Diversity & Inclusion

I am a person of Indian origin, heading an innovation department of a Japanese company in the United Kingdom. My core team has between 2 and 30 years of experience, 6 nationalities from 5 domains. For a majority of them this is their first time working with an automotive company.

As the diversity of the team increased, so did the ideas and the creativity. I can testify that every interaction that I have with my team is a learning opportunity for me and most of my team also feel so.

Having first hand observed how naturally we were generating more ideas, I started to do a bit of research of why is it so? I turned to the region where a disproportionately large amount of ideas have come from over the past few decades - Silicon Valley. It is undeniable that there are a lot of ingenious ideas that have come from that region which are shaping our society today. The Trillion dollar tech companies, the unicorn start-ups and the thousands of companies worth more than millions of dollars are all concentrated in this area. Anna Lee Saxenian, Dean of UC Berkeley School of Information has done extensive research in this area and written a book ‘Regional Advantage.’ Her findings state that the reason why Silicon Valley is so innovative is because of the amalgamation of ideas between individuals and companies are multiplied to orders of magnitude as they are concentrated in such a small area. This leads to informal interactions between people of different cultural, socio-economic, and ethnic backgrounds. 

How do you explain that Google, Microsoft, Twitter are all headed by Immigrants? The culture of these organisations have a core requirement to be the epitome of inclusion. The best person always rises through the ranks.

The focus of this article though is diversity in general. 

The Unending pursuit of familiarity.

Our brain is trained to only seek the ‘familiar.’ This is a human tendency that is deep-rooted in our origins where we are programmed to seek ‘similar things.’ Despite what anyone claims, there are unconscious biases that all of us have towards a plethora of things. Learning to avoid the unfamiliar in primitive times was useful as it ensured survival. You avoided a person from another ‘cave’ as they might harm you and the result could literally be your death. In modern society, there are very few instances where our life would be in any real danger, yet our primitive brains always ‘warns’ us towards the unfamiliar. This can create unconscious bias towards that we don’t understand. This is a primary reason for teams that look very similar in terms of background, culture or any other aspect

The requirement of the unfamiliar.

In order to truly innovate, to break barriers and to do something great, you need diversity in your team and diversity in the decision makers. This does not mean gender or race only, but in personality, ideas, origin, nationality, hobbies, ethnicity, culture, socio economic background, profession, experience etc. The more aspects you can combine, the better the resultant result will be. This needs to be done consciously and actively. When hiring, seek out the mis-fits who may not resonate with your team. When seeking suppliers get ones from other industry or domains. When seeking partnerships look for the most crazy alliances. 

The role of the leader.

So now that I am suggesting to create a team of 'mis-fits', how do they actually do something great? This is where the leader comes in.

The leader needs to be an orchestrator who will strive to achieve harmony in this haphazard, eccentric environment. Just like in an orchestra, different instruments are played by experts, but the symphony sounds melodious only after the conductor gets them to play in unison. It's irrelevant that the conductor cannot play any instrument, The conductor is THE central entity. This is the job of the leader - to embrace the differences and lead them to greatness.