The Art and Practice of Leadership Coaching: 50 Top Executive Coaches Reveal Their Secrets

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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.
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