Talent has won the war for Talent. These six ingredients help you build the diverse workplace where it thrives.

?Today, I am on my way to Turin where I will open the academic session on the MBA Programme of Collège des Ingénieurs Italia. For me, just like every year, this trip offers a glimpse into the world of students coming out of our education system and getting ready to start their professional adventure. 

Just like every year, the students will be curious, full of energy and dreaming of their lives after graduation, impatient to enter into the world of work, bringing a huge dose of enthusiasm and new ideas.

What’s new this year is that we are all still scrambling to adjust to the new normal. I am thrilled that Collège des Ingénieurs pulled it off to have live sessions. Nothing compares to the thrill of working with the energy of young people and the imagination, creativity and innovation that could stem from it. Over the years, the students have baffled me with the innovation projects they have managed to pull off. Their originality, pride and invention have been unstoppable and therefore this week in October is a heyday in my calendar. 

So much Talent and just a few days to exchange. Yet the biggest challenge has always been: how to generate trust with a future viewing young group of people. Regardless of gender, race, life style or personal choices, they dream of the talent enabling workplace where it doesn’t matter what you wear, what matters is what you bring to the table. 

So how do we build it? Here are 6 key ingredients. 

1. Foster diversity with an attitude

One thing I was always thinking of and hoping for in my drive to campus was diversity. How many students would have different cultural backgrounds, educational differences, how much life-style variety would they bring? What would be the gender equity in the room?

One of the key ingredients of successful teams is just that: the diversity they show. Not merely the diverse background of their team members. The diversity they show by claiming the space, by not conforming to the norms of the majority but by standing tall, proud and different. It is a broader topic than just having people from a different gender or cultural background. True diversity offers us a more profound opportunity to represent a broad and inclusive society in which opportunities are available for all rather than a one-sided outdated approach to working in front of the mirror on the wall. 

2. Link diversity to your purpose

Even though there have always been women in the room, there haven’t been nearly enough, and therefore I write this article as an invitation to everyone: if we haven’t seen enough diversity in the calls have, the teams we lead, or the colleagues we hire, the challenge lies with us. It is our task and responsibility to create a diverse workplace.

Sometimes I hear it is merely a choice we have to do ‘good for others’ whereas we now know it is quite the opposite. It requires a relentless focus and a strong sense of observation. Without those, we may look over the fact that everyone looks almost the same, wears the same clothes, eats the same sandwich or talks in self-replicating opinions.

Diversity requires us to look up and be self-aware that things are often uncomfortably similar. We need to remember similarity brings peace of mind, and we have wrongly trained ourselves into thinking that is a good thing. Peace of mind may help us to think the wrong thing, that we don’t need debates, we don’t need different opinions or highly unusual ways to go about solving a problem. Yet we do. Research shows over and over that we need it now more than ever.

Diversity offers us the opportunity to create a more innovative and successful workplace where various ideas are generated in all colours of the rainbow and lead to more resilient and long-lasting outcomes as they have taken into account more variables. 

This focus on diversity has to be relentless for diversity to increase as it doesn’t suddenly appear by magic. It cannot be the cool project of some person or department, it has to be felt across the spectre of the organization and communicated without pause. Linking it to the sheer purpose of what you are trying to achieve in life as an organization will increase its value and show to everyone why it’s so important.

3. Share some incredible research 

Yes, there is plenty of research out there showing us that diversity equals more innovation, better profitability and a more sustainable innovation cycle. That’s not even mentioning the more fulfilled and happier workforce it generates as a side kick. So even without a business case, we might as well consider these studies and all the research that underpins the self-evident conclusion: a diverse group of people with a variety of life experiences and poinst of view leads to greater success. 

Often, the lack of underpinning diversity in a purposeful way creates the impression it is the pet project of one individual or it leads to political controversy whereas if we read, share and spread the research on diversity, it just makes common sense to keep it in our focus.

In order to inspire you here’s my pick of today:

1.    Creating a Trans-Inclusive Workplace by K. Sawyer, C. Thoroughgood & J.Webster 

2.    The Inclusion Dividend by Mason Donovan & Mark Kaplan

3.   Trust Factor, The Science of Creating High Performance Companies by Paul Zak

4.  Look for Gender Equity as a bellwether

Gender, for example, is a good precursor of other elements of diversity. Without gender diversity, half the battle is lost. With gender diversity, a base is created to change systemically how people think and how group biases on similitude can be overturned. Gender is such a primary organizing framework in society that changing the way we manage gender diversity is likely to have a disruptive and diversity enhancing impact.

