Building Robust, Diverse Teams: Tales from the Frontline

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Mary, a member of an enterprise cybersecurity team, is acutely aware women are pervasively underrepresented in her field in ICT.

She has joined business technology teams that have done the critical initial step of hiring staff from different backgrounds. Thus, she sees the importance of ensuring the new employees thrive, and more importantly, stay on the job.

“Managers should be trained in managing a diverse team, ensuring they have an active role in guiding and developing their new hires,” says Mary, who requested anonymity as she talks about what organisations may overlook in onboarding a diverse team.

“Hiring a diverse group without equipping managers with the necessary people skills and tools is simply ticking a box, hiring simply for diversity quota’s sake, and is destined for failure.?

“Make sure the team is ready to welcome and nurture your new, diverse talent,” she says. “There are several ways to achieve this, and one is by buddying up the new hire with each member of the team to speed up team integration. This is relevant, more so with remote new hires.”

“Include in your tenured staff’s goal to train your new hire so they are invested in the growth of their new colleague,” she adds.?

“The evidence of this effective peer training is for the new member to be able to perform/demonstrate some level of mastery of the new knowledge or skill they have been trained on. This will prevent the natural inclination to stick with who they already know, unintentionally isolating your new hire from your tight-knit team.”

‘Include in your tenured staff’s goal to train your new hire so they are invested in the growth of their new colleague’ - Mary, cybersecurity team member

Empowering Through Mentorship

For Edwina Mistry, helping build confidence and democratising the concept of leadership across staff is critical for creating diverse, strong teams.

“I do a lot of mentoring for our staff and it is basically to help them professionally and personally because these go hand in hand. When you help people grow personally, they will automatically grow professionally,” says Mistry, director of operations at Imagetext and a business IT specialist in Auckland. “We believe in helping our staff grow into other roles.”

She says 60 percent of Imagetext staff have been with them for more than 16 years, so their tenure ranges from 16 to 34 years. “Currently we have 18 people out of which 65 percent are actually non-Kiwis, or come from different cultures. There are 40 per cent of women in the business,” a figure she notes is not the norm in many technology firms.

“I think the most important thing for anybody is confidence, so when people have confidence, they can do anything,” says Mistry, and this is reflected in her community work.?

As a founder and director of CreateOps, she works with young adults, tertiary institutions and students who need extra help getting back into the workforce. Before this, she started ShadowTech, where girls in years 9 to 11 join an ICT team or project for a day, with female staff as mentors. She makes sure Maori and Pasifika youth are well represented in all these programmes.

“When you have confidence and are not threatened, you do not expect certain things to just be given to you because you are from a minority group or because you are female. If you are confident in yourself, you can stand up and ask and get what needs to be given to you.”

Her focus on building confidence, especially for those coming from groups underrepresented in ICT, comes as studies show that women might be less inclined to pursue certain professions, like technology, due to a perceived lack of confidence in their ability to compete in areas traditionally dominated by males.?

“If talented women in STEM aren’t confident, they might not even look at those fields in the first place,” the article quoted Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Katherine B. Coffman. Coffman noted it is important for managers “to be aware of how confidence gaps may impact the workplace” and realise women may need the extra push to express their ideas or to nominate themselves for a promotion.

‘When you help people grow personally, they will automatically grow professionally’ - Edwina Mistry, Imagetext

This, Edwina knows by personal experience. She says the former front office receptionist at Imagetext is now a service coordinator. “She is quite technical and interested in hardware repair. So while she is in service coordination, I am encouraging her to get certifications in hardware repair so that she can spend some time within sales coordination doing some hardware repair.”

By doing this, she is expanding the organisation's leadership concept. “A leader is someone that others look up to or look to as a role model and want to be like. You don't have to be in a management position to be a leader. You can be in any position in this company, and you can be a leader, and that is how we work here.”?

As Mary and Edwina have shown, combining practical and atypical strategies creates a diversity loop that transcends mere recruitment, and lays the groundwork for a vibrant culture at work.?

Divina Paredes is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #DigitalWorkplace #Data4Good #Sustainability #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprises

Reach her on X (formerlyTwitter): @divinap

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