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If you haven't yet launched a full-blown effort to diversify your workforce, it's time to start. But you can't simply flip a switch. "You evolve as an organization. You can't say, 'We have a supportive environment, now everything will change,'" says Hicks.

Instead, building diversity is a matter of establishing and then building trust both with your existing workforce and in the broader community. Diversity is internal behavior that reflects what is true about your company. What is your representation of women or minorities in management? Where are they reflected in middle and senior management decisions? One of the key metrics of success is how your employees view your efforts and how those efforts are viewed externally."

Diversity is a business objective and it starts at the top. "Experience tells us that the most diverse companies—those ruled by a hierarchy of imagination and filled with people of all ages, races and backgrounds—are the most successful over time," says Xerox Chairman and CEO Anne M. Mulcahy.

"Somehow, diversity breeds creativity. Maybe it's because people with different backgrounds challenge each other's underlying assumptions, freeing everybody from convention and orthodoxy," she adds.

Diversity has to also apply to benefits the company offers its employees. Xerox established Life Cycle, which allows employees to designate a certain amount of money (up to $10,000) to supplement buying a home, or caring for elderly parents or child care.

Hicks sees diversity as a pyramid with creating and managing near the bottom and valuing and leveraging diversity near the top.

It's a manager's ability to be flexible, which has nothing to do with race or skin color, that impacts his or her success.

Diversity also brings an organization the gift of creativity. But that gift is only unwrapped if you have diversity in work processes and thought processes. "If you have two people in the room and they think alike, you have one too many," he says.

And that brings us back to the bottom line. Happy employees who enjoy being at work are also going to be more productive employees. And if you want to do business with other companies, you'll have to understand and embrace diversity. Minority and female-owned businesses are the largest growing business segment in the world (75 percent to 80 percent). "Those are potential business transactions—if you can communicate with those diverse markets," he says. e