How to Balance Diversity & Company Culture

Culture sets a company’s values while diversity determines the execution

Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash

Focusing any organization around multiple values is tricky, simply because at some point they will conflict with one another. The classic example is the rallying cry of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. The first two are the primary sources of ideological conflict, as it’s hard to reconcile them at their extremes — perfect equality negates liberty and vice-versa. Obviously, you want to exist in a middle ground with some liberty and some equality, but finding where is complicated.

Modern corporate culture has its own conundrum in that the modern firm (especially in the ever more important tech space) values both a strong company culture and diversity of opinions. These two values are opposites; a strong company culture celebrates homogeneity while diversity intrinsically does not. Since no major firm is coming out against either diversity or building a strong internal culture, they must coexist. The only problem is that companies are striking the wrong balance because they don’t understand why each is valuable.

Company Culture and the Danger of Proxies

The idea of a company or organizational culture is relatively recent. The field…