Since at least 2010, the business press has been highlighting research showing that diversity enhances creativity, opens new markets, and, generally, increases profits. But how strong is the connection between addressing biases and enhancing creativity? How well do other diversity best practices in areas of recruiting, onboarding, and training support organizations to leverage diversity’s benefits?

Like most change efforts, unclear goals, poor planning, lack of leadership commitment, and unpredictable external forces cause diversity initiatives to go awry. Like other professionals who try to guide organizations through managing change, we diversity consultants can sidetrack well-meaning but ill-prepared leaders.

For diversity is not about focusing on bias or promoting cross-cultural communication or enhancing empathy. It’s not even about overhauling the recruitment process, developing mentoring programs, and creating resource groups. These are methods, not goals.

The primary goal of diversity initiatives, I believe, is to sharpen organization skills at managing the inevitable conflicts that emerge when people with different skills, values, and backgrounds come together to work towards some agreed-upon goal.

Conflict can be a scary word, evoking images of shouting, sabotaging, fighting, killing, and other forms of nastiness. Yet, at bottom, conflict is merely something that is in opposition to something else. It’s a part of life, something at which we all are pretty good at managing at times, and not so good at other times. Conflict can even be exhilarating.

Yet while reviewing ten diversity-related articles that I have saved over the years published in DiversityInc, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Scientific American, The Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post, and other business sources, I discovered that the word “conflict” appears only three times. If we diversity thought leaders avoid the diversity-conflict link, we are encouraging those we lead to avoid it as well … to the detriment of everyone.

How might viewing diversity through a conflict management lens change the way we conduct diversity training?

During a five-year period in the early 2000s, I conducted day-long workshops for several nonprofit organizations. During the first half of these sessions, participants explored the following questions:

What is diversity?

What is conflict? and

How have each of us managed diversity-related conflicts in the past?

After lunch, participants formed small groups to create and act out skits describing organizational conflicts with a diversity component. After each skit, the entire group developed strategies to manage the conflicts described in each skit. The workshop closed with participants sharing lessons learned and developing immediate next steps to advance diversity efforts.

While no formal evaluation activities took place after these workshops, I did hear about several examples of small behavioral changes that took place as a result of these sessions. My favorite resulted from a skit where participants pantomimed walking towards a refrigerator, opening its door, and running away.

“OK, OK, I get the point,” a male participant said as other participants (mostly women) laughed.

It turned out that the male in question didn’t remove his leftovers from the communal refrigerator, resulting in an increasingly rancid smell that infested everything surrounding it.

“You’ll be glad to know that this gentleman now consistently removes his stuff from the fridge,” the human resources director told me three months after I had conducted the workshop.

At best, diversity training by itself results in small, short-term positive behavioral change, but perhaps focusing on diversity’s conflict component might yield better results. Might educating people about biases each of us subconsciously carry be valuable? Probably, in the context of strengthening relationships so that disagreements can be addressed more effectively. Perhaps, workshops aimed at sharpening emotional intelligence skills instead of focusing on cultural awareness might be more effective in supporting people to manage those inevitable conflicts.

How might viewing diversity through a conflict management lens enhance other components of a diversity program?

Organization leaders should still set and enforce clear behavioral boundaries, as sexual harassment, demeaning talk, and discriminatory behavior are conflicts that need to be managed effectively to prevent uglier ones from emerging. But recruiters might be encouraged to ask prospective new hires to share examples of how they partnered with someone significantly different from themselves to accomplish something worthwhile. Mentors and members of employee resource groups might be recruited based in part on their ability to roll with conflict.

With diversity-related conflicts festering around us, it’s time to reassemble the diversity building blocks — those best practices — using conflict as the foundation.