Work Force Diversity: Hard to Manage, Big Rewards : Conversation / Lorri L. Jean

Affirmative action programs are increasingly seen as discriminatory or harmful. But at the same time, organizations now value a diverse work force to serve their increasingly varied clientele. One of the most diverse groups is the staff at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center. BERKLEY HUDSON talked with center Director LORRI L. JEAN, 38, on the benefits of many points of view.

I’m an attorney by training. As deputy regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I was a career federal employee and the highest-ranking, openly gay or lesbian in the government during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

I was also the oldest child in a farm family in Arizona. We raised hogs and crops. My family never had any money. The whole culture I grew up in was Mexican: my friends, my environment, the people who worked for my dad on the farm.

As a woman, a lesbian and someone who grew up in a working-class family, I know what it’s like to be discriminated against. Although my parents weren’t free of bigotry, I still was raised with a concept that you should treat all people fairly and nicely.

And in today’s environment, building diversity on a staff is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. A diverse work environment at all levels is the most dynamic, most creative. It’s a hell of a lot harder to manage, but the rewards outweigh the challenges.

If you have a bunch of people who are alike, they’re going to communicate in the same way and probably relate to each other more quickly. They’re going to come up with ideas or solutions quickly. But they’re not going to be real creative about it because they think alike. For example, we had a safer-sex program called Lifeguard, viewed as a model all over the country. The trouble was almost everybody in this program was white. So was the staff. When we added new staff members who were people of color, they looked at the program and said it was all from the cultural perspective of white folks. They said there were some things that don’t work in the Latino or African American environment. We made changes, targeting different cultural groups. The result is we’re serving many more people and that’s more reflective of Los Angeles as a whole.

When you bring people together who are different, there is a lot of fear. A lot of time the discussion about diversity focuses on the fears of white men and white males being excluded. The truth is everybody is afraid of people who are not like them.

If people don’t understand the kinds of differences that exist cross-culturally, then they come to stereotypical conclusions instead of understanding that people can look at the same situation in a different way, talk about it in a different way and reach a different conclusion. And none of the conclusions may be wrong.

Two years ago when I got here, our work force was probably 45% female, 55% male, 40% people of color. At the managerial level, it was about half female but less than 10% people of color. Today, it’s over 30% people of color in management. It’s made a tremendous difference in raising money. We’re getting more money from people of color and women. A lot of grants require you to show that you serve different populations or have a certain demographic base on your staff.

People are always talking about white males being resistant to diversity. That’s an unfair characterization. But if you’re going to build diversity, you can’t leave out white males anymore than you can leave out African American women or Latinos or anybody else.

I had my own consciousness raised about stereotyping when I worked for the Reagan and Bush administrations. I would have thought that Reagan political appointees, political conservatives, would have been a lot more monolithic in their reaction to me. The truth is they became my biggest allies. They were the ones who promoted me and were my mentors.