Biblical Diversity: A Lever for Success

By: Ricky Harper, C12 Northwest Florida Principal Chairman

As a business owner or leader, you are constantly looking for ways to grow.  Whether it is the business size, revenue, margin, productivity or the leader’s acumen, skillset, or professional development, most CEO’s and owners are acutely aware that lack of growth is an indicator that the business may be dying.

So, how do you grow?  It could be by increasing sales, adding products or territory, networking, new marketing strategies, creating productivity efficiencies and on and on. Growth can be found in a myriad of ways; some obvious, some less so.

One effective and powerful way to grow a business is by building a biblically diverse or multicultural staff.

Biblical Diversity & Competitive Edge

Simply put, it is because a diverse staff has a wider degree of experience, tastes, education, values and insights into the minds of the consumers you serve and more importantly, the minds of the consumers you are not serving.  Think of it like this: If your sales staff are only men, how can you fully relate to and effectively sell your product to women?  If your product is consumed by men and women, you should have a sales staff that is made up of both genders.  Likewise, your sales staff should reflect every spectrum of the socio-cultural makeup of your potential customer base.

Intentional diversity strategies sharpen our competitive edge.  Decades of research have shown how diversity improves customer service, increases employee satisfaction and collaboration, sparks innovation and enhances decision-making—all of which lead to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns.

Many studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of diversity.  One such study found that companies improving their diversity increased revenue by 19%.  Another found that diverse teams performed at a higher level and were more innovative.  But here is the number that really drives the point home:

A 2013 study found that diverse companies are 70% more likely to capture new markets and 158% more likely to understand the needs and wants of their target end-users. That is a path to growth.

Will diversity happen organically?

Unfortunately, the path to diversity can be bumpy.  Many of us have inherent biases or we are afraid of the unknown.  Becoming more diverse must be an intentional strategy for a business if it is to achieve that goal.  Inga Beale, former CEO of Lloyds of London pushed her company to diversify, and in doing so the company enjoyed growth in markets they never expected to be in. She said,

“Many conversations about diversity…do not happen in the boardroom because people are embarrassed at using unfamiliar words or afraid of saying the wrong thing — yet this is the very place we need to be talking about it. The business case speaks for itself — diverse teams are more innovative and successful in going after new markets.”

When building teams, diversity should be the goal, but you cannot simply mandate a number.  Quotas not only demoralize people; they also rarely work.  Instead, diversity must be an intentional goal using an organic process.  In other words, look hard at all the candidates and without bias choose the best one. Do that and you will have a diverse staff, which will lead to greater success.

“Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” (Col. 3:11)

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.” (1 Cor. 12: 12-14)