On moving the needle and spinning the flywheel: Why diversity matters
Why I care about diversity, why we should all care, and how to get started
Role models
Take a second, close your eyes (after this sentence), and think about some people you have looked up to in your life, both as a child and today. You might have called them role models.
Did they motivate you to take up any hobbies or make certain career choices? Was there anything in particular about these people that inspired you?
Did they have anything in common? Did you have anything in common with them? Were they the same gender as you? Same race, ethnicity or sexuality as you? I will not be surprised if the answer to at least one of these questions is yes.
When I was growing up, I always loved the Bible story of Sampson, who gained his strength from his long hair; at 13, I thought Lenny Kravitz was the man, and I picked up guitar; today, I look up to Lewis Hamilton and am inspired by how he uses his platform to drive awareness and equality (things like his foundation, Mission44). Looking back, I could relate to them because I looked like each of them in some way – I could see myself in their shoes. As we get older, we tend to forget how influential role models were growing up, and we may begin to feel like we don't need them.
Now think about your current workplace or organization. Ask yourself the same questions above. Do you have any leaders or managers that you look up to? Will diverse prospective candidates and employees find someone to look up to? Will they feel inspired and feel like they can move up the proverbial ladder?
Unfortunately, both in my own experience, and anecdotally, for many people of diverse backgrounds it's rare to find such role models in the workplace.
I'd like to share my experiences and thoughts on how we can build diverse communities in the workplace by "open sourcing" a framework we have created in an employee resource group (ERG) that I am a part of. The ERG, which will have to go unnamed, is an organization that is focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of engineers from Black and underrepresented communities.
Through sharing, I hope that others can learn from and apply this framework in their own lives. I will walk through how we have built, developed, and fostered a community that is tangibly moving the needle to increase diversity in the tech sector, and I see no reason why this cannot be applied to other sectors as well.
This article is all about why we should care about diversity, of all kinds, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, neurodiversity, etc.
Why should we care about diversity?
It's a fair question. The work to improve diversity is not free, and you will often be doing it with no compensation and little recognition, but my goal is to show you why it's worth it. To start, I'd like to explain why I care.
Why do I care?
Throughout my adolescence I always wanted to "give back" – to leave the world a better place than I found it. Unfortunately, I struggled with putting that altruism to action.
In spring of 2020, I had a mini-existential crisis; here I am, working at a massive company writing code that generates bills every month, doing absolutely nothing in regards to all of the injustice and struggle in the world. Record breaking wildfires and droughts broke out across multiple continents. Protests and riots arose worldwide in response to the tragic murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many more. I felt that I had to do something.
During this time, a colleague connected me with the ERG mentioned above, and I learned about its Interview Prep Program, which helps software engineering candidates, especially those from underrepresented communities, prepare for their interview. As I started running these prep sessions, the attendee feedback from the sessions about how "just seeing someone that looked like them in the industry made them so much more comfortable in the interview" gave me a real sense of fulfillment.
Two years after starting our interview prep program, we've helped 70+ candidates from underrepresented communities – engineers, managers, and technical program managers – get hired. I started to feel like I was actually making a difference in people's lives. A big tech company on someone's resume can really help increase their opportunities.
Additionally, the strong sense of community within the ERG has made me feel at home. In our weekly sync ups, we brainstorm about not only on our programs' progress, but also the highs and lows of our our personal lives: the promotions we've gotten and those that have been dragging on, the new plants in our video backgrounds, the races we're training for, and so on. This creates a comfortable, homey environment; as I mentioned in my last article, "Home is not a physical place but a feeling."
This is my story about how participating in and growing this ERG has become a passion of mine. And if folks have trouble empathizing with that, there are real financial and business benefits to maintaining and growing diverse and inclusive companies.
Why should managers and businesses care?
Hint: More diverse organizations literally have a higher likelihood to make more money than less diverse organizations.
I love data, so below are some stats to help support the claim. I encourage you to check out the linked articles if you're curious:
Multiple studies have shown that diversity, both in gender and ethnicity, is correlated with profitability.
The companies with the highest representation of women had 35% higher return on equity and 34% higher total return to shareholders than companies with the lowest representation of women.
In 2019, top-quartile companies [by diversity] were 36% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile.
Incremental representation has an incremental impact: Companies with more than 30% women executives were more likely to outperform companies where this percentage ranged from 10 to 30, and in turn these companies were more likely to outperform those with even fewer women executives, or none at all. A substantial differential likelihood of outperformance – 48% – separates the most from the least gender-diverse companies.
Ok, Matt, I hear you, by whyyyy? Why is it that diversity leads to these improvements? From what I have read, it's best summarized by this:
Diversity fosters innovation and creativity through a greater variety of problem-solving approaches, perspectives, and ideas....
A diversity of informed views enables objections and alternatives to be explored more efficiently and solutions to emerge more readily and be adopted with greater confidence... When leadership lacks innate or acquired diversity or fails to foster a “speak-up” culture, fewer promising ideas make it to market.
