Unfortunately, when one thinks of workplace diversity, what leaps to mind is little more than a long series of Do's and Don'ts to be memorized and adhered to in the workplace. What we don't speak about nearly often enough is the matter of joy.

Joy at work would be a very bizarre concept even if it were on the periphery of the business vocabulary. Yet, oddly, joy at work fits most naturally in a conversation about workplace diversity. Because being around people - and any time you are around people, you have diversity - can be one of the great joys of being human.  

It's one of the cool things about being at work. Even if you don't particularly love the work you do, sometimes you can enjoy the people and the relationships you have with the other people in your office. And, sometimes your can have a great job making lots of money and still hate your job because you come home drained and spent every night from all the infighting and politicking and back-stabbing that goes on.

A great deal of what brings us joy at work is being in a place with cool people and cool relationships, where we are allowed to learn and grow in what we do. We enjoy being a part of a wonderful team. We like being around wonderful people. And even though we may not always see eye to eye, when there is respect and mutual care about one another, then the workplace is a better place to be.

It's only when we don't handle the diversity well that bad things happen.  

So the task is to create a workplace culture where we experience the joy, which comes from being around other people, who have different perspectives, backgrounds, ideas, and joys. And to have a culture that gives its teams the skills they need to handle situations when the differences between people threaten to become distracting and harmful to the overall team spirit.

Rather than focusing on Self-Directed teams, perhaps creating a culture of Self-Correcting Team would be useful.  

These teams foster open-mindedness. They provide training in critical joy-at- work skills, like the skill of giving feedback in ways that are trustworthy, gentle, caring and firm; and the skill of receiving feedback, even when it's something you don't necessarily want to hear (there must be training in both skills, because you can have all the feedback giving skill sin the world, but if the listener is not skilled in how to receive feedback, you could be Martin Luther King Jr. and still not get through to them).

Diversity training is more than race and gender training. Race and gender are crucial, painful issues and should not in any way be minimized or ignored. But wouldn't it be better to have diversity training that addressed those issues in the context of creating a wonderful workplace culture?

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