Diversity as Business Advantage
In all the bluster - and worse - around DEI initiatives and policies I’m surprised there isn’t a stronger argument being made for how diversity and inclusivity are directly beneficial to a business. I don’t mean in the sense of meeting some targets and being able to put that on your website, or being able to tender for contracts that have ESG or social value requirements, I mean in the sense of core business performance.
All businesses, even (especially?) those with a highly visible and vocal CEO, require a broad range of people to define their mission and execute against it. That mission and execution will be all the stronger for having been examined, challenged and refined by people who think differently from each other, have different experiences, different viewpoints and even different values. A good business is forged from the inputs of a diverse array of people, not from the singular vision of any one person or small group. Founders can only take a business so far: sustained business growth comes from the people they hire and promote to senior positions and limiting that hiring to people who look and think like the founders weakens the business.
A few years ago I spent a bit of time with a business whose founding team looked at first glance to be very diverse. Four founders, three men and one woman, with three different ethnicities represented. But they had all been to private school and had met at an Oxbridge college where they were all studying the same degree. I was somewhat depressed by how they all responded in pretty much the same way to some of my more challenging and provocative questions about their business and product (which wasn’t without its controversial aspects; aspects to which they seemed somewhat blind or inured to).
But then I got to spend some time with the rest of the senior leadership team as well as some of the front line workers and I was encouraged by how much more diverse these groups were. There were a fair number of Oxbridge graduates with private or grammar school backgrounds but also plenty of people from other socioeconomic groups with an array of different life experiences and perspectives, including - something I always look for - non-graduates in senior or key roles. Gender balance and ethnic diversity were very obvious but nowhere was there a whiff of “DEI hiring”, the founding team set the standard that gender and ethnic diversity was the norm rather than the exception and then the people they hired actively worked to promote other forms of diversity and inclusion, not because they were mandated or targeted on that but because they could see that other viewpoints were required.
Over the years that business has effectively addressed the more controversial aspects of their product and they have grown from strength to strength. Having peeked behind the curtain for a brief period I have no doubt that this has been directly driven by the diversity and inclusivity of their team.
Are DEI hiring programmes and targets a necessary thing or an anachronism? I’m not qualified to answer. But I do feel qualified to say that explicit consideration and action around diversity and inclusion - especially if you’re a white male founder like myself - is a vital part of business success; you will only limit your opportunities if you ignore it.