Is there really anyone left in the HR community who isn’t familiar with the arguments in favour of diversity? The need to mirror on the inside of the organisation the makeup of your customer or client base? The imperative of getting the best talent no matter their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, physical ability, etc, etc? The fact that innovation and development so often seem to stem from differences of approach and opinion, not from the conformity that comes with a group of semi-clones?
So if we are well-used to all this and, perhaps even more importantly, have bought into it, why is it that the individuals at the top of so many organisations often look, speak and act in such a suspiciously similar way? It’s a question that speakers such as Elizabeth Wallace, head of the executive search team at global financial services firm, BlackRock, and Jon Terry, partner and diversity champion at PwC, will be posing at the World Executive Search Congress on 9th October. And the answer seems to be that, no matter how good diversity initiatives look on the drawing board, they are, in many cases subject to subtle yet highly damaging attrition once they are deployed into the workplace. And I would suggest that the reason for this is that, with a few very creditable exceptions, organisations have not yet developed tools or processes robust enough to completely eliminate unconscious bias from the hiring and promotion cycles and this makes its biggest impact in the composition of the executive team.
Some of the more optimistic voices have predicted that the growing influence of AI or Artificial Intelligence will eventually eradicate this invidious form of bias. But others have pointed out how a number of initial flirtations with this form of technology have actually made the problem worse.
Until (or perhaps it should be ‘if’) AI provides a solution a more prosaic and accessible one might be to follow the lead that major employers such as the consultancies Deloitte and EY have already taken at junior level and extend a form of ‘blind cv’ recruiting to the executive level. For this to work it would, of course, need to fully embrace the way that talent of this kind is currently targeted and engaged with. It would mean the development of search tools that focus purely on capabilities and relevant experience rather than also gathering information on factors, such as gender, ethnicity and the like which are in reality simply misdirections and which have no demonstrable effect on an individual’s ability to do a job. And given the technologies at our disposal that surely cannot be beyond our reach.
This would, of course, also need to be accompanied by a degree of re-education at the very highest levels of organisations, by a clear outline of the benefits of reaching out beyond the ‘usual suspects’ that make up far too many shortlists for senior roles. It will represent a significant challenge – selling and implementing any significant form of change always is – but given the benefits that diversity can so clearly deliver at all levels, and in particular within a senior management team, is it one that the HR community can afford not to take on?
