How do leaders create a shared sense of identity given that most workplaces are highly diverse? It’s an important concern, because a staff complement that is divided along demographic lines presents almost limitless opportunities for conflict.
Members are not going to contribute to a shared loyalty if they feel their ethnic, religious, political or any other identity prevents them from identifying with their diverse colleagues. Business leaders need to create a sense of belonging as “us” that is even more salient than the divisions imported from outside.
Leaders foster this shared identity through a mission that resonates with their followers, with symbols, traditions, stories and heroes that represent the soul of the organisation. They may also define “us” in terms of competencies and even processes that make us stand out from the competition. The greater the diversity in the organisation, the more prominent the message needs to be.
Leaders need to be careful to avoid language and events that might unintentionally seem to define the company in terms of one, usually dominant, set of members and exclude others.
Group identity can be fostered at all levels. For example, it is an opportunity facing the government of national unity in SA — can we all be persuaded that we belong together and should work together in overcoming the challenges we face as a nation?
I find the Kenyan protests really interesting. The youth seem from the outside to have transcended identity politics in the form or ethnic rivalries that have plagued Kenya and so many other countries. If that is true, it’s a bottom-up rebuke to their national leaders.
Next door in Rwanda the recent election has illustrated a top-down approach to imposing a single national identity on a country that suffered dreadful genocidal violence 30 years ago.
It can be lost. National identity was once a strength of the US, but that has fallen apart spectacularly in recent years to the extent that some commentators murmur about civil war.
Nations with multiple ethnic, linguistic and religious identities may have histories that include searing memories of fighting each other, and so cannot draw on much of what defines more homogeneous peoples. We have to create shared symbols such as the flag and anthem, shared heroes such as Nelson Mandela and sports teams, and shared ceremonies or holidays. We create them to forge a national identity that would not otherwise exist.
Mandela provided an extraordinary example of how symbols can be harnessed. Until he wrought his magic at the 1995 World Cup, celebrating the Springboks would have been alienating for large numbers of South Africans in Mandela’s core constituency.
He courageously opened the door to transforming the Springboks into a unifying team by donning the captain’s jersey and forcefully calling on the ANC youth to support the team. By itself that would not have been enough; it required wise leadership from captains and coaches over the years to take us through that open door and create what has become a unifying rather than divisive symbol, part of our shared national identity.
Wise leaders recognise that we all need to belong to a community we can identify with and that feeds our need for acceptance and significance. Leaders who can transcend their own limited, exclusionary loyalties and create a shared identity out of diversity create robust organisations, communities and nations.
How leaders help us find each other in diverse organisations can be a proving ground for the wider challenge across the globe. As we rapidly develop the capacity to destroy ourselves in new ways, this skill of creating shared identity with a transcending loyalty will increasingly become a condition for our survival as a species.
• Cook chairs the African Management Institute.
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