Welcome to the Metrics - on my diversity journey so far

I was unpacking some of the last boxes from our most recent house move the other day when I stumbled upon a file from the office. I had brought it home around a year ago and in it I found two pieces of paper which I immediately sat down to read. One was a personality test focused on change behaviours and the other was a 360-degree feedback paper – both from Q4, 2020. In fairness, I was maybe subconsciously procrastinating getting the items organized somewhere in the house as these things tend to pile up on me just to be moved somewhere else later.

According to my latest personality test I am a pragmatist with slight conserver tendencies. That means I am ok with change, but I will probably ask you to tell me why the current model is not good enough. If I am convinced by your argument, I will help you carry out the change with great enthusiasm, stand on the beer crate to deliver the message alongside you and help you drive it home. I will take the path of least resistance, maybe seeking a bit too much consensus as I like to make sure everyone wins something, but we will get it done – as a team. This resonates well with my self-perception.

I went on to read the 360-degree paper and I had several smiles, chuckles and felt a great sense of pride (and relief) that the conclusions were on par with the personality test. I live my values of integrity and trust not just in my own head but also in those around me it seems.

Then I got to page 46 and the input on how I “value differences”. While the metrics in this category were very much in the middle of the overall scoring a comment drew my attention: “He is aware, but I think he doesn’t try to engage into using the different styles and cultures in the team proactively enough”. At that time, I was leading a team of more than 200 people in 11 locations across the world with a lot of diversity.

So, that comment stuck with me back in 2020 and when I re-opened the file it caused quite some reflection in the days to come. We were doing well but we had untapped potential seen from the teams’ perspective – and I might have a blind spot.

Let’s set the scene to explain my angle better; I am a blue-eyed guy approaching middle age if I haven’t already arrived there. Where I am not losing the battle against my receding hairline, some silver fox seems to be shedding its fur when I am not paying attention. Clearly my body type is built to scale despite the efforts to keep the development at bay. I am a family man, whose absolute priority is to serve my three kids and fantastic wife before anything else. In the industries I have been part of, I clearly fall into the majority group of the employee population. I am a part of the group called “men – in suits”. Being a part of the “the many” and buying into the rationale that diversity creates better solutions, I know I need to do my part to advance the diversity agenda. And I thought I was doing well here, but it seems I can do even better. ??

So how do we ensure that we, as individuals, leaders, teams, and organisations get the most out of diversity?

I think many companies have done well in getting the diversity metrics to trend in the right direction. The various makeups of gender, race, belief systems, age-group, backgrounds, habits, industry experience, family constellations all point towards a more diverse group working on solutions. My trouble is that I am not sure I am convinced the investment is paying the returns we expected. From time to time, when I have reflected on meetings with perfect diversity metrics participation, I couldn’t really tell if the outcome would have been different if the group was fully homogenous. While the people participating had been statistically diverse, it did not really change anything. If all you have is a multicultural, gender diverse, colourful palette of people that think exactly alike, express joy in the same solutions, have no real new perspectives – or even worse – don’t say anything, then what have you really achieved?

My point is that getting the metrics right solves nothing – it is just a very expensive way of telling the world that you are doing what you can to follow the most recent diversity trends. To convince shareholders that you are doing the right thing. If you leave the diversity aspirations at the metrics level, you run a risk that you never really see the true benefits. You must find a way to extract the power of that diversity. You need to get the different perspectives, ideas, world views from that group. If you don’t, in my world, you have nothing but a bunch of numbers that look pretty on display. Is that a trophy to be proud of? Probably in beginning but I think the novelty wears off quickly.

My conclusion is that achieving diversity in metrics is nothing but the baseline. The ticket to play. After you get the ticket, it is then up to the leaders to ensure that the baseline produces results that are better than before. Management must be the ones driving that we achieve the true diversity all the metrics play into and enable. Because that is all the metrics do – enable the most important diversity aspect of all: diversity of thought. That you cannot put into a pivot table or a pie chart. It must be actively pursued, and I think I may have found a way.

Until now, I have been living by and taught the golden rule: “Treat others the way you want to be treated”. I believe it holds a lot of good things and genuinely teaches you from an early age to show respect for others and behave in a decent manner. For myself, it has been the fall-back position in many situations where I have felt uneasy about what decision to make. How would I like to be treated right now? I have seen the world primarily through my lens, and it may have limited my ability to unlock the diversity of thought I had available in a team to its fullest extent. Maybe the golden rule has caused my blind spot?

To get some input on how to move forward, I took a diversity and inclusion class on LinkedIn learning. Here, I was introduced to the platinum rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated”. This has opened a whole new world to me. I believe this might be the simple key to get the optimal result from the diversity metrics baseline. It evidently requires a totally different investment into the 1-1 conversations with team members. It urges an understanding of culture and belief systems in different ways. It warrants an active approach in seeking to understand, then to be understood. I think I have been doing parts of this already but having this simple sentence in the back of my head from now on will for sure give me a more structured approach to engaging and understanding the wealth that can come from diversity of thought – and hopefully I can create an even better working environment for the teams I am leading or taking part in going forward.

For me, it is time to clean the blind spot off the lens I am looking through. The difference is that it is not my own lens but that of the person I am engaging with and learning from. My pragmatist-conserver-self has convinced itself that this change matters and makes sense.