I remember once we had a great conversation with my dear friend Elaine Daniels, a thoughtful HR expert and an excellent head-hunter, about the necessity and importance of diversity in our workforce. She mentioned a common practice in recruitment scoring systems being widely used is to evaluate candidates and choose the best fit for the team. She referred to a situation when it was difficult for her team to solve an issue because all were very alike in their thought process, and not able to see the issue from different angles. After close evaluation, she identified the problem as lack of diversity of thought in their workforce. I think this is a familiar situation for many of us.
This recruitment system that sometimes called the most intelligent and sometimes the best culturally fit candidate selection, results a pool of resources who are acting, behaving, and thinking very similar and are avoiding any serious discussions, constructive disagreement, or out of box thinking. The fact is this team selection method was created during industrial revolution, to respond to the massive industrial labor needs to perform repetitive tasks with no creative or innovative approach. This approach needs fundamental change to address our today’s world.
Currently when we are talking about diversity, it instantly reminds us of racial, gender and sexual orientation differences. We have taken many steps to solve past related problems caused by related discriminations. We still have long way to go, but at least we have reached a level of consensus awareness in this area. Although it is critically important to pay specific attention to gender, race and sexual orientation, avoid and prevent any related discrimination, and provide equal opportunities for all, but it is also important to keep in mind that diversity is not limited to these instances.
Diversity in our societies and teams is a very wide topic and includes different personality types, cultures, perspectives, behaviours, values and beliefs that exist even among the members of one gender, culture or race. It is essential to have a more comprehensive view of any situation by accumulating various perspectives. It makes our brainstorming sessions meaningful and increases creativity. It brings innovative ideas into the workplace, enables us to solve problems and make our project teams more efficient.
In the absence of advocating for healthy and respectful way of discussing and debating, essential conflict management tools and techniques, meritocratic values and approaches in place, lack of creative HR and managerial tools to comprehensively analyse a team’s required skills for different roles, our organization are taking the simplest solution to identifying talent. We select candidates from similar experiences and background who perfectly fit in our organizational culture and don’t give opportunity to those candidates who bring a different thought perspective or have a different behavioural style. Hiring managers who avoid diverse talent perspectives in the recruitment process are missing great opportunities to bring talent with diversity of thought into their teams and create great values for their businesses.
What do you think? What is your experience with diversity in your project teams? Or your experience about diversity in general?