Cultivating diversity

(by David Burke - from Hydro Intranet)

(2006-07-19) Like Hydro’s current ad campaign suggests - “why not?” - Hydro vice president and author Inger Tafjord could end up promoting her new book on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

AUTHOR: Hydro's Inger Tafjord is an engineer who chose to work with people. (Photo: Terje S. Knudsen)

Oprah's "Book Club" is not only the world's biggest, it suggests works that can help people become better human beings. Tafjord's book - "The Lifedance – a matter of life and death" - fits the description.

Now all she has to do is translate "Lifedance" into English.

HUMAN ENGINEERING
By her own description, Tafjord is an engineer who chose to work with people. Her long-time HR work in Hydro has helped define diversity at a deep and intimate level. She's behind Hydro's booklet, "Diversity – our natural resource," published in 1999.

"The Lifedance" explores new depths of diversity – both from the individual and organizational perspectives. Her HR career in Hydro has resulted in meeting all kinds of people, often in crisis. "Lifedance" profiles many of them – from a male executive in his late 50s facing professional marginalization, to two young women sexually harassed by an older superior. Most of them find strength through adversity.

FINDING BALANCE
"Can the challenge be to train our sensitivities and sense of humility so that our perception of limitless is tempered with a sense of balance?" she asks rhetorically.

Time and time again in her conversations with people, Tafjord says she found that open dialogue evoked suppressed personal issues that can impact the organization with dysfunctional consequences. She strongly believes openly discussing these "hidden" issues helps cultivate personal and collective awareness - facilitating sustainable solutions that improve the organization's effectiveness.

Tafjord urges Hydro employees to have the courage to confront "hidden" issues they feel strongly about and for leaders to have the courage to open up and respect people for who they are. "We need to unlearn a lot of behavior as well as forgive ourselves and our colleagues," she says. "Finding the ability to do that is part of the diversity inside ourselves."

NO RIGHT OR WRONG
"We tend to see situations from our own perspective," says Tafjord. "We need to open up and see the alternative perspectives. If we only see challenges as problems, we tend to have right and wrong solutions. Then we are in trouble. Organizations have lots of dilemmas - and there's no absolute right or wrong to dilemmas.

"We have to be humble. It can be right to be wrong and it's not wrong to not be right."

In a world moving steadily faster and faster, doesn't devoting too many resources to cultivating dialogue hinder an organization's decisiveness, flexibility and ability to compete?

"Business will inevitably function more quickly if we take the time to respect various perspectives on issues and weave the resulting awareness into the bigger picture," she responds.

Read more about the diversity theme in the next issue of Hydro's company-wide hi! Magazine.