Every organization preaches diversity. Every organization sets established processes in place to ensure there is a wide breath of persons working within. (Diversity in the sense of experience amongst the workforce. You can keep the race based diversity to yourself.) Yet in the end, the organization refuses to actually promote the process. Time and again, meeting after meeting the concept of innovation and experience and spoken to at length. How can you, meaning me, make the processes better. How I make the people better? What am I doing to make the organization a better place? I can tell you want I’m doing. Can you tell me shat you’re doing?
Within my organization people are constantly told how they should shape their careers. How doing this or that benefits in one way or another. What committees you should belong to. What events you should lead. It is this forced path I belief limits the opportunity of the members and pigeon holes the organization to reproduce like members.
Hear me out.
Organizational management at a higher level constantly lays out the path to success. This path involves blocks that must be filled out, awards that must be won, and career opportunities that must be achieved. So one heads such advice and sets out on this route doing everything stated. Eventually, one day the member will be rewarded with the goal set forth. They have achieved everything they could. Now they are simply left to motivate others and see them become successful.
This is where I find fault.
Using this process of establishing a benchmark the organization limits the diversity within. No longer are people full of thought and ambition, but content with a careerist mindset. The process no longer setting apart the best and brightest. Now the process simply dictates you must be like the others. The process repeats and repeats. And eventually, the organization is build upon a foundation of “yes people” simply moving through the organization to check a box. This is stifling innovation amongst all the members.
If I have bright ideas, ways to improve, or just something different, I am cast aside for those that are lockstep with the drumbeat. I am not trying to change to world. I simply want to work in the best organization that I can. I was to see people perform at their highest levels. Because of this it become increasingly frustrated with the process. I cannot watch the organization implode upon itself, there has to be a better way.
Do I have the best ideas, no. Nor do I have all the answers. But I am willing to learn. To think. To understand.