You lack diversity on your leadership team.
You don’t have enough underrepresented minorities on your leadership team.
You don’t have enough of them around the table when you’re making decisions.
In healthcare, all across the country, the leadership of hospitals and healthcare organizations don’t reflect the diversity of the patients that they serve.
Women make up 78% of employees at healthcare organizations yet there are barely 22% in a leadership role above chief nursing officer.
There are many challenges in organizations with gender diversity.
It’s even more complex when it comes to underrepresented minorities.
African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities make up 50% of the patient population at most hospitals, but less than 9% of executives around the board table.
You have a diversity problem in your organization.
You’ve got to find a way to fix it.
You’ve got to find a way to work on it.
Diversity helps you to be more successful and deliver better outcomes for the people that you serve.
There’s years’ worth of research that shows how important it is to have diverse thinkers and voices at the table.
If you’re working to solve a problem around health disparities, you need to have a diverse group of people at the table to help you to figure it out.
If you’re working to develop a leadership program for women, it might be nice to have some women in the room.
You must work on diversity and inclusion all day, every day and every year moving forward.
Your patients are going to get more and more diverse as time goes on.
They’re going to get more diverse racially, ethnically, social economically and by gender.
All types of people are going to come to you for care.
When they come to you, are they going to see anybody that looks like them in a leadership role or even in the front row of the frontline?
If you don’t focus on diversity and inclusion, you’ll have challenges understanding how to meet the needs of a particular community.
You might make a mistake, and that mistake will cost you.
Focus on developing a team that is diverse and inclusive and allow those voices to help you to deliver better care, better outcomes and better value to the communities that you serve.
