Despite the centrality of managing diversity effectively in contemporary organizations, existing literature gives disparate and incomplete accounts of how managers actually manage diversity in practice. The prevailing managerial literature focuses on what diversity activities should be involved in managing diversity but does not identify how managers actually undertake these activities in practice. The growing interpretive/critical literature focuses on how people's understandings define managing diversity, but is silent on how managers translate their understandings into specific diversity activities in practice. We applied a practice perspective in conjunction with phenomenography as a methodological approach to investigate how managers actually manage diversity in practice in the empirical context of professional services firms. The results show that managers' practice of managing diversity is constituted by four understandings of managing diversity that distinguish and organize diversity activities into four different and progressively more comprehensive ways of managing diversity. This practice‐theoretical account transcends the existing literature's partial accounts in significant ways by offering a new and considerably broader and more precise conceptualization of managers' practice of managing diversity, including which ways of managing diversity may be more effective than others. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.