We're all born with different parts but what gender really often comes down to is what people expect we're going to do because we have those parts, or what people expect we’re not going to do or we’re incapable of doing because we have or do not have certain parts. 

When a baby is born the first thing that people think is it is pink versus blue, bringing a whole list of consequences that appear innocent but risk exclusion by birth. Yet we are very comfortable with those exclusions because they've been ingrained in us for a long time and we are so comfortable with many of them. 

Not that long ago, we have to remember, women in the workplace were more exceptional, let alone women leaders. Now that reality has completely changed, yet the management processes from back in the days may still reflect some of the past behaviours that were part of an almost fully male workplace. That progress is moving into a new phase where inclusive behaviours may now include many other gender expressions such as diversifying dress codes or the use of pronouns in teams in order to clarify the preferred expression of any person on the team. 

5. Apply Systemic Discipline

Breaking the patterns of what has been done before may appear as abstract jargon. Yet systemic discipline is what’s needed to achieve true diversity and precisely that has been mostly overlooked.

Without it, diversity becomes a gadget, a totem, a fashionable and nice to have department at work. Whereas diversity, inclusion and belonging are the bedrock of tomorrow’s success. The world is so interconnected, any venture wishing to play a role or seeking to fulfil a purpose will be resounding across the world. So having access to many different points of view only help you in reaching that goal faster. Those who don’t embed it into their organizational discipline will forget all too easily what it meant. Diversity, inclusion and belonging requires a thinking mode that is different from before. Let’s face it, we have been educated, trained and conditioned to look for similarities. We often confuse similitude with quality, mirror image with potential and sameness with kindness. This leads to a confusion of what it means to trust someone. It has lead us down the slippery slope of exclusion and unequal chances based on someone’s style, dress or heritage. It confuses us even more as we have systemically transplanted it into KPIs on the basis of “what works here must work there”, overlooking the diverse nature of our workforce and making it difficult for us to think out of the box. 

Diversity, inclusion and belonging means a systemic make-over of management. It requires us to tell girls pro-actively that the first coders on the planet were women, that the algorithms we currently have are bias prone we need an army of coders to rewrite them. 

6. Build Trust and measure it

So how can you contribute as a Leader to improve the diversity, inclusion and belonging in the workplace? 

It is all relating to trust. A first component of trust could be translated as yield: allowing people who are doing the job the freedom to let people who are doing the job to execute projects as they see fit.

When leaders become coaches, teams and individuals can choose the work they wish to do and in this type of environment the most diverse teams outperform everybody else since they have the ability to find solutions from different angles.

People are often fearful they may be the first speak up about a diversity issue, as if the idea of looking away is more attractive than stepping up. Sometimes because they may believe it doesn’t affect them personally or because they are so busy with management tasks they simply have no time.

Yet therein lies the caveat. We are all busy and we will not be less busy tomorrow. We may look away since it is easy, or pretend we don’t see the issues around diversity, inclusion or belonging simply because they seem too complicated to address, yet it is precisely when leaders individually and collectively talk about it and act accordingly that belonging in an organization leaps forward. We could choose to do just that and say that if we all look for ways to improve inclusion, increase the diversity of our teams, that we will move our company forward.  

So we should speak up, speak out, and ask our team members to do just that. Our own people can show us where we have the biggest risks and where our priority solutions should come from.

How do we promote diversity, what do you think really works, what has been your personal experience and where should we really improve are all important questions that up to now have remained in the fringes. Build trust wherever you look, whatever you do, whoever you lead.By being a beacon of trust, diversity thrives and you can start measuring it and make your teams flexible, agile and successful.

The war for talent is over and talent has won. A new era has arrived. The era of diverse and enticing ecosystems formerly known as "workplace". The war is over, there is no race. Instead we now have a community of diverse people ready to build tomorrow.

For me, the journey back to Collège des Ingénieurs will be a surprise like every year. Hoping for more diversity, more diverging opinions and more gender equity I trust we can build the talent-on-fire workplaces we need today. Let’s face the challenge and ask ourselves: what will we do to build the diverse workplace where talent can thrive? Share your thoughts!