As a white, middle-class man I find it less than entirely encouraging to think about diversity. Given my “majority” classification I probably should be prey to just about every prejudice out there. If only I were gay, or even just a bit bi-curious, my diversity credentials would be much improved.
I’m average height and weight, with no major psychological disturbances or better still, a Birmingham accent. I’d blame my parents if they weren’t well-adjusted, intelligent, nurturing individuals who didn’t have the courtesy to put me through a messy divorce and custody battle. I’m right-handed. Even my relative youth (I’m 30) is rapidly becoming ... less relative. In conclusion then I am possibly the most boring person you have ever not met: average in every way. I would like to see the organisation in which I was the diversity solution.
It is reflecting in this (extremely useful) way that led me to suspect that I might be missing the point on this whole diversity thing. Our human differences are important, I get that, 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 that will work; we are immediately attracted to people who seem to be similar to ourselves. Imagine spending the afternoon with yourself:
“You’re so right!”, “I know what you mean!”, “I couldn’t have put it better myself!”
What a balanced, sensible, intelligent, witty (not to say attractive) person you are: who could fail to enjoy that! 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. So, back to our weird afternoon in the company of ourselves, perhaps lunching in a smart restaurant. Cosy and agreeable. And then armed robbers burst in and demand everyone’s money. You, being a dynamic, quick thinking individual decide to attempt a heroic citizens arrest, and looking to yourself for a second opinion get a rousing sense of encouragement – and you both leap into action. While you’re both busy getting better acquainted with the business ends of a selection of automatic weapons someone at another table muses, “what a shame those two brave people never noticed through the window the police already on their way into the building”.
The lesson is clear. If you take yourself out for lunch, you will probably get shot.
OK – not very useful, but bare with me for two seconds. Hopefully I have demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs that 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. And this is where diversity really begins to bite from a business point of view.
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.
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”, i.e. 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 little 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 is that the diversity argument leads almost 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, i.e. we all look different but think the same. 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” etc. And say what we like – we often recruit/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.
Had I only taken my wife to lunch instead of myself. She would have held my arm for just a second and said, “wait, think, look around!”. And I wouldn’t have got shot after all.
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. Are 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 importantly 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.
Of course, the diversity debate would be a lot simpler if everyone just had the same understanding of what it was all about…
In the words of Homer, “Doh!”
Dan White, internal consultant, CHPD
We are now a matter of weeks away from the introduction of the Equality Bill. Over recent weeks the Bill has provoked much controversy, with the head of the Catholic Church criticising its existence. So why all the attention?
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