The Way Forward is Together

In a recent study by McKinsey & Company, research showed gender and ethnically diverse companies outperform their competitors by 21% and 33%, respectively. Accenture, a global strategy consulting firm, found that businesses which actively seek to employ people with disabilities enjoy 28% higher revenues and a 90% increase in employee retention. Diversity in hiring, however, is not enough to move your business forward—inclusion is imperative.

​Our role model for inclusion in the workplace might surprise you. Henry Ford, to most people, is remembered as the founder of the Ford Motor Company and chief developer of the assembly line. Yet few realize his progressive thinking in regard to hiring and inclusive practices within his business model. Decades ahead of his time, Ford understood that a fair workplace is a profitable workplace and provided jobs and opportunity for advancement for people of color, women, and those with disabilities. A close look at his leadership style reveals two core lessons.

1. For everyone to win, the game must be fair. By 1916, Ford’s employees represented 62 different nationalities. Understanding the importance of learning to work together, Ford hired race relations experts to observe both worker-to-worker and manager-to-worker interactions, then create a training program to ensure a tolerant and inclusive work environment. He standardized his wages, with workers in each position earning the same income, regardless of their ethnicity. And, though it earned him great criticism from his peers in the auto industry, Ford placed no race restrictions on advancement through his company; anyone with the skill and drive was eligible to earn any promotion. By 1918, Ford began hiring women, again going against trend to pay them the same wages as their male counterparts, and working with his leaders to ensure they had a safe and respectful working environment.
2. The way “it’s always been” is not always best.  By 1916, Ford employed more than 900 disabled workers, and by 1919, over 21 percent of his total workforce included men and women with physical disabilities. As disabled soldiers began returning en masse from war, Ford sought ways to adapt the work environment to provide more employment opportunities for handicapped workers. Within his factories, he adapted work stations to accommodate various disabilities. Ford also visited military hospitals, providing the injured and recovering soldiers opportunities to work on small tasks, such as screwing nuts onto small bolts, to earn wages from their hospital beds. Hoping to challenge the societal practice of limiting the potential of handicapped individuals, Ford included the following in his autobiography, published in 1922:

It would be quite outside the spirit of what we are trying to do, to take on men because they were crippled, pay them a lower wage, and be content with a lower output. That might be directly helping the men but it would not be helping them in the best way. The best way is always the way by which they can be put on a productive par with able-bodied men...I am quite sure that if work is sufficiently subdivided...there will be no dearth of places in which the physically incapacitated can do a man's job and get a man's wage. It is economically most wasteful to accept crippled men as charges and then to teach them trivial tasks...in the hope, not of aiding them to make a living, but of preventing despondency...Those who are below the ordinary physical standards are just as good workers, rightly placed, as those who are above.

Decades ahead of his time, Henry Ford understood the best way forward is together. Census data predicts that by 2050, there will be no racial or ethnic majority in our country, and women already make up 46.9% of the labor force. Research repeatedly shows that diversity, inclusion, and success go hand in hand, and that we, as leaders, have the power to make it happen.
 
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