Diversity and Merit are not mutually exclusive objectives

Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake recently told Bloomberg TV that his company needs to put a greater emphasis on merit when hiring and promoting, rather than focusing on diversity goals. He suggested a more “moderated” approach to diversity and went on to say he was -

“highly sympathetic to diversity but we just don’t want that to override merit”

Clearly, he seemed to imply that in some ways diversity and merit are mutually exclusive and that he would have to compromise on merit to meet diversity goals. This created quite a stir, and he subsequently offered an apology and clarified his position.

A few years ago, a colleague of mine was promoted to a senior executive position and when I congratulated her, she diffidently asked whether she was promoted due to a “diversity factor” or was it due to merit irrespective of gender.

As both these examples show, there is a deeply ingrained thought process in stakeholders across gender, ethnicity etc. that somehow diversity goals of an organization are somehow not commensurate with a high performing culture.

Nothing could be more wrong.?

The fact that diversity fosters innovation and has a significant positive impact on company performance is well established. There have been numerous studies for decades and the recent Mckinsey report “Diversity wins” shows that the likelihood of financial outperformance was 25% higher in top quartile gender diverse executive teams and in the case of ethnic diversity, that number was as high as 36%. Additionally, they found that the greater the diversity representation, the higher the likelihood of outperformance.

So then, why are organizations unable to meet their diversity objectives and be representative of the environments they operate in without triggering a debate around merit?

1/ Awareness - it is not somebody else’s responsibility

This is one of the biggest impeders to progress. Diversity goals are often seen as a “target” that has come from the “top” and that it is somebody else's responsibility. There is no real understanding or appreciation of the positive impact of a diverse workforce, and hence there is no real personal ownership of meeting the objective like say a business target of sales or revenue.

How many executives are aware that in India, the average female executive representation is estimated to be 5% whereas the female workforce participation is 23%. This number for the US is 21% against a female workforce of 45% and in Japan it is only 3% against a female workforce of 42%!

2/ Education - it takes time to change mindsets

Doing something once doesn’t create a habit. Doesn’t change the mindset.

Most organizations have training sessions to educate their employees about their Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) policies. However, these are usually annual sessions much like an annual security certification.

Do organizations educate their employees once a year on their financial or business objectives? Highly unlikely. It is probably a more frequent affair with regular interventions and trainings. And if diversity is indeed as important to business performance as say understanding the latest technologies in the marketplace, then why isn’t it more frequent?

3/ Transparency – openness removes barriers

Often the lack of transparency creates misconceptions and reinforces misapprehensions.

Most large companies have well laid out D&I policies. However, few if any are transparent in sharing information about why a particular policy objective is formulated.

For example, instead of merely decreeing that a certain percentage of promotions should be of diverse employees, how about sharing data of the proportion of diverse employee at the various levels in the organization. Hence say, if the proportion of say women is 40% at a particular level, then the expectation that women should constitute a minimum of 40% of the promotions from that level is easy to comprehend. And to implement.

Similarly, the diversity representation of new hires should reflect the proportion of the diversity of the workforce. Or for that matter, the issue of pay disparity could be made a lot more solvable if there is a willingness to share information and co-opt people into the issue.

4/ Metrics – if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it

Peter Drucker may not have diversity in mind when he coined this term, but the fact is that unless organizations measure diversity metrics in the same manner that they measure business metrics like say sales or revenue, there is unlikely to be much progress.

Diversity measures should be an integral part of management systems much like organizations measure any business or financial metrics. And they should not be measured annually, but as often as any other business metric is measured.

There are a whole host of other issues as well.

For example, while hiring, leaders often look for a “cultural fit” which is often nothing more than a reinforcement of existing male stereotypes.

I am not suggesting that organizations should not consider cultural factors while hiring but it is necessary for leaders to be aware of these biases so that they don’t subconsciously fall into them and disadvantage diverse employees who bring different skill sets.

Furthermore, I will argue that appointing a woman as a D&I leader by default (as most organizations do) is not always the best thing to do. While one can understand the rationale behind this, I believe it sometimes reinforces an impression that gender diversity is a woman’s issue. It’s not, in fact it’s the man’s issue!

Will mistakes happen while pursuing diversity goals? Sure, they will. Organizations may hire the wrong woman employee or promote the wrong woman candidate. However, these mistakes happen equally when they hire men or promote them. But when that happens, it is usually classified as a professional error whereas if it’s a woman employee who's wrongly hired or promoted, it is unfortunately classified as a “diversity issue”.

And starts again, the debate between diversity and merit.

There is simply no merit in the argument.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article are personal and do not reflect the views, thoughts and opinions of my employer, organization, committee or any other group or individual.?