Pawel Brodzinski has a terrific LinkedIn post about the value of hiring women. In his experience, they stay longer than the men. That means the investment the company makes in these people has a longer payback time. That's an example of a safe hiring decision.
That's been my experience, too. But I didn't just hire for women. I looked for diversity of thought and experience. (Also, for personality diversity. Maybe because I didn't want to be the only extrovert around.)
That meant I hired way more women and non-white men in some organizations. If I could create the culture I wanted (and often, I could), these people tended to stay longer. That matters because the more companies invest in their staff, the more likely people will stay longer. (See the myth: We Have No Time for Training.)
But that employment duration pales in comparison to the other benefits.
Because we had diverse teams, the products were better. Not because these people were “10X” anythings. (10X is total hooey.)
No, our products were better because I hired for collaboration and the speed of learning together. (These are not “female” characteristics—they are human characteristics.)
Because we had team members who had different backgrounds and experiences, they asked different questions. We (mostly) avoided groupthink. We explored requirements first by talking and then by prototyping.
I encouraged people to ask for help. We even had team agreements on knowing when to ask for help. (I used to believe in struggling for 20 minutes. Now, I'm more likely to stop at 15 minutes.)
That's all because effective product development relies on a team learning together, as quickly as reasonably possible.
Useful Products Are an Outcome of Learning
Software teams create useful products with a mix of learning and doing. The more we do and release, the faster we learn. (That's double-loop learning in action.)
Right now, diversity has a bad rap. But I see (and have to use) products all that time that are pure crap. The user experience stinks and gets worse. I can tell that the organization does not use persona-based development. If they did, they would change the user experience and fix the damn bugs. Why don't these intelligent people change how they develop their products?
Their teams fall into groupthink, especially about “reasonable” customers and the feedback the team does not want:
- A reasonable customer would never do that.
- Why would anyone want to use the product that way?
- What was the customer trying to do? Really?
The more similar everyone's background and experience, the more the team tends to fall into groupthink.
Diverse teams tend to have fewer groupthink problems. Especially if the organization values them for their different perspectives.
If you're a hiring manager, you don't have to use the D (diversity) word. Instead, you can change how you hire. Instead of focusing on people who all look the same and have the same background, choose to focus on team-based collaboration and the speed of the team's learning. That will often get you a more diverse team that will create a better product.
That's a safe hiring decision.
Read More:
- All three Modern Management Made Easy books. Because managers choose what to focus on: the individual or the team, and how to increase team-based delivery and learning.
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- The Hiring Technical People blog. I have not updated it in years, but all the posts are still here.