Comfortable in my own skin

This week’s topic was mainly about diverseity in the workplace and how to go about handling the different cultural, sexual, religious, age, and gender diversity’s as a leader. After completing the My Tolerance for Cultural Difference skills building exercise, the scores came out between 40-50 showing that I have a high tolerance for diversity. To be honest I feel that I have a lot of things to work on as a leader and have already seen some issues that I need to work on in previous lessons but I believe that tolerance for diversity is not one of them. 

I’m comfortable in my own skin and over my years of traveling the world I’ve learned to adapt to different cultural, religious, and sexual ideologies. Don’t get me wrong, I have learned a great deal about how to deal with certain diversity in the workplace and why diversity is such a benefit in the workplace as described in Durbin’s Text. He wrote about Patricia Harris and how as the cheif diversity officer for McDonald’s she diversified their operations in minority conunities, which sold more hamburgers. I don’t agree with all ideologies either but my philosophy has always been, begin the relationship by showing the same amount of respect that I hope to receive in return. Of course this doesn’t always work, especially when some type of diversity is involved. This is why, this weeks lesson is very important because as a leader I have to try to understand why an individual aren’t returning the same respect and what can I do to reach common ground. 

Understandings diversity plays such a pivotal role in creating successful working environments. I learned even more this week was that diversity doesn’t just stop with cultures, sex, religion, gender, and ideologies it also largly deals with age. Generations competing against each other to either maintain at the top or take the throne. As a leader I have to learn how to handle all of these different diversity issues and make them successful tools. My travels have helped me with the ability to adapt and tolerate diversity but this weeks lesson has shown me ways to make beneficial opportunities out of diversity.