Are You Open-Minded? 5 Ways To Know For Sure

by Ron Carucci for ForbesWhether you lead a team or run an entire organization, here are five ways to assess whether your actions and words match your self-proclaimed open-mindedness.1. Inventory who’s in your echo chamber. Echo chambers are alluring things.  They can fake “diversity” in masterful ways.  I recently sat around the table with a “diverse” leadership team. The leader was an African-American man.  The team had three women, two of whom were white, and one who was Asian American.  One of the women was openly gay.  There were also three men, two were Hispanic and one was white.  People politely joked about the latter being the “token white guy.”  But after watching them for a couple of days, I confronted the elephant in the room:  “There isn’t an ounce of true diversity at this table.”  And they all knew it. Sure, they had achieved diversity of gender and race. But that’s easier to achieve than diversity of views.  It wasn’t that there weren’t fundamental differences among the team – there were.  It was the degree to which they worked so hard to hide them that gave it away.  At the first sign of even mild dissent, their catch phrase was, “Well, I guess we agree to disagree.”Read More →