Overview

Jack Welsh, the former leader of GE, repeatedly stressed it was the company s diversity that was its greatest strength. By diversity he referred to both its varied business divisions and its multicultural employees. While the popular management thinking of the 1980s and 1990s was to focus on a core business and stick to the knitting, Jack Welsh helped the multifocused conglomerate GE to thrive. He did it, in part, by taking best practices from one division, reworking them, and applying them to other divisions in the company. As with diverse corporate divisions, so with multinational employees take the differing and often conflicting ideas, work them, and come up with something better.

The two biggest reasons immigrants are a growing segment of North American workforces are simply that qualified immigrants are showing up in greater numbers with a desire to work, and there is not an overabundance, locally, of qualified people to draw on. As a result, our workplaces become more culturally diverse.

Cultural differences are a source of both challenges and opportunities. In most cases, the challenges come first and the opportunities later. To make it beyond the early challenges and to reap the rewards requires preparation, patience, and persistence, as do most good things in life.

In our Prologue, we listed common negative statements that you perhaps have heard from others in your organization regarding the employment of recent immigrants. Under stress, and without preparation or support, it is common for multicultural teams to display some of the worst...