Diversity - It's all about Perspective!

In my recent LinkedIn articles, I’ve been share some excerpts from my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”.

In my recent posts I’ve focused on the way that you define and justify the attributes you are looking for when hiring in order to build a successful team and how putting clients at the centre of your business is a critical step for any successful business to embrace.

In this article I want to focus on diversity and the benefits of ensuring that as you grow your business, you bring in a range of outlooks and experience.

Diversity in hiring seems to be on the agenda a lot lately. For every advocate there appears to be a noisy opponent when it comes to diversity and DEI policies.

Diversity - It’s not rocket science!

For my part, I have always believed that an incredibly important contributor to any company’s culture and success is the makeup of the team that works within it. This team brings external experiences and perspectives to the table, and so it follows that the more diverse the team, the greater the array of perspectives and experiences available.

Like many small businesses, when we first started hiring other people, we were not flush with cash, and so we had to be very selective about whom we hired. As I mentioned in my article in December, we were deliberate about what we were looking for. We added a dimension to that: we needed people who could be scrappy when it was required, or who could jump into different roles if the circumstances arose.

When you’re in a small business, you have to do all sorts of unexpected things (move desks, clean the kitchen, deal with utilities providers), so you don’t want people who say, “That is not in my job description.” As a result, we hired the most adaptable people we could find.

In those early days, we didn’t put dedicated effort into hiring a diverse range of people, per se, but when we looked back after our first fifty hires, we found that we’d achieved what many organizations try to fix retrospectively. We had an incredibly diverse team in terms of ethnic background, gender, country of origin, and experience.

It’s not about target-setting

I don’t mean to say that we completely fluked this of course. We had been looking for curious, can-do people with international experience and who were not afraid to put themselves outside their comfort zones. And more importantly, we had definitely not been looking for “people like us”—two white blokes from the UK living in Sydney.

This is the core of what diversity is. It’s not a target-setting exercise but a desire to seek diversity of experience, which will in turn contribute to the success of your business.

There are well-documented benefits of having a diverse team, such as

·?????? improved creativity and innovation,

·?????? better problem-solving,

·?????? smarter decision-making, and

·?????? better commercial outcomes.

This diversity within RFI, therefore, gave us an edge from both a commercial and cultural perspective. We could approach problems within the business or requests from clients and ensure that we would have people who thought differently about how to solve these things. In turn, when we had to make decisions, we could be challenged because colleagues had perspectives that we hadn’t thought about.

From that point when we realized how diverse the team was, we strived to ensure that as we grew, the people who hired others were always looking for the same attributes that had provided us with such diversity. This worked well. At the point that we had more than one hundred staff globally, we had a team that boasted more than twenty-five birth nationalities and an executive leadership team that was evenly balanced by gender.

As we grew, we grew in diversity. As we grew internationally, we grew in diversity. We were proud of this, and I still am.

If you like this and you’d like to hear more, then check out my new book “The Startup Handbook – A Founder’s Guide to Building a Business”. Available in e-book (US$6.99), paperback (US$18.99) and hardback (US$25.99)

So, please go and buy a copy here and leave me a (good) review ??

#startup #diversity #buildingforsuccess