The SEEMA Method
Five steps to inclusive leadership
SEEMA Method put human dignity at the center. When you place employees at the center and make diversity and equality about them, you will earn their respect. Through good diversity management, you apply diversity and cultural differences among employees to create value.
When we talk about leading a diverse staff of employees, we can also talk about the leader’s degree of diversity- maturity. The SEEMA Method identifies the individual leader’s layers of diversity. You will want to allow your employees to be themselves, to help them grow and expand their potential, insight, and diversity competence at work.
SEEING
We need to see past the labels we put on people—gender, race, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, age—to the real person underneath. We need to have this as a goal, to see the unique and beautiful individuals.
ENGAGING
Each of us knows how it feels to be in the minority because each of us has been in that position at one time or another; this means that we have within us the ability to deal with diversity. The SEEMA Method is all about harnessing this ability to be better at engaging with others in confidence so that we can identify with their experience.
EQUALIZING
The SEEMA Method goes even further. It guides us to move beyond what we have in common with others and embrace each individual’s uniqueness. Rather than attempting to melt employees into a giant pot of similarity, the most successful companies encourage workers to connect across what they have in common and learn from one another’s different points of view.
MANAGING
It falls to management to set the tone. Leaders develop what we call diversity-maturity. Having built their skills at celebrating both the commonalities and the differences between themselves and others, they develop strategies, action plans, training programs, support schemes, and mentoring schemes to encourage diversity competence in leaders at all levels in their organization and to make all employees responsible for building an inclusive culture in the organization.
ACTING
The organization then stands poised to tap into the full potential of diversity in growing the company in many more
ways than bragging rights about quota numbers. A company that wants to expand abroad, for example, hit new markets, or even just develop more innovative products for a specific clientele back home will find it much easier to do these things if it has reached diversity-maturity.
ways than bragging rights about quota numbers. A company that wants to expand abroad, for example, hit new markets, or even just develop more innovative products for a specific clientele back home will find it much easier to do these things if it has reached diversity-maturity.