Businesses should care about diversity because employers quite literally define and contribute to representation in the workforce. A recent Mckinsey study stated:
On the current trajectory, it will take about 95 years for Black employees to reach talent parity (or 12 percent representation) across all levels in the private sector. Addressing the major barriers that hold back the advancement of Black employees could cut that duration to about 25 years.... At the managerial level, the Black share of the workforce [is] 7 percent. Across the senior manager, VP, and SVP levels, Black representation holds steady at 4 to 5 percent
I still get chills every time I read it. Almost a century for Black employees to reach talent parity. Though, the second part of the quote fuels a fire in me to this day. I truly believe that within our lifetime – within 25 years – we have the capacity to see equitable representation across the board if we take action. If we have the chance, we must take it.
Where to start?
Ok, hopefully by this point you can see the importance of diversity across multiple dimensions, but what if you don't have an existing program or group for it? How do you start to increase diversity in your workplace? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Every company and organization will be different. But I'd like to share my experiences of building and growing a framework that I have seen success with, in the hopes that you can apply some of these in your own world.
The cornerstone of any approach is to create the potential for a "flywheel effect" or a "virtuous cycle". In other words, the outputs of your processes must fuel the inputs and keep the cycle moving.
The diagram below shows what this flywheel looks like for our ERG.
Let's start at the top of the flywheel with Recruitment. One natural place to begin increasing diversity in your organization is to analyze your recruiting and hiring processes. What are the demographics of the interviewers? Are there interviewers who belong to the same demographic group as the interviewee? Is there someone in the interview debrief who looks out for bias, perhaps by asking for concrete examples when feedback is subjective: "I feel like the candidate didn't know XYZ", or "The candidate seemed to know ABC"?
Once these talented individuals are recruited, we need to focus on Retention. Start with being intentional about creating an inclusive space and community for underrepresented employees and allies. Finding a place where they feel comfortable asking for help and meeting others is especially difficult in our remote/virtual world where so few water-cooler introductions occur.
As these employees get their feet under them, we have to make sure that they, and all employees for that matter, have a concrete understanding of what their expectations are, and what it takes to both advance to the next level in their role and progress in their career. If you are involved in the promotion process at your company, ask "bias busting" questions: Are we making this decision based on data? What is the demographic of the people deciding this person's promotion? Asking ourselves these kinds of questions can help us make more objective decisions.
Now with just these three pillars, recruitment, retention, and advancement, we should start to create a self-sustaining flywheel. Though, if we remember the importance of role models in our lives, we can see how to accelerate the rate at which the flywheel spins: As more diverse employees grow in their career, the more that the next generation will believe that they can enter the field and be successful. As more underrepresented individuals enter the field, there will be a larger and stronger community to support them in their roles; this support should help them get promoted, and so the flywheel spins again.
I plan to expand upon these concepts in upcoming articles with concrete steps. (Let me know if any area in particular interests you the most!)
Ripples to Waves
With this flywheel as the north star of our journey, we are met with the reality that many representation statistics are bleak, with perhaps single digit percentage representation of diverse groups, as seen in the Mckinsey study quote above. Though, remember: if we do nothing, we won't live to see the change.
You don't need a large group to start making an impact. Every individual that joins the community or that we help matters, and each should be celebrated. This ERG I have spoken of was started six years ago with just six engineers, wanting to share their experiences by starting a book club, and it has since grown to hundreds of members across three continents.
The best part? We are just getting started.
After reading this, I hope that you:
1/ Recognize that moving the needle is an excellent goal. Making incremental progress is still progress! If you help one person get promoted or have a better interview, they are much more likely to give back and pay it forward for the next one.
2/ Make more voices heard: In meetings, especially where you see one or two people underrepresented, ask for their opinions on the discussion; make sure they feel like they can voice their thoughts and opinions. This will foster increased creativity and dialogue, while boosting their confidence to be their genuine selves to work every day.
3/ Acknowledge that we all have unconscious bias, and be on the lookout for it: Probe for bias in meetings, interviews, and promotion discussions. It's always healthy to ask for data to back people's opinions: "Do you have any concrete examples of times when this person did XYZ (missed a deadline, delivered high quality work, etc)?".
4/ Subscribe to dive deeper into each part of flywheel: In upcoming articles, I'll be elaborating on how to actually start a community and/or diversity initiative, diving into each part of the flywheel, recruitment, retention, and advancement, through the lens of a real-world ERG case study.
If you have any thoughts, insights, or questions for me, please feel free to reach out at splashofcolour@substack.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of their employer. Any content provided by the author is of their own opinion and is not intended to malign any organization, company, or individual. The author is not responsible for any consequences resulting from the use or interpretation of the information presented in this article, and no endorsement, approval, or disapproval by their employer should be inferred.