The importance of diversity

For many years, I did not understand the requirements for diversity, for quotas for organisations to hire from minorities and other factors. My view used to be that you should hire the best person for the job, and if they were female or non-white, then this would be a bonus. However, I have evolved my thinking to see the importance of diversity in a workplace to go further than “the best person for the job”. There are still businesses that have diversity quotas – and I will explain why this is.

I had always believed that hiring should be solely on merit – education, experience, skills & training. But this is because it was in my favour. I am an educated white male with experience and training in many areas, and on paper I am often amongst the best candidates. However, that is the problem with diversity – if a business only hires people like me, then they only get people who have had a formal education, aligned experience and defined training and skills. I have pointed out before that education can stifle innovation and creativity, and that training is often obsolete. I have also talked about the limitations of engrained thinking – “that is not the way we do things around here“.

I have also found that in my industry training, and my formal university education, there is a structured approach to thinking, problem solving and diagnosis – which may be constraining the thought processes of many. In my courses, we were taught formal methodologies, pre-defined processes to establish business requirements, step-by-step analysis, and rules for almost every formal activity that was in the training. From my own experience, these structures needed to be taken as a guide only, with additional actions or considerations required, and some steps that were not always relevant or opportune. Yet, this critical thinking against the formally trained structures was only something I could do because of my experience and insight, and many other people on the course(s) were taking the steps as ‘gospel’ and non-fungible.

These are the people who break diversity, and the reason we need more variety of skills, background and experience.

The importance of diversity

If businesses only hired people who fit their mold, only hired people who had a particular degree or had only one type of industry certification – they knowledge of those people (and hence the business) would be limited only to what was taught in the formal course. Extrapolate that to life experience and background – if a business only hired people who went to a particular school or came from a small suburb, then the other experiences of those people (and hence the business) would be limited.

Life experience, upbringing, cultural exposure, gender and lifestyle factors are all important areas of diversity for thought, approach, understanding, empathy, innovation and problem solving. If everyone thought the same way, had the same experience and approach, we would be stuck in the mindset of “this is the way it must be done”.

I pride myself on my multi-domain thinking, my ability to solve problems by thinking outside the routine approaches and using knowledge I have learned from another sphere or discipline – but there are many other who only have skills that they have been taught, only learn from experiences or exposures that they have had, or are constrained by their culture or society for particular approaches. Diversity is critical to allow us all to develop and improve.

Diversity Quotas

One way that business tries to meet these diversity requirements is to have specific diversity quotas, to hire a specific number of women, non-whites, or people from other backgrounds. The quota is not purely to meet that tick of compliance, but to provide a more level field when it comes to hiring – if there is a job with 100 applicants, then it is highly likely that 85 of them will be white males with the same qualifications. This puts minorities at a disadvantage, and a quota allows them to be raised to the same level as the rest of the field.

Problems with quotas

However, the negatives stick with our memories, and tarnish the experience. Some organisations make broad-stroke assertions of quotas for minorities that mean that the wrong person gets hired for the job.