LORDSTOWN Event encourages diverse work force

YSU, GM sponsor breakfast to incorporate workplace diversity.
By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
LORDSTOWN -- You're in a sinking boat in deep water with your mother, your spouse and your child. You can save the life of only one. Whom do you choose?
If you chose your child, you're not alone.
Only six of the 75 Mahoning Valley public officials and business leaders attending a Diversity Week breakfast Monday said they would choose to save their mother, and only one, a newlywed, chose her spouse.
The overwhelming majority chose to save the child.
That result is typical for an American audience, said Dr. W. Terell Jones, vice president for educational equity at Pennsylvania State University, and it says a lot about the culture and value system here.
In a Philippine audience, he said, 92 out of 100 would save their mother.
"The Philippines is more history-focused. Americans are future-focused," the speaker said, using the dilemma to illustrate the way people look at things and value things differently from culture to culture.
Business aspect: Those differences can be valuable and even profitable to a company's bottom line, Jones said, but a successful diversity program is more than just keeping a tally of how many women or minorities are hired or hold management positions.
"You've got to value differences, but you've also got to manage differences," he said.
Managing differences means setting reasonable hiring and training goals in keeping with the available work force, he said.
And Jones said workers should be required to maintain certain behavioral standards in their treatment of co-workers.
"I believe behavioral change is a prerequisite to attitude and value changes," he said. "All of us need to know a lot more about people who are different. It's a learned process. We all have issues to address."
Diverse work force: The breakfast, held at the General Motors Assembly Plant in Lordstown, was sponsored by GM and Youngstown State University to kick off the local observance of Diversity Works Week, a series of events designed to celebrate and encourage workplace diversity.
Bruce Pierson, manager of GM's Lordstown Metal Center, said the company's fabricating plant is the most diverse of the eight plants he's worked in.
"Our fabricating plant has become a melting pot of the world," he said, noting that employees have been transferred there in recent years from GM facilities in California, Texas, New York and several foreign countries.
Pierson said plant managers try to recognize differences and turn them into assets. Diversity-related complaints from employees are taken very seriously and investigated thoroughly.
Dr. David Sweet, president of Youngstown State University, said he's proud of the fact that minority enrollment is up 11 percent at YSU this fall and professors are emphasizing the importance of diversity in the classroom.
"Educationally, we need to prepare our students to understand and work in a diverse workplace," he said. "There's the pragmatic side to that, too, because when we welcome diversity we'll attract more minority students."
Women and minorities: Maureen Midgley, plant manager of the GM's Lordstown Assembly Plant, said the plant has continued the progress in bringing more women into leadership positions that was begun under her predecessor Herman Maass. Besides herself, she said, there are three other women in top management posts.
The plant's employee population reflects the community's ethnic mix, but there's still work to do to bring more blacks and other racial minorities into leadership roles, she said.
"I think we're ready to move beyond quotas and numbers and reward people for their behavior," Midgley said. "Nobody wants to be a quota. People want the opportunity to be recognized for the way they handle problems, and that's what we're looking at."