Everyone knows the U.S. church is becoming more diverse. And we know that growing diversity is beginning to have an impact on almost every parish. In the old days, we dealt with diversity by segregating people into separate neighborhoods and separate parishes. I once visited a rural town in the Midwest that had two parishes, even though one would have served the entire community. I was told the reason for the double abundance was that parish A was founded for immigrants from Germany and parish B was founded for immigrants from a different region of Germany!

For the most part, we are no longer founding ethnic parishes. Parishes that used to be traditionally Italian or Polish or whatever now find themselves sharing pew space with Catholics from other parts of the globe. What we wind up sharing is not just a difference in language or foods that are brought to the parish potlucks. We also encounter very different styles of leadership and participation in parish life.

In The Loudest Duck: Moving Beyond Diversity While Embracing Difference to Achieve Success at Work, Laura Liswood analyzes how businesses deal with diversity issues. Modern business has engaged in “diversity training” or “sensitivity training” for decades and has mostly failed to leverage the talents of their non-dominant-group employees and managers, according to Liswood. She gives her readers some new lenses with which to look at diversity and some strategies leaders can use to go beyond merely accommodating diversity to maximizing everyone’s contribution to the company.

Do you bring your grandma to work?

The key insight for me was what she calls the grandma effect. When I was a kid, my grandmother told me the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In China, someone my age was taught by his grandmother that the loudest duck gets shot. If he and I are both on the parish council in one of those German-heritage parishes I visited, who do you think will have the most influence with the pastor? All of us grew up with sayings and attitudes that are conscious and unconscious ways of grooming us for success within our own culture. If I tried to bring my squeaky-wheel skills to a parish in China, however, I’d very likely get shot down. The task for a parish leader is to discover what “success behavior” looks like for the various cultures he or she encounters in the parish. And then either accommodate parish ministry to those behaviors or provide stretching exercises for the non-dominant group members so they can participate more successfully. Or usually, the leader will have to employ a combination of both strategies.

Are you a mouse or an elephant?

Another powerful insight from Liswood is her metaphor of the elephant and the mouse. If an elephant and a mouse are in the same room, the elephant may not even be aware of the mouse. And even if the elephant is aware, it doesn’t pay much attention to what the mouse is up to. The mouse, on the other hand, watches the elephant vigilantly, alert to every move the elephant might make. Liswood uses the example of female poker players, who are disproportionately successful at winning games. The reason, according to the women, is they have been learning since they were pre-teens how to read the behavior of men. This is a big advantage in poker. Men, on the other hand, have had less motivation to pay such close attention to female behavior. So in a business or a parish, the dominant group will need to acquire skills for listening better and observing the non-verbal behaviors of traditionally non-dominant groups.

The entire book is worth reading for every parish leader, but Chapter 6, “We hire for difference and fire because they are not the same,” should be required for every pastor, anyone in the diocese who has hiring and firing responsibilities, and anyone in the parish who recruits volunteers. When a parish employee or volunteer is fired, it is, in my experience, more often because of a clash in culture and not because of incompetence. Liswood’s conclusion of the chapter is a good summary of the entire book:

In organizations, managers have the power to allo­cate scarce resources, hire, fire, promote, judge, review, give raises, and assign good projects. The employees re­ceive these positive and negative experiences based on the norms of the culture and how closely they ascribe to them. In diverse organizations, the dynamics are complex. We often evaluate the advantage or disadvantage of oth­ers based on those we are comfortable with, and whether their speaking rituals sound like our own. It helps, then, if two people bring the same Grandmas to work, but that is precisely what doesn’t happen with diversity. We uncon­sciously have right and wrong columns in our head that we add up. When we put different people together—which diversity inherently does—we have to go the next step, move beyond the diversity, and be conscious of who we and others are. Only then can we get the true value of that diversity, make the workplace fair, keep the pipelines flowing, and have more effective global companies.

Share your diversity story

How about you? What is your experience with diversity in parish life? Are you struggling with it? Have you been successful in incorporating differences? Please share your story because it will be helpful for others to hear.

Disclosure: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned.