My lessons from failing to build a diverse core team.

Two months ago a woman walked into our office and I’m not proud of what happened next. Frankly, it’s been running circles in my head ever since.

I was 5 minutes late to an internal meeting and walked into the main hall. The young woman was talking to our chief engineer, and as I walked in he said “here’s the boss, why don’t you discuss it with him”. 

She was doing her thesis about increasing diversity in the workplace and wanted to work with us. 

I asked her: “Can you help us get a more diverse team?” She responded she wanted to focus on increasing awareness first. My team and I responded “Awareness? We’re very aware. We need help!” 

She suggested that maybe if we’re more aware of unconscious biases that we could more easily attract a more diverse set of people.

We suggested that if she wants to focus on awareness, she might be better off working with the big corporates. 

Not a very sensitive response.

What I did wrong.

In hindsight I think there’s a lot of truth in her statement. But I had a hard time accepting that in the moment.

What I failed to communicate in that moment is that the diversity question has been engaging me a lot and I haven’t been able to figure out what the best way to deal with it is. 

This article is my breakdown of how I failed to build a diverse team so far and how I think we should go about building diverse teams.

And if you’re reading this, young woman in question, I’m sorry. 

I shouldn’t have told you off. Getting immediate blowback from a group of mostly white men must’ve entrenched some of your perspectives to us. Maybe we weren’t the most qualified to comment on this.

I should’ve asked you to plan a meeting with me so we could talk about it later, instead of trying to rush it in the moment. 

I’d love to engage with you on this. Feel free to reach out.

How I failed to build a diverse team

Since I started building the FruitPunch AI team, I’ve wanted to keep the split 50/50 between men and women and build a diverse team across other metrics.

So much so that I went to events on the topic and talked with many female leaders on how I could assure this.

But for some reason, it’s been incredibly hard. 

This is ironic, because our community of AI engineers actually has a lot of women in it, about 40%. Much more than the status quo in the field.

But with almost every hire it was so much easier to find a fitting white, male candidate. 

After hiring 5 men and 1 woman I’m now at the point where I’m only looking at female candidates for our next hires. 

This is of course a crisis measure.

Why I think this happened is a combination of my cofounder and I mostly knowing other men and unconscious bias in how we present ourselves that doesn’t attract people different from us.

Like the young woman mentioned.

I think this unconscious bias is present in many of us, even if it’s only because it’s just easier to communicate with someone that has had similar experiences throughout life as yourself. 

Shared context.

It takes a great leader with foresight to build a team with people different from themself.

In our case, every hire was highly specific and eventually rushed. We needed them yesterday and they needed to have at least 2 unique skillsets.

While we’ve built an amazing team full of Uniqorns (unique mix of qualities and experiences), this resulted in a team consisting of 5 Dutch men, one South African man and one German woman.

The best advice I got on building Diverse teams

I’ve accepted that building a diverse team is not going to happen automatically. We need to go the extra mile and spend more time.

The best method I’ve heard so far from other founders is this: make sure that the initial group of people you are interviewing is equally qualified and diverse. 

By putting in the effort at the start you don’t have to worry about having to hire the less qualified candidate. And you take away the selection bias of white men knowing mostly other white men.

And then of course you should be aware of that generally men present their skills & achievements more favorably than women, and other cultural differences. 

Understanding these cultural differences is hard. 

I highly recommend reading Culture Map by Erin Meyer. I found out about a lot of bias I never knew I had when I read this book.

Important in reducing the likelihood of biased selection is making sure you have an as objective as possible view on people’s hard and soft skills. 

The best way to achieve this is real-world proof. As a startup you can’t hire on potential or hopes. But there’s very little objective proof of skills out there, definitely in juniors.

Ironically that’s exactly what we’re solving with FruitPunch AI in hiring AI engineers. 

By putting them through 10-week long real-world challenges, where they solve a problem in a team, we get a reliable proof of their hard and soft skills.

Regretfully, this isn’t available yet for for other roles, and assessment tools out there are generally inaccurate and pseudoscientific. 

So there we have to rely on portfolio and word of mouth.

Why not all teams should be diverse.

Oooh controversy! Yes you read that correctly. So why?

The friction with diverse teams doesn’t end when the team is hired. 

Erin Meyer says in Culture Map that while diverse teams increase creativity and insights, they also reduce effectiveness on the short term.

This links back to the point about communication context I mentioned before.

You communicate faster and more effectively with people that have the same language, assumptions and knowledge.

My take-away from this is: make sure your management team is diverse and that over-all your company is diverse, but maybe keep teams focussed on execution (like a software dev team) low in diversity.

That’s kind of a crazy thing to say after everything I’ve said before, but I believe this can work.

Make your creative teams diverse, make sure your company is diverse, make sure strategy is made by a diverse group of people, but let execution not be diverse. Not diverse can mean all Indian women or white guys of course.

We didn't talk about company culture here, but that’ll rip open another wormhole leading to a world filled with tech-bro’s. 

That’s one can of worms (or bro’s?) I don’t want to open now.

All in all, I hope you, dear reader, appreciate this honest review. Please share with me your thoughts so I may learn from them. 

Especially if those thoughts don’t align with mine :)

XOXO, Buster.

Dedicated to the young woman who’s name I never learned who walked into our office to talk about Diversity in April 2022.