Increasingly I hear CIOs talking about the need to have greater diversity within their leadership teams. Often this need appears to be driven at a macro level by corporate strategy. Namely the requirement to have more diverse teams leading businesses to success.
First and foremost, I agree wholeheartedly with the principle. Diversity is fundamental to uncovering different ways to progress a business, different ways to approach opportunities, and different ways to succeed where our contemporaries fail. My disagreement comes with the idea that we can magic up a diverse leadership team from thin air.
Focussing on IT (its what I know – you may work in other business areas and see parallel issues though!) we can look at the people we have the greatest number of, the most junior ranks in IT.
When I look around IT organisations, I tend to see a white British male dominated environment. Why could that be? Perhaps as hiring managers we tend to recruit people who will ‘fit in’ with our existing teams, people we think it will be easy to integrate, and thenceforth manage as a common unit.
With this approach at the easiest point of entry to a career in IT, why are we then surprised that the cream of each department happens to be male?
If we tend to recruit people for whom English is their first language, why are we surprised that the leaders we select from this pool also tend to have English as their first language?
When we recruit, it is simpler to recruit ‘another Joe’, or ‘another Adam’ – thinking that we want to emulate our brightest stars of today. If our aim is to be the strongest possible team, supporting the strongest possible business, we need to have the broadest mix of capability and experience. Instead of recruiting ‘another Somebody’, how about we look to strengthen our teams by recruiting somebody who is different to the rest of our team? We can train skills, but we can’t train background diversity, diversity of experience, diversity of priorities or viewpoints.
We need to look to the future we want, and start building that future within our organisations at grass-root level.
Only when we had truly diverse teams, will we have the ability to deliver truly diverse leadership.
Giving a candidate extra credit solely because they are female, and therefore underrepresented is a mistake. Giving a candidate extra credit because they are different to the rest of our team is the right approach.
Always remember the key rule – “Its easy to teach people new skills, it is not easy to teach people to change their background, experience nor personality.”