Promoting Diversity in Leadership

By bringing together researchers and community organizations dealing with different dimensions of diverse leadership at various levels in several sectors, the project intended to produce new knowledge to inform and offer practical and creative tools that enable them to respond better, faster and more effectively to promote diversity in leadership.

Effective management of diversity is critical to organizational performance and Canada’s competitiveness. Diverse leadership also signals who belongs, while shaping the aspirations and achievements of young people. Women, immigrants and visible minorities, Aboriginal people, people with disabilities, and those with diverse sexual orientation are under-represented in leadership roles. However efforts to measure this are fragmented and challenged by definitional, ideological and methodological issues.

Notions of leadership are socially constructed, highly racialized and gendered. Representations of leadership in the media reinforce this. The practices across sectors and in the media that constrain or promote diversity in leadership warrant further investigation. Approaches to advancing diversity in leadership are fragmented. There are distinct challenges facing Aboriginal people, women, immigrants and visible minorities, persons with disabilities, Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) people.

Work has tended to focus on specific sectors – elected officials, the private sector and nonprofit organizations – but there are opportunities to share leading practices across sectors. Finally, analysis has tended to focus on individual (micro), organizational (meso) or societal (macro) barriers and interventions without an integrated framework to provide a shared analysis for coordinated action and impact assessment.

The DiversityLeads project will address the challenge of leveraging diverse leadership for social and economic development in Canada. By bringing together researchers and community organizations dealing with different dimensions of diverse leadership at various levels in several sectors, the project aims to produce new knowledge that informs and offers practical and creative tools that will enable them to respond better, faster and more effectively to promote diversity in leadership.

Core Questions:

1. What is diversity in leadership? How can we benchmark and assess progress?

2. What are the barriers to diversity in leadership at the individual, organizational level and societal level? What lessons can we learn from individual and organizational successes (and failures) to help organizations and individuals erode these barriers?

3. How is diverse leadership represented by the media?

4. Is there a framework that allows us to integrate approaches, across groups, sectors and levels, to promote sustainable change?

Research Goals:

The DiversityLeads project will achieve these goals in relation to Aboriginal peoples by:

• mapping current practices and fostering new knowledge about the participation and advancement of Aboriginal peoples in leadership roles in the GTA with comparators to other major cities like Vancouver and Montreal;

• examine the barriers Aboriginal peoples face in achieving leadership roles and the strategies which can help them advance;

• improve our understanding of how media portrays Aboriginal peoples and the practices which shape representation in the media in order to improve them;

• develop effective approaches to mobilizing knowledge to promote the advancement of Aboriginal peoples drawing on the experience of academics and stakeholders in business, government and the nonprofit sector. Most importantly, perhaps it will build a shared understanding and framework for creating sustained change.

DiversityLeads is a five-year Community University Research Alliance (CURA) Project.