As a white, middle-class man of average height and weight, with no major psychological disturbances or regional accent, I would struggle to find the organisation to which I was the diversity solution. If only I were gay ... But before I broach the subject with my wife, perhaps I am more diverse than I look. My brain could be very different to yours, you just can't see it. And this is where diversity really begins to bite from a business point of view.
Our human differences are important, and it is important to reflect the differences of our customers in our workforce. We’re trying to say, ‘Look, we’re just like you, whoever you are’. And psychologists will tell you that works; we are immediately attracted to people who seem to be similar to ourselves. The old saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ has some truth about it; we tend to be attracted to people who most closely approximate our physical appearance.
Whilst to meet me you might think I am as non-diverse as it is possible to be, my brain, on the other hand, might not work in the same way as yours. You can tell this by locating your eyebrows. If they are further up your face now than they would normally be, you are experiencing some diversity, not of race, gender, sexuality or anything like that, but of thought and expression.
I spend my time working with leaders, individually and as groups, facilitating board meetings, coaching individuals and supporting their development. I do this across a wide range of industries and all around the world. The biggest threat I see to my clients is not change, (economic downturn, acceleration of technological advancement, emerging markets, changing customer needs etc.), but their response to it.
This is not a new phenomenon. One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin recognised the same feature in nature. Darwin is often misquoted as proposing the ‘survival of the fittest’. What he actually put forward was ‘the survival of the most responsive to change’, in other words the fastest and best at evolving to suit new conditions. Let’s run a little example to make the point. At some point in the peacock’s evolutionary history females started liking males able to display their resistance to disease (that, incidentally is why peacocks have big tails). Had all male peacocks decided to do this with a little jig (something their customer base simply doesn’t like – ask any female peacock) then we would have none of the pretty birds around today. Fortunately some experimented with a slightly gaudy tail, which did the job tremendously well. The result: the species is alive and well. The same applies to organisations. If the whole board responds to a down-turn in the economy by reducing fixed costs and streamlining operations, (because they all agree unanimously that this looks like the sensible thing to do), then what about alternative approaches like raising capital, buying competitors, divesting whole product lines, expanding into new markets etc, etc. Potential dodo-dom lies this way.
The challenge for leaders in organisations today is that the diversity argument leads to a perfect contradiction. We like people who are like us – so in order to appeal to the maximum possible customer base we try and recruit a fully representative workforce. (Incidentally race, gender, orientation, age etc have no correlation with capability – if you’re still unsure about that … I despair.) However, we can get great diversity with no diversity; we all look different but we think the same way. This is even harder to spot because leaders will tend to recruit in their own (psychological) image. Recruiting people who think like you, behave like you and respond like you is extremely hard not to do, because you won’t end up thinking, ‘this person is just like me’, you’ll think, ‘this person is good, right, personable …’ And say what you like, we often recruit and promote on personality.
Thinking similarly makes for an easy life; few arguments and more action, though arguably less sound, rounded, well considered decisions. Thinking divergently makes for more conflict and may take longer, but ultimately leads to better decisions. On a first meeting you may find these divergent thinkers difficult to get along with, but if you persevere you can form an excellent partnership. Humans understand this strange dichotomy because whilst ‘birds of a feather flock together’, ‘opposites attract’. This too is true. The best partnerships are formed on points of difference, not similarity.
If you’re concerned about convergent thinking in your management team (a good precursor of group think) then you can use the Centre for High Performance Development’s Leadership Orientations Questionnaire (LOQ) to find out just how diverse your thinking styles actually are. Is your team predominantly far sighted or near sighted; detail conscious or detail averse; factual or intuitive; risk averse or risk taking? More often than not we find some severe bias in most leadership teams. This doesn’t mean you have to change the team (necessarily) but it does alert you to the fact that you may need to learn to watch for certain gaps or tendencies within the team.
The diversity debate encourages us to seek to minimise apparent differences between the internal world of our organisation and the make up of the external world – and this is healthy and good. Possibly more important is the argument that diversity really lies in maximising the differences in management team’s thinking styles and approaches. Because with diversity comes a much better chance of survival.
www.chpd.com
dan.white@chpd.com
Our human differences are important, and it is important to reflect the differences of our customers in our workforce. We’re trying to say, ‘Look, we’re just like you, whoever you are’. And psychologists will tell you that works; we are immediately attracted to people who seem to be similar to ourselves. The old saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ has some truth about it; we tend to be attracted to people who most closely approximate our physical appearance.
Whilst to meet me you might think I am as non-diverse as it is possible to be, my brain, on the other hand, might not work in the same way as yours. You can tell this by locating your eyebrows. If they are further up your face now than they would normally be, you are experiencing some diversity, not of race, gender, sexuality or anything like that, but of thought and expression.
I spend my time working with leaders, individually and as groups, facilitating board meetings, coaching individuals and supporting their development. I do this across a wide range of industries and all around the world. The biggest threat I see to my clients is not change, (economic downturn, acceleration of technological advancement, emerging markets, changing customer needs etc.), but their response to it.
