Recently there has been a large amount of coverage both in Australia and India about the way Indian nationals are being treated.

Several people have been threatened with their lives or have in fact lost their lives in the past weeks. This has been of huge concern for many reasons, not only for the people of India who are becoming a larger and larger part of our community, but also for those involved in Australian politics and for the greater community.

What may concern us in business is that the things that happen in the parks and streets around our cities also affect us in business.

Ask the question: say you have a mix of ethnicities in your business, either on the ground in Australia or in their own countries like Indonesia, China, India, the Middle East or New Zealand.

How do you cater for people from these different ethnicities? What do you do to create open dialogue or cultural understanding? How are you bringing people from different cultures together in order that they all get along and can learn from each other without barriers?

Given that we often struggle even to negotiate simple things with regard to immigration laws, like who should be able to fly or settle, it's even more important that we treat ethnically diverse staff with respect. When you get it right, you can really enable not only increased performance but also faster and clearer communication.

Take a look at a quick video with some thoughts on diversity and talent in the workplace from people like Tig Gillam, CEO Adecco, and Marilyn Johnson, VP Market Development IBM and other business leaders. Are you doing these things in your workplace?

Consider three things in your business:

• Work out who your most talented people are.
• Find out where they are from and why their background has helped them get the results they are currently getting with what they do.
• Create a process where your people can share their experiences with others in your team. Don’t put them on a pedestal, but give them the ability to share how their background makes a difference.

• Have your teams discuss what it means to come from their own cultures and the effects on results as they see them.

Bring all your people together culturally so they support each other and are willing to have respect for each other's differences.

It’s no coincidence that people like Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King & Barack Obama, through their ability to bring large groups of people with major differences together, have made such a difference in our world.

What could you do in your organisation's CULTURAL world and what would it take to boost it?

Why can one sales person write 150% more business, or one mining site have 80% fewer people issues, or one team produce 200% more productivity than the others? Six Sigma is a process used in certain environments to “reduce” inefficiencies. Even then, projects are run and there are still major differences in specific people's performance.

The fact is that while procedures in business are essential, unfortunately the “Outlier” results – that is, the ones that really make the difference – are not written up because they are found by high performers who don’t spend all their time writing. They are busy getting results!

So how could you build a live system or process for capturing and then replicating the informal or tacit smarts of your internal talent? Does it matter that you are not in sales or banking? Could these processes work in government, oil & gas, engineering or contact centre environments?

Check out this great little conversation on companies transferring internal smarts via technologies.

If you want to be able to propagate these kinds of smarts, you need to create a process by which to do so. In the age we live in, in most cases, this process is going to look like a specific technology – SharePoint or some form of intranet or capture system. You can do it manually to start with and this can work great also.

Consider the following five points to enable you to capture and propagate “Key Informal Business Smarts”:

1. Have you looked at your top five product lines/key deliverables/client issues?
2. Do you know who is best at what and why in these areas? The copout is to say, "Oh, Sally has been here for ages and she is just a natural." The value is to work out what she does that makes her "a natural". For instance, notice that when she has an issue with her work she calls Steve in product development and he resolves her issue within 5 mins. Compare this with the rest of the team whose issues go into a queue somewhere and take days to resolve. Hence she gets things done 5 times faster.
3. How often do you have team meetings to discuss an area where someone is clearly much better than the others? By the end of the meeting, you can ensure that everyone now has access via new knowledge skills and behaviours to the strategy being used by the high performer.
4. If you have these meetings, great! Do you then get one of your admin team to spend 15-20 minutes typing up the learnings, choosing some keywords and then putting them into a searchable database? This enables others who were not at the meeting or new people coming into the organisation to access these smarts. You can use a ranking system on the database so people can rank the value they get from each document or recording.
5. Do you bring the smarts to life by using a forum/blog or wiki-type entry moderated by one of your best people? Not all high performers want to help, mostly because they are never asked. However, ask a high performer if they would like to help the rest of the team get better. If you have treated them right over time, they’ll jump at the opportunity.

The ability to transfer the “Intangible” smarts of your business – the ones that are making the biggest difference today – can transform your business. You need to be willing to acknowledge that there are better ways of doing things. Consider that in many cases team meetings cover current issues like what’s going wrong, who’s started or leaving, and focuses less on the things that are making a large difference to the results today.

Consider what you’re not doing and change it!