Dealing With Diversity

Research shows that innovation won't happen without a diverse work force. Then why do so many CEOs clone themselves for every position? 

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051101/handson-strategies.html

            In this article, it brings up the point that businesses want diversity in their work force, but are searching to shallow.  For the company of Mark VI Transportation and Logistics, you would not likely see this bunch of people together outside of the office.  They consist of a cautious president wearing a dowdy bow tie; a former truck driver who climbed the ranks to executive vice president; a lesbian in a company polo shirt; and a 43-year-old mom with a corporate background.  The group could not be more different, but once they step into that office, they are all business and really click.  For over a decade before the current management team took over, Mark IV had been stuck in a rut, unable to get past the $3 million mark.  Then within 5 years of the new management, they drove the company up to $20 million in revenue. 

            The point that this article is trying to drive home is that diversity works.  The original management team for Mark IV was a cozy group of friends who all shared similar thoughts or would all agree with each other, not bringing up any outside ideas.  Once the new management team was appointed having an extremely more diverse make up, it allowed for them to bring up topics and ideas that others may not have thought of.

            In order for a company to create a more diverse workforce team, it is important that they start off with recruiting and hiring the right people.  More times than not, an employer will hire someone who they see is a great fit for their company because that person thinks like they do will most likely agree with them.  The article references this idea to be like cloning the CEO of a company or every job.  Employers would most likely not admit to this phenomenon, and it doesn’t make them bad people, but its actually the theory of similar attraction taking place, meaning that we like to surround ourselves with people that are like ourselves.

            To prove this phenomenon to be true, several academic groups did a study using 50 groups to solve a murder mystery, very similar to the type of exercise that we did in class.  The results from this study showed that the more homogeneous groups were both more likely to be wrong and more confident of their answers in comparison to the more diverse mixture groups.  “Homogeneity simply does not breed innovation,” says Anne Donnellon, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Babson College.

            I think that this article brings up a good point about how important it is to have a diverse mixture in your work force, especially on a management team.  Mark IV is just one of many companies who have embraced this and used it to their advantage and turned the company around.  In their meetings now, they tend to be a bit more raucous and consensus is harder to achieve. But these arguments often spark new ideas.  As a result, the company is constantly spawning and sculpting new innovations in a way the old team never did. Revenue has increased more than six fold. 

Diversity is an important factor for employers to embrace, because it really does work.  This doesn’t mean though that employers need to radically revamp their entire management team, but have a slow adoption to it over time and they will hopefully see results.  It is also important to note that as adversity in your management can benefit in discussion, too much adversity can be destructive, so it is important to monitor it, and using slow adoption process to achieve a more diverse team can help with this.  Diversity really does work.