Ethnic, gender, or generational diversity?
As awareness of corporate sustainability grows and organizations around the world adopt ESG, what is harder to achieve in top management? Ethnic, gender, or generational diversity?
I believe the most difficult to achieve in top management is generational diversity. Strategies for working on corporate sustainability that involve everyone with their beliefs, ways, cultural heritage, etc. are not simple to develop. Breaking some paradigms becomes a barrier to the adoption of ESG.
The adoption of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is wrongly translated as essentially marketing and circumstance options and not as a strategic option assumed by senior management. This strategic option creates an organizational culture and sets goals to be achieved.
In this context, diversity defines more autonomous identities with values of tolerance and respect for others and for social and environmental sustainability.
Inclusion and diversity are challenges in the ESG context. It´s very difficult to specify which of the three diversities is harder to achieve in top management. Factors such as culture and belief can favor one or other. The prevailing culture in the region where the organization is located can be a barrier and a decisive element to understand this question.
Both of these three options are difficult to achieve, in my opinion, in any location the organization be. It is still uncommon to find any kind of diversity, be it ethnic, gender or generational, in leadership positions globally speaking. I believe that this is more related to the strategy of each organization, and in this sense, the adoption of ESG good practices may be contributing to a change of scenarios in the future.
Dear Otávio José de Oliveira,
Very useful discussion. I would like to another dimension to this issue. Achievement of ESG diversity as an outcome is one thing. How this ESG diversity
is achieved becomes more important as it will decide whether it is sustainable or not.
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