November 19th, 2009
I recently facilitated a series of sessions focused on how to make a community’s culture more inclusive. There was a particular issue that the group got kind of stuck on. The participants were talking about disparities in employment and how hiring practices play a role. One of the participants made this statement: “I am here because I believe that diversity is very important for our community, but when it comes to hiring practices, all we have to do is hire the best person for the job and the rest will take care of itself. I think it is unrealistic today to believe that any organization is not hiring the best person for the job.” There was a fair amount of disagreement on this and it proved to be a challenging and multi-layered issue for the group to work through and it was a privilege to be facilitating as they applied themselves to the dialogue.
I have also facilitated workshops for corporate leaders that have struggled with the intersection of diversity and talent and what they mean and what they mean to business today. Clearly talent is critical to the success of an organization…maybe more so today than ever before. Focusing on diversity does not mean that we are giving up all considerations of talent; I am always a little confused by that thinking.
I think that the talent vs. diversity conversation that I seem to bump into from time to time shows some fundamental misunderstanding of both talent and diversity.
A lot of people say a lot of things about talent and I think that we have convinced ourselves that talent is a tangible, quantifiable thing like a pound of butter or a gallon of milk. But it is not.
Talent is a very intangible, contextual, dynamic thing. Regardless of how many fancy tests, tools and profiles that we use we can never truly measure it. That is something that talent has in common with diversity and when we oversimplify these powerful and important drivers of business value we do ourselves a great disservice.
In addition to the intangible nature of talent and diversity, when we have this debate we are not comparing apples to apples. Talent can be an individual attribute, diversity cannot. Diversity (or difference) is relational or social in nature. You have to be different from someone, so a relationship is inherent.
Another reason this debate is misinformed is that when we are focused on building good teams (which we should be) diversity is actually an indicator of talent. There is a growing mountain of evidence showing that teams with more diversity can outperform those with less. Scott Page (who wrote maybe the most important book about diversity this decade) says this “…when solving problems, diversity may matter as much or even more than, individual ability. From this we can infer that organizations, firms and universities that solve problems should seek out people with diverse experiences, training, and identities that translate into diverse perspectives and heuristics. Specifically, hiring students who had high grade point averages from top-ranked schools may be a less effective strategy than hiring good students from a diverse set of schools with a diverse set of backgrounds, majors and electives.”
And last, but not least…we are simply not good at “hiring the best person for the job.” We tend to be better at hiring people that we think are like us and that we are comfortable with. Regardless of our intentions, our evaluations and considerations of other people are susceptible to numerous tricks that our mind plays on us.
It is not about prioritizing diversity OR talent…it is about prioritizing them both. They are interwoven and overlapping they are both part of the winning equation.
Be good to each other.
This portion of your article is extremely well written – "We tend to be better at hiring people that we think are like us and that we are comfortable with. Regardless of our intentions, our evaluations and considerations of other people are susceptible to numerous tricks that our mind plays on us." In my view, those tricks our mind plays on us reveal not only who we like but also who we don’t like, based on our personal bias. Additionally, sometimes I believe hiring managers are coached on hiring based on diversity initiatives which are primarily ethnic. There’s a saying that says "perception is reality", which I re-write to say "perception is bias"….moreso, the assumptions that are made about working mothers and their "ability" to perform their job or take it seriously. Sadly, I’ve heard of male employees who leave early for work or a golf game and get a pat on the back for being a good father and golfer. When a mom leaves for work early to pick up a sick child from school or attend a parent-teacher conference, she cannot be considered for promotion or projects due to her family demands. Sandly, this is true. It is written that work-life balance is a component of diversity, and providing open-flexible work for mom’s and dad’s indicates they are welcome employees.
Joe,
Thank you for sharing your experience and introducing an opportunity to extend the conversation. The challenge is we often only view diversity through a singular lense, race or ethnic origin. However, the challenges with talent and diversity is on so many levels: single vs married; heterosexual vs. homosexual; tall vs short; attractive vs unattractive; fit vs overweight; able vs disable; blond vs brunette; jock vs geek; manager vs employee; degreed or undegreed. There are so many stereotypes that go unchallenged when we meet people with outstanding personality, credentials, and ability we discount it all if that individual falls outside our "mental profiles". Academics call this phenomenon cognitive dissonance. When our experience differs from our persceptions (or beliefs) we have a strong desire to hold on to our beliefs we might dismiss or explain it away. Either way, when talent presents in unexpected packages, we work very hard to hold onto our current beliefs until we are challenged to create new cognitions or beliefs.
In as much as diversity is awareness, acknowledgement, and acceptance of differences and similarities; inclusion is leveraging differences in meaningful ways to improve performance, relationships, organizations and communities ; all of which requires talent!
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