Respect Over Diversity
Definition
The claim: counted diversity and lived respect are different things, and a workplace that has the first can believe it has the second while it does not. Gender and nationality mix are visible and easy to report; respect for difference is neither, so it goes unmeasured and unbuilt.
This is a position argued across two published pieces, the second explicitly framing Respect as a Scrum value the author had newly re-encountered.
Core Ideas
Two views of the same team
“We are a real diversity focused team, because we have people from Asia, America, Europe, and local people, males and females.”
“Nearly all the board members are male — do we have diversity in the organization, and do we really care about it?”
Both speakers believe they are talking about diversity. Neither is talking about whether people are treated fairly.
The real failure is subjective review criteria
The sharper problem is a colleague who labels people Social, Hard-working, Brave, Collaborating. The tags are neutral; the criteria are not:
- if you don’t meet people the way I do → not social
- if I can’t understand you → not collaborating
- if you don’t match my expectation → not hard-working
Every standard is the observer’s own habits, generalised. Diversity without objective criteria makes this worse, not better — it adds difference for the subjective standard to punish, while the headcount says the culture is healthy.
A fair review rests on what a person does, what they are good at, and how well they communicate — including when the working language is not their first, or when they communicate in an engineer’s register rather than a manager’s.
The difference that no diversity metric captures
Four cases, each with a snap judgment and a question that dissolves it:
| Observation | Snap judgment | What was missed |
|---|---|---|
| A types slowly, doesn’t know shortcuts | ”stone age, not qualified for software” | hardware and OS familiarity — a Mac user handed Windows |
| B is away 2–3 hours at lunch | ”lazy, tell the boss to fire him” | a French colleague’s proper meal, not a work-day sandwich |
| C doesn’t talk, hard to understand | ”doesn’t communicate, fire him” | English is not everyone’s first language — slow yourself down |
| D starts very late in a flexible workplace | ”doesn’t collaborate, fire him” | flexible means flexible |
None of these differences appear in a diversity report. All of them get people judged.
Why the metric is actively harmful
Focusing on the countable “gives people a wrong feeling — we have the diversity so we have the culture of respect.” It supplies a surface reading that makes the real problem harder to see. What a workplace needs is Respect, Objectives, Collaboration and Happiness — with respect for difference as the load-bearing one.
Relationships
- Constructive Feedback (BIQ) — the practical fix for subjective criteria: specify the behavior
- Widget Factory vs Film Crew — the two org cultures this judgment style tracks
- Talent Retention — what a culture of unfair review costs in people
- Scrum — where Respect is a named value
- Measurement Dysfunction — the general case of a metric standing in for the thing it measures
- Work Culture & Management — parent topic