Increasing the diversity of your team

Creativity & Communication

But 10 x 1 does not equal 1 x 10. Imagine you have ten roles to fill, and you ask ten colleagues to each hire one person. Obviously each person will try to recruit the best person they can find – that’s the same as asking one person to choose the ten best hires he can find, right? Wrong. Anyone choosing a group of ten people will instinctively deploy a much wider variance than someone hiring one person. The reason for this is that with one person we look for conformity, but with ten people we look for complementarity.

If you were only allowed to eat one food, you might choose the potato. Barring a few vitamins and trace minerals, it contains all the essential amino acids you need to build proteins, repair cells and fight diseases - eating just five a day would support you for weeks. However, if you were told you could only eat ten foods for the rest of your life, you would not choose ten different types of potato. In fact, you may not choose potatoes at all – you would probably choose something more varied.

Ten hiring managers can independently choose the “best” candidate and accidentally build the same person ten times. The eleventh can then be hired to explain why nobody notices the same risks.

Each decision looks sensible alone. Together they create a team rich in visionaries and poor in finishers, or packed with articulate enthusiasts while quiet customer perspectives remain missing. A panel can praise ten candidates for “executive presence” and discover later that it selected the same communication habit repeatedly. “Culture fit” completes the job by turning shared blind spots into a warm feeling.

Plan composition before opening separate searches. Which capabilities, experiences and working styles are absent? Where must recruitment widen? Who is consistently screened out before their evidence is heard? Review the emerging team as a portfolio rather than a pile of individually respectable CVs. Structured criteria help because “best” otherwise mutates to resemble whoever already owns the meeting.

People are not demographic ingredients, and nobody should carry responsibility for representing an entire group. Capability stays essential, while the definition of capability deserves inspection. A different route into the field may supply knowledge the standard route cannot. The portfolio question simply admits that ten excellent potatoes remain a dreadful menu. Hiring each one rationally does not make the resulting dinner less absurd.