Tips for building Diverse and Inclusive Teams

Three factors of production have become cheaper – computing, information, and connectivity. What differentiates one company from another is the ability to reframe, synthesize, and innovate at scale to solve rapidly evolving use cases. The key to this differentiation is the fourth factor: a creative mind share from diverse and inclusive talent base. Here are few tips to build one.

•  Leadership: Everything starts and ends here!

It is about setting key objectives, creating culture, and supporting process and tools. Diversity and Inclusion means different things to different people, but we all know for sure what exclusion means when we are left out. As leaders we need to lay out what we are consciously excluding in our strategic decisions and key long term objectives. For example, the view of diversity could vary significantly depending upon site strategy, a site in San Francisco may facilitate global ethnic diversity that is orders of magnitude different than one in Bangalore.

•  Objectives:

Remove stereotyping and grouping like gender, race, disability and ethnicity metrics driven outcomes. While these are shorthand for making decisions, some categories may be forgotten or remain lower in priority forever. Anytime metrics becomes a goal the "Andon cord" should be pulled. Objectives should be driven by expected outcomes. For example, if you are looking to digitize cancer treatment for masses, look for skills diversity in Oncology (medical, radiation, surgical), Deep Learning, Data Science, and Automation tools in addition to sourcing diverse data from global data base not just regional data.

• Culture:

Fundamental to realizing the objective is the culture of team. Culture should be experienced more than a mission statement. The behavior of a person is a function of environment. We naturally tend to behave differently in a Church/Temple, work and home! Culture will reflect the purpose and objective of the organization. For example, if the focus is to develop creative and innovative solutions more than just top line growth, we need no holds barred culture where no one is above the fray. In such a setup, ideas will have merit regardless of where they come from, you will invariably attract free and independent smart thinkers with potential instead of just past accomplishments.

•  Environment:

Environment is something we create by following consistent practices. Cohesion of heterogeneous team members happens when there is a steady signal of safe connection. When people are insecure, they are not at their best. In the absence of safety, we all try to ADAPT to make the interactions work in an environment. For example, we should let go off comparisons and celebrate behavior/efforts more than results. This will encourage team members to be open to new perspectives. Health of an environment is also determined by the amount of peer level conversations (East-West traffic) as compared to hierarchy driven (North-South traffic), the more the former the more inclusive environment we will create.

•  Consistency:

Process and tools enable consistency. While everyone may have goals, only those who have the systems, process and tools will eventually succeed. If process doesn’t enable progress towards objective, by all means be willing to tweak it. We need to have an environment where preferred behavior is run by autonomous part of the brain and undesired behavior is checked by reflective part of brain. Through consistency, we can establish habits and then improve upon them. More important in any process is handling exceptions, this is where typically things start breaking. For example, in software development most defects are from lack of clear definition of handling exceptions and change in default behaviors to the system. This is even more acute when it comes to talent acquisition. Managers who are unsure when it comes to reviewing candidates whose background doesn’t fit their own experiences and understanding may DEFAULT to excluding a diverse candidate! Alternative could be to ask for peers or cross functional team to reevaluate.

• Talent Acquisition:

In this hyper connected world prospective talents have a much better view of our organization than many of us want to believe. The law of self-selection always kicks in. The talents that aligns with culture and beliefs of the organization will be attracted, while the ones that don’t will be repelled. We can’t unduly put the onus of building diverse talent base with TA team, it is a collective responsibility. The way to create a healthy talent pipeline is by looking for candidates that flexed their muscles in different situations. An organization can become a talent magnet when it becomes a place of happening where team members are fully led, utilized, recognized and offered opportunities to grow based on POTENTIAL. Besides most talent acquisition responsibility is in the hands of first line managers who are fairly new to people management. This leads us to the subject of talent development.

•  Talent Development:

Most opportunities are not well defined in an organization. The few that always raise their hands will get to define and own it! Leadership have to be proactive in profiling the talents across the organizations be it a technical or management track with a view of every team member skills, aspirations, potential and match it with opportunities. When done with consistency by removing any interference for team members progress, the results would be astounding and FAIR. HR team can help facilitate this fair process, but talent development can’t just be HR responsibility. Leaders are dealers of hope for teams to inspire, dream, learn and become more. Talent rotation is a great way to develop them too. Please check out my recent blog on Talent Rotation

•  Inclusion:

Recognizing exclusions is a sure-fire way to address the issue of inclusion. Consciously reflect on what, how and whom we are excluding. Let it guide our actions. Any inclusion initiative that is incongruent to the culture and purpose of the organization will merely be a feel-good activity; it may even be more detrimental and faster way to undermine its progress. We also have more to learn from people that carry the greatest burden of exclusions in their life. Hence to solve inclusion we should be recruiting excluded experts in our teams to guide us!! Despite best efforts mismatched hires do come through, the system should support a quick way to transition them out or else risk averse hiring will not promote diversity and inclusion. Please check out my recent blog on How Exclusions Influence Software Quality.

 While the above tips capture the highlights, I would appreciate your feedback and comments to build on it. Please let me know what worked for you. Thank You!