Non-Obvious Diversity

Look at your Employee Handbook (first—find your Employee Handbook). You will likely see "diversity" listed in the table of contents, alongside "equal opportunity employment". It's the law. Search the web for "diversity in teams". I see over eleven million results. To say that diversity in the workplace is important, or key to successful teams, or is a moral imperative, is to say nothing new at all. And yet I see this concept applied superficially, or narrowly, without full regard for the impact of variation on creativity, innovation, and robustness. A diverse workplace isn't always a comfortable workplace, but it is a more adaptable and capable workplace during times of challenge and change.

When we talk about diversity in the workplace, we often focus on gender, ethnicity, or other attributes that define classes of employees protected by law. While I wholeheartedly support diversity along these dimensions, I have observed more subtle dimensions that impact team effectiveness and success. Also, while I have seen diversity achieved across the larger organization, I have seen individual teams that are accidentally or intentionally homogeneous in some material fashion. Homogeneity by design is often a byproduct of our selection criteria, so it's no wonder why we find ourselves in groups of people that all resemble each other along one axis or another.

Age, Experience, and Education Cohorts

When building a company or team, the terms we use and attributes we focus on tend to be associated with energy, intelligence, and aptitude. We want a "shot in the arm", "new blood", a "startup mentality". We want to build a culture of speed, growth, and agility. These are traits most commonly associated with youth, or at least with what is new. When you think of your prototypical early-stage startup, you think of a bunch of kids working around the clock, sleeping under their desks, driven by what they don't know. They succeed by out-executing the incumbents, who are often portrayed as slow, inflexible, and old. There are plenty of examples of this playing out in the real world, and I believe that a young team with a strong sense of direction and purpose can disrupt an industry—I've seen it with my own eyes. While homogeneity along the age and experience axis might increase initial velocity, how does it hold up in the long run?

Some companies avoid hiring experienced employees early on because they bring baggage with them that interferes with the founder's vision and desire to establish a consistent corporate culture. The founding team might bring in a few leaders with established track records who then hire less experienced people to fill in the rest of the team. This can lead to teams that are disproportionately green, and often times disproportionately young. Besides the value of experience, an older team might deliver a more rounded perspective on factors that impact decision making—technical or otherwise. Team members from different life stages will have different motivations, different time horizons for results, different out-of-work experiences, and a different tolerance for disappointment. All the flaws inherent in a uniformly young team can also exist in a uniformly old team. A highly experienced team might be disinclined to try new approaches or question long-held beliefs, and this could cause the team to miss a breakthrough opportunity. In either case, a lack of diversity along the age/experience axis can lead to blind spots that hinder success.

Google has disputed the widely-held belief that it recruits exclusively from top tier universities. Suffice it to say that Google and other tech giants, at least in their early days, endeavored to select from a relatively short list of schools, and asked interview questions that might have excluded candidates that thought differently from the norm (e.g. weren't Googley enough). Recruiting from the best schools equates to hiring the brightest and most capable talent, and certainly any company with the means and status to attract such talent would be happy to do so. By drawing from a relatively small pool of candidates, all of whom took similar courses from similar schools, you are subjecting yourself not only to your own selection bias, but also the selection bias of the institutions from which the candidates are drawn. You don't have to be so exclusive as early-stage Google to experience this effect—your job specs probably contain criteria that states the amount and type of formal education candidates must receive to be qualified. There may be no harm in building a team with a similar educational background if the conditions for success in your business are very similar to the conditions that led to the success of the team members when they were in school, but how often is that true?

Industry

It used to be the case that people in the tech industry were technologists first, and then applied their expertise to various domains. As tech has become more deeply ingrained into practically every domain, there is a shift towards industry specialization. Companies select for people with industry experience, because subject matter expertise is highly valued and expensive to develop. Ad tech companies want to hire people with an ad tech background, enterprise software companies want to hire people with an enterprise software background. Hiring someone outside your domain is considered risky, or at the very least an investment in a long learning curve.

