The Australian Financial Review | 09 Nov 2007 | Page: 70 | BOSS

Heather Carmody, a practice leader at culture change consultants Mettle Group, says: “The better leaders of teams don’t have to be told about this. They actually just have diversity as a value. It’s about putting a spotlight on their ability to pull out full effort from team members.” The good news, says Carmody, is that this type of behaviour can be learned. But what is also needed is the promotion of managers who do well on diversity measures and the removal of people who do not.

Diversity in the workplace is a long time coming. But those companies that are taking steps to foster it are discovering it produces real dividends

Draped above each desk at Cisico System's technical services team office in Sydney is a large flag. They're not for decoration. The flags show the ethnic background - and language - of the workers who sit beneath tem. When a Cisco customer calls wanting to speak to someone in Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish or Indonesian, for example, the flag syetm means the call can be quickly transferred to the right person.

“We're like the UN here,” laughs Karen McFadzen, vice president, technical services for Asia-Pacific at the network and communications technology and services company. About 75 per cent of her team of around 200 are from non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, and just over half speack at least two languages. McFadzen, who is Australian born but has a Taiwanese mother, is an oddity: the only team member with an Asian heritage who doesn't speak another language.

Cisco knows it really has to work at diversity. It has a range of programs to mix up its workforce of different ages, genders and ethnic background. Diversity and inclusiveness are key performance indicators for McFadzen and all her managers, and she speaks about it at every monthly staff meeting. She is even taking her message to schools in the community. “If we didn't focus on multicultural, gender and generational diversity, I don't think we'd be attracting the best talent,” McFadzen says. “And the customers we deal with are getting more diverse. When you have diversity, you come up with fresh ideas.”

While there's been lots of buzz around workplace diversity in recent years, there's been lots of lip service too and the upper tiers of Australian management remain devidedly “white bread”. But diversity is increasingly at or near the top of senior  managements'must-do-list, partly die to the skills shortage.