Representation Matters

James Damore’s famous Google memo explicitly states what many folks skeptical or hostile to affirmative action believe: organizations that work to proactively build diversity in the workplace are “lowering the bar” on hiring and promotion decisions. They believe that valuing diversity means devaluing the overall strength of the team.

This is false. Building a diverse organization raises the bar. Study after study has shown that diverse institutions perform better. Diverse boards perform better. Diverse investing teams perform better. Organizations with diverse leadership perform better. Patients do better with a diverse medical team. Students do better with diverse teachers. These improvements are chalked up to two mechanisms. First, that diverse teams represent more diverse viewpoints, and therefore less group think. Second, that there is a role model/empathy impact. There is strong evidence that these are true (for example, black babies have lower mortality when delivered by black doctors), but I think there is more to improved outcomes than this.

There are two other mechanisms that result in better outcomes in diverse organizations. First, organizations need to develop more rigorous and robust processes to bring in diverse talent, so the quality of talent is higher in diverse organizations. Secondly, organizations serve our highly diverse society. Non-white males experience the world differently than white males. Non-diverse organizations have enormous blind spots and difficulty understanding the full environment.

Diversity raises the bar on hiring and promotions. Most organizations have lazy, sloppy or inefficient hiring and promotion practices. Including the ones that require 10 rounds of interviews culminating with a founder interview before the hire is made. This may seem counter-intuitive. Consider that less than 30% of the labor force consists of white, non-hispancic males. If you cannot find or promote employees in the 70% non-white male labor force, it is your process that is broken. Many organizations promote employee referral programs. These are programs that bring in more employees like the ones you already have. Many organizations have irrelevant hurdles for employees that jump over that have nothing to do with the job. Far too many organizations don’t evaluate the experience or skills of an employee unless they have a degree from a prestigious school and/or experience at a brand name firm. This typically eliminates most applicants with appropriate skills. Referral programs and irrelevant hurdles lead to non-representative, smaller candidate pools that don’t necessarily have the right skills.

So, most organizations put together a sub-optimal candidate pool. And then, with this sub-optimal pool, they do a poor job picking the best candidate. Many organizations write weak job descriptions (if they write them at all). Job descriptions often request a laundry list of unprioritized skills and experiences. Hiring teams don’t standardize questions or criteria, resulting in processes that don’t explicitly compare candidates to each other based on the hiring criteria. Culture fit often comes down to the often-cited, but on the face ridiculous, “do I want to have a beer with you” criteria. The end result is that most interview processes are an elaborate affinity test or gut-based decision, as opposed to a rigorous process that evaluates candidates against the needs of the organization.

We are programmed (through media, schooling, entertainment, the existing hierarchy) that white men are better leaders and smarter than others. White men benefit from these non-rigorous, non-objective decisions. Fixing your hiring and promotion programs so that non-white candidates can succeed invariably means expanding the pool of candidates and raising the bar for white men. (For a good example of doing it right, read about Ben Horowitz’s decision to hire Mark Cranny. While Mark Cranny is a white male, the discussion exposes the common decision making biases.)

Diversity drives a deeper understanding of your environment, leading to better decision making. When people discuss lowering or raising the bar when building teams, they imply that the only relevant criteria for these decisions is skill level. For high jump, our original bar jumpers, skill probably is the only relevant factor. But in building a team you need more than that. These days, the importance of good team players is widely recognized (even if it is often ignored). Tolerating a toxic person can destroy even a very highly skilled team. In our complex world today, a good team is more than team players who are highly skilled. You also need a team with a deep understanding of the environment.

Business is often compared to sports, particularly in team building. But there is a big difference. Sports teams have highly constrained and simplified environments. The competitor, the game and the playing field are all known and static. There is no threat that a competitor will add an extra goalie, that the game field will suddenly double in size, or that an additional competitor will show up in the second half. Organizations exist in an ever changing fluid environment, where competition, customer preference, distribution channels and rules constantly change. And this is why representation becomes critical. As Kathleen Hogan at Microsoft says, representation is existential to the organization.

Without representation, organizations will have massive blind spots and poorer decision making. To women, Black people and other minorities, this is obvious. They are used to using products that don’t work for them. Sensors to turn on faucets and dispense soap don’t work on dark skin. Facial recognition does not work well with dark skin. Desks are ergonomic if you are 6’ tall. Cars are significantly less safe for women. There are countless products and services that are designed for white males (who still hold virtually all positions of power), and work less well for the majority of the population.

Yet, white males, for whom the existing world works quite well, often don’t see this. Many believe either that they have the ability to see the blind spots or that market research and data can fill the gaps. Or, they believe that the blind spots are not important, which is easy for them to believe when the positions of power are filled by white men. Back when the minority population was a small percentage of the population and women were confined to the domestic realm, companies could get away with only understanding the white, male point of view. We are rapidly becoming a minority-majority country, so these blind spots are becoming more and more costly.

These blind spots cannot be overcome by market research and/or adding a token diverse person to the group. There are numerous decisions a company needs to make before conducting market research and it needs to decide what data is important. It needs to decide which trends are important, which competitors are a threat, and where the market is heading and then it needs to figure out how to address that. To take an example from my old industry, sheet music publishing is overwhelmingly dominated by middle-aged white males. The industry completely missed the impact of YouTube on the sheet music industry. YouTube raised a new roster of musicians that did not come up through the record labels, and it completely destroyed the “teach yourself” market. The industry was aware of these developments, and they discussed it ad nauseum. But having few young people or people trained out of the music mainstream, the firms underestimated the impact of YouTube, and developed misguided solutions that failed in the marketplace.

Every year, tone-deaf, embarrassing ad campaigns and products show up on social media. Here are a few examples, in which it is clear that the organization had some serious blind spots.

• H&M dresses a black boy in a “coolest monkey in the jungle” sweatshirt.
• Heineken releases an ad pushing a beer past three Black people to a white woman, with the tagline “Sometimes, Lighter is Better”
• Target’s only Father’s day card with a Black couple was captioned with “Baby Daddy”
• Dove soap releases an ad showing a black women turning into a white women.
• Facial recognition works much better on white males than anyone else, as the training sets are primarily white male.

These examples show obvious misses made by large teams of people. These decisions weren’t big blunders made by a bad actor. Many people were involved along the way, and they certainly went through multiple approval layers. Yet, no one saw the obvious.

The problems caused by blind spots are typically much more subtle, such as the inability of a large team with good people failing to reckon with the changes happening to an industry because of YouTube. The impact is more subtle, but just as real. When companies do the work to truly build diverse, inclusive environments, they eliminate these blind spots, which results in better products and better messaging.

At this point, most organizations have a vague idea that there is some evidence or beliefs that diverse organizations perform better than non-diverse organizations. Most hiring managers I talk to still discuss hiring for diversity primarily in moral terms or from a general “diverse viewpoints is good” stance. These managers are not yet understanding the power of diversity. A truly diverse organization can only come from internal hiring and promotion systems that have been developed to address our inherent biases and results in an organization with a much stronger connection to the world within which it operates.