“We’re really struggling to increase diversity in our leadership team.”
This is a common challenge we hear from our clients. Increasing organisational diversity is a conscious focus for many. But when these organisations compare their leaders to the wider team, there’s almost universally much lower levels of diversity at senior levels.
So why is it so hard to increase diversity at leadership levels?
The most obvious challenge at senior levels lies in there being a smaller, less diverse candidate pool. This is often because underrepresented / historically marginalised groups haven’t received leadership opportunities in the past. Whilst this is a tough challenge for organisations to overcome, there are a number of other barriers that organisations have more direct control over.
Other barriers to building more representative leadership groups are the biases and strong stereotypes we see at play at this level:
- We can have stereotypical views of what a “leader” is, only recruiting those that fit that mould.
- We can focus on “culture fit” that results in homogeneity instead of “culture add” that supports diversity.
- We see strong affinity bias occurring – where we’re predisposed to be more positive towards people like us.
- We also see a strong reliance on referrals at leadership levels, most likely coming from groups similar to those who are referring.
Given that we tend to have a smaller group of people recruiting at this level, these biases can easily become entrenched.
Why is it so important to increase diversity at a leadership level?
An organisation cannot be truly inclusive if it doesn’t start at the top with a diverse leadership team.
Homogeneous leadership teams often reinforce historical power imbalances that we are trying to correct. They lack a variety of perspectives, losing valuable decision-making and ideation strength. There are endless statistics to support this; here’s one from McKinsey:
Companies with executive levels of over 30% women are 48% more likely to outperform companies with less gender diversity.
How do we increase leadership diversity?
To make change in this area, we need to take a strategic approach and involve all stakeholders in the process – something that’s often missed when getting efforts underway.
Our proven process takes you through clear steps to build your plan to diversify your team, whilst getting buy-in from all relevant parties.
Here’s how.
Stage 1: Hold a kick off meeting with all stakeholders.
Run a session(s) with leaders and hiring managers to explain the importance of leadership diversity and how your organisation is going to work toward improving in this area. Explain the role those leaders and hiring managers will have in the process. This provides clear communication and expectations and gets everyone onboard early.
Stage 2: Draft organisational level targets.
This starts with understanding your current state of leadership diversity and comparing it to the community you serve. Use this as a basis to set provisional leadership level targets. We recommend looking at multi-year targets, as these provide a roadmap that can help inform your ongoing strategy. Do some modelling to ensure these goals are feasible based on the number of people you will be employing.
Stage 3: Set targets by division.
Share your draft targets with functional leads and work with them to set targets by division. This should be used to confirm organisational level target feasibility as well as provide clarity and accountability at a divisional level. These could even form part of your leaders’ KPIs.
Stage 4: Review your existing recruitment process to identify areas for improvement.
This includes external recruitment as well as internal promotions. External areas will likely include rethinking job descriptions and reducing reliance on referrals. From an internal perspective, you’ll be ensuring you access right talent pipelines by focussing on areas such as L&D, coaching, shadowing and mentoring.
We dive further into this in our blog Inclusive hiring: more than just training.
Stage 5: Provide training.
Determine the support requirements for everybody involved in the recruitment process. Keep in mind these requirements might differ depending on role and professional experience. Include training for hiring managers on how to reduce their bias during candidate assessment and selection, as well as how to lessen reliance on referrals.
Stage 6: Conduct monthly reviews.
Monthly group sessions provide an environment in which to share progress against targets at an organisational and division level, understand what’s working well, discuss learnings and identify challenges and support requirements. These sessions provide powerful pathways for making change as leaders learn from each other.
Increasing leadership team diversity is definitely not easy. But it is absolutely possible. Taking a strategic approach and involving your whole team in the process to define targets, find solutions and then continually review is a vital part of making this change.
