Diversity means difference

Does the idea of working with the people in this video scare you?

Maybe you’re thinking that Goth music and people with dark makeup or full-sleeve tattoos don’t belong in a professional work environment. Maybe you assume that “people like this” don’t have the same idea of business you do, and they wouldn’t fit into your company. Or maybe, like me, you’ve worked in environments where diversity was more than just a training topic.

One of the great joys for me at Wizards of the Coast was that I came on board during the company’s enormous business growth and great cultural flowering. At least 30% of the workforce was openly gay or bisexual, and the company offered insurance benefits to domestic partners beginning in the mid-90’s. All throughout the 90’s, people in suits and Rolex watches rubbed elbows with people in full Goth gear or with multiple visible piercings. Men with great hair and tasteful makeup served as admin assistants to women executives in silk and Armani. We were a company full of different people discovering how to reach a common goal.

Wizards’ culture was no secret — apart from anything else, it was one of our most effective marketing messages. Our customers loved the idea that the people creating their games were like them, whether they were mathematicians or metalheads. But every once in a while I would have a conversation with someone from a more traditional company who ask some (usually polite) version of, “What the hell are you people doing here?” in the tone that meant Why are you letting these people turn your company into a circus?

And I’d answer with some (usually polite) version of “Well, we’re a little too busy growing 100% annually the last few years to worry so much about dress codes. Why, what are you guys up to?”

I’ve been thinking about diversity, although my HR friends tell me that the new word these days is “inclusion.” That’s a fine word, and I do believe, for example, that people should be included in the decision-making process for decisions that affect them. But it doesn’t express the truth of the matter: there’s a difference between “including all points of view” and actively welcoming — and managing — the differences that we all bring to the table. The kind of difference that makes one person feel most alive and engaged when she’s wearing a long black dress and lace gloves, while another gets that feeling from her sharpest suit and leather briefcase.

I offer the Wizards’ story not as an example of why Dress Codes Are Bad (I don’t think they are), but rather as an example of a company that understood that clothing is just a symbol, and that the way to keep their workforce engaged in the chaos of triple-digit growth was to respect differences in whatever way made the particular people involved feel they could bring their whole self to the game.

It worked at Wizards. We all looked very different. We came to the job every day from very different worlds. And we put all that energy and vitality to work in service of a common goal. We all felt respected, and so we did a better job of respecting each other, of realizing that how we worked together was a lot more important than what we looked like while we were doing it.

We argued. We disagreed. We couldn’t always understand how someone could have their opinion — what are they, stupid? Ignorant? Willfully obstructive? Well, no, of course not — as is the case with much business conflict, they simply had a different perspective. The nice thing about all of us looking so different was that it was much easier to understand how we could think differently. That we could be different and still be together.