Acquired Diversity: Varied Life Experiences Create a Stronger Team

Some folks believe that diversity initiatives aren’t for them. They think diversity only includes inherent traits such as race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. However, acquired traits like education, veteran status, socioeconomic class, places lived, and age are also dimensions of diversity. And eventually, all of us will assume one or more of these identities. Diversity really does include everyone.

Both inherent and acquired diversity drive processes critical to business success. You’ve likely heard the statistics about inherent diversity: companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile and top-quartile companies in ethnic and cultural diversity outperformed those in the fourth by 36% in profitability. But have you considered the benefits of acquired diversity?

There’s limited research tying acquired diversity directly to quantitative outcomes, as acquired diversity is difficult to measure due to its malleable nature. However, we can logically deduce several benefits.

Let’s take places lived as an example. Imagine you are a global company headquartered in the United States with clients throughout Europe and Asia. Folks who have lived in these places and are multilingual would be a huge asset to your company. Such employees can be a critical link between U.S.-based executives and foreign-based clients.