Leonardo Cardenas: Living Diversity

Leonardo Cardenas

Director General, TÜV SÜD America de Mexico

How do you live and practice diversity?
Diversity in many forms (age, gender, race, culture, family, etc.) and is all around us, basically, it is unavoidable. However, it can be enjoyable or painful, that is a choice and a mindset. I enjoy diversity and the more diverse an environment is the more comfortable I am in, because diversity means learning. You learn from kids (even babies), you learn from other genders, you learn from diverse cultures even if you grew in the same city, you even learn from people with diverse hobbies. I am quite convinced that the only real requirement to enjoy diversity is forgetting there is a Manichean world and understanding the environments we live in (family, friends, work, sports, etc.) are full of colors and provide incredible learning opportunities. 

How do you encourage diversity in your team and get your directs to walk the talk?
Basically, by showing on a daily basis what a diverse team we are and how we benefit from diversity, I see five direct benefits from diversity on our everyday work:

• Cutting Red Tape: when you encourage diversity; you encourage reducing the red tape (that adds no value) in job profiles, in process and this becomes a state of mind; red tape is meant to protect the status quo, diversity is changing the status quo.
• Allows Innovation: people talk a lot about innovation and has become lately this huge management trend “we have to innovate” and that is good, but many time we confuse innovation with improvement; if you are surround by like thinking coworkers, you probably have limited your innovation into improvement, you need external energy to really change things and that is what diversity brings to the table.
• Requires New Negotiation Technics: have you ever tried to take your little kids to the park and your grandmother? If you, have you can understand you need different negotiation skills to accomplish the same activity. Same goes on the workplace, some activities come natural to some cultures, some are difficult to accept,  and the same negotiating tactic does not work, so you basically need to expand your negotiating skills and be diverse within yourself.
• Remove the “Obvious”: nothing is obvious for everyone, if you are my age, the first cellphone you had was not obvious, and neither was the first automatic faucet in a public restroom. Working with diversity means you can see the elephant, but also the wall, the rope, the snake and the column at the same time, diversity helps to question the way things “have always been done” and that is the start point for improvement.
• Increases Customer Understanding: being “Customer Center” is a great phrase, however to practice it, you need understand your customers, and yes your customers, whether you want it or not, are diverse the more prepared you are to deal with diversity, the more you can understand your customer’s need in the way they express them and not try to get them to express them your way. 
  

Can you share with me an experience where you have seen the positive impact of having a diverse team?
At a point a couple of years ago here at the office, several senior persons retired and even though succession plans were in place and those who took their places were fully capable, and have great skills, we lost the view of a certain age group. Even though we had the customers, and we had all the process, we were slagging in new sales, and a part was because most of the group was in the same age group, we brought in an older person to help with sales strategies, and sales went back on track, there is not something we can pinpoint on what changed, there was no “silver bullet” but there was a different question towards the customers’ needs, and the mixture of old eyes and new hands just works very well.

What, in your opinion and experience are some of the challenges for women to develop their careers to senior level (management or specialist) in TÜV SÜD?
Actually, in TÜV SÜD Mexico office, there is no special challenge for women form the labor point of view, and from the personal point of view, I believe we have found a way to be flexible enough that while we have had women with diverse life styles (married with children, married without children, single mothers living alone, single mothers living with their parents, and a big etc.). Normally there is no need for a special permission or work leave because “I am woman”, So there might be diverse challenges from woman to woman, my job is to make sure that none of those challenges keeps them from developing as persons and as coworkers. As of today if you remove the CEO of the office, 2 out of the 4 highest salaries are for women, and the highest paid specialist is a woman, as well as the operations manager. Also there are more women working in the office than men. And as far as to my succession (which I don’t see coming very soon), the two natural successors include a man and a woman, so there is always room for improvement; but I want to believe and see evidence every day there is no “glass ceiling” in this office.

If there is one piece of advice that you would give to our female colleagues who wish to further develop their careers in TÜV SÜD, what would it be?
If you are here and you believe in yourself, you are winning the race already; don’t believe being a woman is a kind of handicap; do your work the best you can do, don’t aim to be the “best woman” in the company; aim to be the best manager, director, CFO, CEO, whatever your dream job is inside TÜV SÜD and be the best there has ever been. There are no limits besides the ones you set for yourself.