This is not a new phenomenon. One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin recognised the same feature in nature. Darwin is often misquoted as proposing the ‘survival of the fittest’. What he actually put forward was ‘the survival of the most responsive to change’, in other words the fastest and best at evolving to suit new conditions. Let’s run a little example to make the point. At some point in the peacock’s evolutionary history females started liking males able to display their resistance to disease (that, incidentally is why peacocks have big tails). Had all male peacocks decided to do this with a little jig (something their customer base simply doesn’t like – ask any female peacock) then we would have none of the pretty birds around today. Fortunately some experimented with a slightly gaudy tail, which did the job tremendously well. The result: the species is alive and well. The same applies to organisations. If the whole board responds to a down-turn in the economy by reducing fixed costs and streamlining operations, (because they all agree unanimously that this looks like the sensible thing to do), then what about alternative approaches like raising capital, buying competitors, divesting whole product lines, expanding into new markets etc, etc. Potential dodo-dom lies this way.
The challenge for leaders in organisations today is that the diversity argument leads to a perfect contradiction. We like people who are like us – so in order to appeal to the maximum possible customer base we try and recruit a fully representative workforce. (Incidentally race, gender, orientation, age etc have no correlation with capability – if you’re still unsure about that … I despair.) However, we can get great diversity with no diversity; we all look different but we think the same way. This is even harder to spot because leaders will tend to recruit in their own (psychological) image. Recruiting people who think like you, behave like you and respond like you is extremely hard not to do, because you won’t end up thinking, ‘this person is just like me’, you’ll think, ‘this person is good, right, personable …’ And say what you like, we often recruit and promote on personality.
Thinking similarly makes for an easy life; few arguments and more action, though arguably less sound, rounded, well considered decisions. Thinking divergently makes for more conflict and may take longer, but ultimately leads to better decisions. On a first meeting you may find these divergent thinkers difficult to get along with, but if you persevere you can form an excellent partnership. Humans understand this strange dichotomy because whilst ‘birds of a feather flock together’, ‘opposites attract’. This too is true. The best partnerships are formed on points of difference, not similarity.
If you’re concerned about convergent thinking in your management team (a good precursor of group think) then you can use the Centre for High Performance Development’s Leadership Orientations Questionnaire (LOQ) to find out just how diverse your thinking styles actually are. Is your team predominantly far sighted or near sighted; detail conscious or detail averse; factual or intuitive; risk averse or risk taking? More often than not we find some severe bias in most leadership teams. This doesn’t mean you have to change the team (necessarily) but it does alert you to the fact that you may need to learn to watch for certain gaps or tendencies within the team.
The diversity debate encourages us to seek to minimise apparent differences between the internal world of our organisation and the make up of the external world – and this is healthy and good. Possibly more important is the argument that diversity really lies in maximising the differences in management team’s thinking styles and approaches. Because with diversity comes a much better chance of survival.
www.chpd.com
dan.white@chpd.com
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3 comments:
It was good to read an article on diversity that looked at more than the superficial divide of gender (Man bad, woman good approach that Chris Parry amongst others seem to prefer). As a male working in an organisation where the gender make up is heavily female oriented, I could easily rewrite Chris's article by interchanging the male and female references.
Both Dan and Chris refer to the preference to recruit in your own image. My experience (within management and leadership development) is that the problem starts before that. Too often the assumption is that your best operator should be promoted to supervisor, your best supervisor should be promoted to manager and so on. There is no assessment or development of the relevant skills until after the promotion has been made. Having also worked in an organisation where you were tested and evaluated before promotion, I can see which system works better.
Bringing this back to the current financial crisis, it appears to me that some technically-clever individuals were in positions to influence at a strategic level through the development of complex financial 'products', without needing to concern themselves with the longer term strategic impact of these decisions.
Whether this shortcoming is restricted to a single gender or a single industry may warrant further investigation, but I would suggest that some fundamental assumptions about recruitment and promotion criteria would appear to be in order
Dan White makes some excellent points about the linkage between being able to adapt as an organization and the ability to form cognitively diverse groups. Another form of diversity is emotional diversity and the varying levels of ability to quickly identify, label, and express how one is feeling about a particular strategic choice or decision, for example. When a woman or a man has “a feeling about something,” which may be pre-cognitive at first, it is more than a fleeting emotion or blink. I believe there is a lot of neural data being processed, accessed, and served up based on many years of experience. A good leadership capability is the ability to sense an emotion and articulate the possible logical reasons for its presence. This skill may be confined to one individual (intrapersonal) or it may find itself in a team effort (interpersonal). Let us hope we can design tools that allow us to effectively assess and develop this type of leadership diversity.
Thanks, Dan, for showing us that diversity is more than skin deep. Diversity of thought is critical for making effective decisions. I am grateful and supportive of this viewpoint. Can we take it a step further?
Interesting article. Psychological diversity is a key issue in UK Plc. Is the paucity of divergent approaches and outlook due to their recruitment/promotion policies or are individuals colluding in it by - consciously or subconsciously - choosing to stick with the crowd? Perhaps an even more concerning phenomenon?
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