Question: Within 10 years, who will be the scarce workers and managers you will be desperately trying to hire?
Answer: They will look less and less like that white guy (me) in the photo to the left. So will your future customers.
Want proof? Look no farther than Tampa Bay's current crop of children ages 10 to 14. They are your employees and customers in the making.
In this kid world, whites make up a bit more than 50 percent, while blacks compose just over 20 percent and Hispanics just under 20 percent. That means the area's black and Hispanic populations, which today are still relatively small, will combine to represent close to 40 percent of Tampa Bay's adults in their early 20s by 2013.
If all this demographic future-talk seems too remote, think again. Most businesses still operate by looking backward. Few blacks, Hispanics or women hold positions in the top ranks of area companies. And even fewer minorities can be found among this region's economic development leaders.
What delicious irony. Here's our mostly white, mostly male business leadership trying to prepare for a future increasingly driven by a dramatic rise of minorities. Sooner or later, that formula of exclusion won't work.
Inclusion - making Tampa Bay's ranks of business leaders more diverse - is a key theme behind two forums this week. Tuesday's sparsely attended session was held at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. The second forum opens this morning at the University of South Florida's downtown Tampa center.
The meetings are part of a bigger campaign dubbed "Faces of Florida." It is the work of a Florida Chamber of Commerce affiliate called Leadership Florida and backed by a grant by Workforce Florida Inc. Regionally, the campaign is known as "Faces of Tampa Bay" and is supported by the Tampa Bay Partnership.
Here's the local rub. Like the old saying about a tree falling in the woods: If a new campaign kicks off to encourage diversity among Tampa Bay businesses, will anyone really hear it?
"Tampa Bay is not perceived as an area that welcomes African-Americans," says Sherril Claus, a veteran workplace consultant who serves as the region's chief contact for the diversity campaign.
On a scale of black-friendly regions, Florida is still behind the times. A poll of voters conducted last year for Leadership Florida as a prelude to its Faces of Florida project showed that 67 percent think white Floridians have a high-medium degree of prejudice toward blacks. And 73 percent surveyed think blacks have a high-medium level of prejudice toward whites. Yet, only 14 percent of those polled think they have a high-medium degree of prejudice toward other races.
That's not a healthy environment in which to nurture diversity. But this week's sessions may offer a diversity argument compelling enough to warm a CEO's heart. In the long run, businesses that embrace diversity will attract the best workers, appeal to the most customers, and be best positioned to prosper.
That's a critical point, one emphasized Tuesday by Progress Energy Florida chief executive Bill Habermeyer and again by LaWanda Byrd, diversity officer at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute.
"Diversity supports the business case," Byrd says. "Long-term, without diversity, your company will become a has-been."
Her solution: To "weave diversity into the culture of an organization."
Byrd, along with other diversity specialists from the Southeastern Equity Center, Wachovia Bank, Progress Energy and the Tampa Tribune, all offered convincing reasons for area businesses to hire and promote more broadly.
While nobody linked hands and broke out into Kumbaya, the tone of these meetings may prove too benign to achieve some clearly tough, culture-changing goals. Tuesday's interesting and well-meaning forum was mostly preaching to the choir. The harder task of addressing prejudice in the larger work force remains.
At the least, these meetings are supposed to provide opportunities for bigger, richer companies to share their ideas about successful diversity programs that smaller Tampa Bay companies might find beneficial. The "Faces of Tampa Bay" project is starting to collect such ideas and other resources on diversity online at the Tampa Bay Partnership Web site. More details, including contact information for Sherril Claus, can be found under "Faces of Tampa Bay" at www.tampabay.org
Take a look. Get involved. Time is short. All those 10- to 14-year-old kids aren't getting any younger.
