IN HEALTHCARE, diversity is an organizational leadership issue that is most often addressed through legal policies regarding equal opportunity, affirmative action, and nondiscrimination statutes. The lead articles outline additional methods, such as education, collection of data on racial and ethnic disparities, and management of diversity in clinical services, patient care, leadership, human resources, and community relations as factors to address considering diversity issues. In my experience as a healthcare executive, leadership representation, organizational culture, and organizational support of diversity are the most powerful change agents and should be the primary focus of diversity initiatives. The concept of diversity is inclusive and ultimately influences the global community. Diversity in the workplace creates a productive environment in which individual differences contribute to overall success. Diversity should based on learning from others whose perspectives are different from our own and creating workplace practices that support such learning. A global learning community results leadership welcomes differences and fosters an organizational culture that supports constructive conflict. DIVERSITY: DRIVEN BY LEADERSHIP Diversity in organizations is driven by flexible leaders who value change. Currently, healthcare organizations recruit management that matches the majority population of the organization. As a result, the demography of the leadership fails to reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. Hospital leaders are predominantly Caucasian men, but the communities they serve are made up of multiple ethnic groups. In the lead articles, Cordova, Beaudin, and Iwanabe and Armada and Hubbard point out that the majority population in the United States continues to decrease as minority populations grow. Lin GrensingPophal (1999) writes, when employers focus too keenly on culture fit in the hiring process, they can develop blind spots for other problems - such as inadvertently discriminating against protected classes of workers, developing a workforce that lacks complementary skills and personalities or downplaying the importance of competency-based skill sets. Overemphasizing diversity in the hiring process and ignoring the big picture can result in an inability to effectively change the culture. Armada and Hubbard write that over the next 40 years, people of color are expected to account for 90 percent of U.S. population growth. The risk is high that healthcare organizations will continue to poorly manage diversity initiatives even as the culture evolves. This unmanaged diversity will cause organizational conflict. In response, healthcare organizations should move toward bottom-up diversity initiatives supported from the top down. Keith Swenson, a principal at William Mercer, Inc., believes that a strong diversity program requires a clear understanding of the organization's values (GrensingPophal 1999). The organization must agree on the values, and the values should be exemplified and used as benchmarks at every stage of the employment process. Once organizational culture and values are clearly established, the leadership must ensure that the organization also addresses factors such as legal concerns related to discrimination. The corporate leadership of some large healthcare systems have made diversity programs mandatory for all entities within the system. However, these initiatives are not always successfully adopted. I worked for an organization in which the hospital leadership ignored the system's diversity initiatives. A group of senior leaders involved in executive recruitment stated that there were no minority candidates in the market who could meet the criteria for a vacant senior leadership position. I had the opportunity to review the credentials of some of the candidates. I was surprised to learn that those who moved forward in the hiring process were Caucasians less qualified than some of the minority candidates. …