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To highlight ways of improving staff attitudes to ethnic‐minority clients.

The briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds his own impartial comment and tries to place the article in context.

Gillert and Chuzischvili's article shows that employee beliefs play a more important part than specific intercultural “competencies” in helping staff to deal with ethnic‐minority clients more effectively. Change will be successfully achieved only if it is part of a larger process that causes employees to see that beliefs are not linked to any moralistic notion of having to be fair or non‐discriminatory, but to the very identity of a good professional in the organization. In this context, “on the job” training is more important than classroom instruction.

The article suggests key ways in which diversity training can be made more effective.

This article is based on the experience of a pilot training on “dealing effectively with diversity” for branch office bank personnel in The Netherlands. We conclude that being successful in serving ethnic minority clients is a matter of beliefs, playing a more decisive role than specific “intercultural” competencies. The experience of Rabobank shows that learning to deal with diverse clients, then, will only be effective if it is part of a larger change process, and if training is just one of several interventions: impressions and lessons learned from work in progress.