and
using the listening tools pro-
vided in class so they could
recognize when they were
treating people in a devalu-
ing way, when they were excluding
people inadvertently,” Marvel says.

Diversity training is not new at Sprint Nextel. When the company still was Sprint, it hosted courses in diversity and cultural awareness through its University of Excellence. But Edwards says this latest effort is the newly merged entity’s first com-panywide initiative that is mandatory for all managers and executives.

Where past training initiatives were not mandatory and were focused on understanding differences, the new diversity training focuses on “how managers can take differences in others and maximize those differences to get the best results,” Edwards says. “It really took us beyond thinking about differences and made us realize that we needed to value the differences in others in order to have a world-class organization.”

Another 6,500 managers are required to take an eight-hour course and have three follow-up meetings with their employees to share what

“They could recognize when they
were treating people in a
devaluing way, when they were
excluding people inadvertently.”
Kathleen Marvel, The Chubb Corp.

showed the impact of discrimination by making blue-eyed children inferior at first and then doing the same with the brown-eyed children in a classroom demonstration.

“It is awareness where people start to recognize for the first time that they have prejudices and biases and how they should address them,” Salvato says. “We focus on a change model that helps people understand the only way you can change behavior is changing how people see things.”

sion and its ability to achieve the strategic competitive advantage.

“One of the failures in organizations is when they separate diversity training and don’t link it to best practices in management, in teamwork, in sales and conflict resolution,” Tulin says.

CHECKLIST FOR
DIVERSITY TRAINING
Getting Out
of Comfort Zones

Diversity training “has to show how you deal with people of diverse backgrounds by overcoming biases or comfort zones,” says David Tulin, president and founder of Tulin Diversi Team Associates. His company specializes in diversity coaching, consulting, training and assessment.