I had a conversation with someone a couple of months ago about the importance of diversity in recruitment and having a diverse workforce.  Their counter argument was that hiring someone similar means they are more likely to fit in and be happier whereas hiring someone with cultural, background or cognitive differences can mean that person may feel like the odd one out.  I can’t really argue with that because the problem in that scenario isn’t that the new starter is the same, it’s that the whole team is the same.

So why is diversity important? 

Before I begin, I want to clarify what I mean by diversity.  It isn’t just diversity in sex, age, religion, nationality etc it’s cognitive diversity.  Cognitive diversity sounds fancy but it’s really just people who think differently.  And when people in the same team and company think differently to each other we get different perspectives on problem solving and decision making.  People are able to challenge each other and it allows the team to come up with the best possible solution from a variety of opinions.  Research from Ashridge and London business schools found that the most cognitively diverse teams consistently outperform more homogeneous ones.    

How do I get a cognitively diverse workforce?

Cognitive diversity comes from people with different backgrounds.  Sometimes those backgrounds are some of the more traditional diversity characteristics such as religion or nationality or sex.  But it also comes from people with different education, different psychometric profiles (think introvert and extrovert) people from different parts of the country, people who have worked up from the bottom and people who have come in at the top.  And it’s the teams that have this diversity that have the greatest chance of success. 

Still not convinced?

Practically speaking let’s take a team of accountants.  All ACCA qualified, big 4 trained and analytical thinking.  Sounds great doesn’t it.  But who in this team would be the one to think of more innovative ways to do things and not only suggest process changes but push them through?  Hiring people who are still able to do the role but have fresh perspectives or different experiences will enable the team to grow and perform better. 

But they won’t fit in as well if they are different?

That largely comes back to culture and openness to change and diversity.  If the culture isn’t open to diversity, is it the right culture?  Something I see lots of teams doing to understand each other more (and potentially remove frustrations at differences and clashes) is personality profiling aka psychometrics.  I advocate it’s use for almost every stage of the employee lifecycle but it especially can come into its own in allowing teams to find out each other’s preferences and explain their behaviours. 

So now you are all sold on cognitive diversity – how to you achieve it? 

That comes back to not only culture but also recruitment and selection.  I’ll do a future blog on this.

Capita have some useful further reading on this topic here Achieving more through cognitive diversity | Capita