COACHING FORORGANIZATIONALCHANGE 165

value in those efforts as greatly enhanced by the organization’s interest in

sustaining its own development over time.

R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr.

Coaching for Strategic

Diversity Management™

C

oaching is usually considered to be a very personal endeavor, a kind of

sor ting through an individual’s decisions and options in line with an

agenda. The coaching that I do is typically with a group of leaders struggling

with an organizational challenge related to diversity. Although my coaching

focuses on the organization instead of the individual, the sense of working

through decisions and options in line with a strategy remains very strong.

I think of diversity differently from most people. I define diversity as the

differences and similarities that can exist among the elements of a mixture.

The greater the number of differences relative to similarities, the more di-

verse the mixture. The greater the amount of similarities relative to differ-

ences, the more homogeneous the mixture.

What does this mean with respect to workforce diversity? For starters, di-

versity does not refer to brute statistics around how many minorities or

women are represented in the workforce, but rather to the differences and

similarities that exist among all members of the workforce. Those differences

Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., CEO of Roosevelt Thomas

Consulting & Training, Inc. and President /Founder of the

American Institute for Managing Diversity, has been at

the forefront of developing and implementing innovative

strategies for maximizing organizational and individual

potential for over two decades. He is the author of four

published books: Beyond Race and Gender: Unleashing

the Total Power of Your Workforce by Managing Diver-

sity, Redefining Diversity, Building a House for Diversity,

and Giraffe and Elephant, A Diversity Fable.He can be reached by phone at

(404) 212-0070, by e-mail at [email protected], or via the Inter-

net at http://www.rthomasconsulting.com.