Diversity is a Gift

As LinkedIn evolves, the topics being discussed have also widened, and recently I’ve been disappointed to see an increase in debates around racism.  Although disappointed to see this, I do welcome the fact that people feel empowered to shine a light on this in a public forum.  Simply put, I believe we all have a responsibility to take a stand against racism in any form, and I don’t see the need for any debate on that.

It has led me to think about diversity in general and how still today there are many leaders and organisations who fail to see the huge impact that diversity brings.  Having always worked in the technology industry, I have no hesitation in admitting being ingrained in the ‘tech bro’ culture.  Technology encourages you to think in 0’s and 1’s, largely male-dominated with social awareness, not being at the top of anyone’s key skill requirements.

I was part of that, but when my career moved into the Service Management space, I realised that human behaviour was almost always the key to the success of technology.  Over time, I’ve become more interested in how to leverage the value that diverse teams bring.  My interest in Design Thinking has also driven that focus to ensure that I challenge any internal bias I inevitably have.

I still see today, many leaders make an understandable mistake in building teams.  Often, our safe space is to build in our image.  Yes, as leaders, I believe we should be role models for the values and beliefs we have; there is no better way of setting your expectations than living to your word.  However, we all have weaknesses, biases, and blind spots.  By defaulting to recruiting people who are like us, we are likely to magnify those deficiencies to an organisational level.  They will be particularly difficult to identify because, in effect, you have created an echo chamber, surrounding yourself with people who simply validate your thinking rather than challenge it.  In extreme cases, you can create a two-tier organisation, and that is a real issue.

Recruiting and building teams is hard. We have to fight against our human instincts to avoid our biases.  There is no perfect recruitment process that really identifies whether someone is a great fit for your team or business. It’s nearly always a gamble.  I do, however, lean towards the adage of being able to develop skills more than changing personalities, and I would always recruit attitude and aptitude over skills.  I’ve mentioned before my growing disdain for the question often asked in our world: ‘Are you a techie?’

Whether it is cultural, ethnicity, gender, educational, age, cognitive, linguistic, disability, socioeconomic, religious, or any lived experiences that are different to your own opens your perspective on the world.  Design Thinking encourages persona-based approaches to developing processes and services.  This delivers great value alone, but imagine the value that can be created by considering the diversity of these actors too.

Not convinced?  I’ve seen real-world examples of where a lack of diversity has resulted in a loss of business.  The service was the provision and support of EPOS systems to two national organisations, identical technology, service levels, and deliverables.  Understandably, both suffered similar issues and challenges, but the average mean time to resolution for both differed by hours.  Why?  The business providing these services simply couldn’t understand why and ultimately saw the contract cancelled by one customer.

What had they missed?  Simply, they hadn’t understood the difference between the employees that were using the EPOS systems.  One customer was a cinema chain, and one was a retail outlet targeting a mature customer base.

Their market segment defined their employee base.

The cinema chain employed young people, largely students looking for part-time roles.  Young people who had grown up with technology at their fingertips, who understood and were not intimidated by it.

The retail chain employed staff that were aligned with their customer base, more mature, less technically minded.  So when issues occurred, you had one demographic willing to unplug things, try to solve issues themselves, recognising patterns of failures and almost self-serving.  The second, simply waited for engineer assistance.

Diversity is a gift.