When you build a team with a similar industry background, you are bringing to bear a great deal of related experience, but you are also bringing in a bias shaped by the constraints of that industry. The solutions you develop are more likely to resemble similar solutions that already exist, because that's how your team has been conditioned to approach the problem. Disruptive solutions, like applying consumer adoption models to enterprise software, come from an outside view that might appear silly to industry veterans. It's hard to invent radically new solutions to old problems with a team that is homogeneous on the industry experience axis.

Personality

Most people avoid conflict. Even people who claim to enjoy some degree of conflict prefer to surround themselves with compatible colleagues and save their conflict for outsiders. When we build teams, we adopt the no assholes rule, which basically means selecting people who get along. This is core to many stated corporate cultures, and harmony in the workplace contributes to comfort, happiness, and tenure. But our natural tendency to select people with compatible personalities might lead to a team that thinks too similarly, or is so comfortable that it is less likely to be upset by something that should upset them.

The best teams I've been on had a collection of big personalities, some of them rather extreme. But when the team functioned at a high level, it was because the personalities were balanced. For every curmudgeon, there was an idealistic optimist. The high-velocity-but-slightly-careless racehorse was balanced by the deliberate, steady workhorse. I've seen the ill effects of a team out of balance—where one member dominates decision making because they have a stronger personality than anyone else on the team. I can't claim responsibility for assembling any team primarily based on a curiously effective mixture of personalities, but I do take personality into account when I divide an organization into smaller teams.

Proximity

Distributed teams offer an opportunity for diversity at the organizational level. Each remote team can evolve under different conditions and develop different habits and practices, broadening the organization's overall menu of options. Like finches adapting to their own island's ecosystem, the distributed teams become optimized to their local circumstances, shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of their team members. But each remote team, if isolated from others, is susceptible to homogeneity in their own vacuum, which can be counter to the organization's overall objectives. I have observed remote teams go on autopilot and develop bad habits and perform sub-optimally because they had fewer resources to draw from and therefore fewer opportunities to be diverse in and of themselves. Establishing diversity while maintaining consistency is a challenging balancing act.

Biodiversity as a Model

Much research has been done on the role genetic diversity plays in the survival of species. A quora post by Dr. Justin Ma states it succinctly:

To put it simply, genetic diversity is important for phenotypic diversity, which is important for adaptability to a changing environment. And environments both biotic and abiotic (but especially biotic), are always changing.

And that is the key—environments are always changing. Ma makes a counterpoint about diversity versus homogeneity:

However, diversity cuts in two directions. It's great for the long term. In the short term, it's often not a great thing. Natural and artificial selection, is in essence, the reduction of diversity in the short term. To give an over-simplified example: A diverse population that hasn't undergone selection is going to be outcompeted by a selected population, which, due to selection, will be less diverse.

This is perhaps why startups comprised of homogeneous team members can outperform more established incumbents—they are by definition selected to compete in the current environment. They are, however, vulnerable to failure under changing conditions.

. . .

There are many factors that cause businesses to fail. Teams may not execute effectively, and this failure may have nothing to do with the diversity of the team members. Markets change, and the product or service developed by the business may no longer be competitive or desirable under new market conditions. I've seen multiple organizations fail to reach their potential without understanding why they couldn't break through and find success. It was as if they had a blind spot that prevented them from seeing certain shortcomings in their approach or offering until it was too late to course-correct. I think a lack of a divergent perspective is a key contributor to this sort of failure. Diversity, even in its least obvious forms, gives us broader visibility on what's possible, what's broken, and positions us to survive when the world changes out from under us. But there are so many axes on which diversity operates that it is possible to be diverse in one dimension and select in another. Perhaps the best thing we can do is be mindful of these various dimensions, be thoughtful about how we build our teams, and be honest with ourselves about how diverse we really are.