It used to be that attending college exposed young adults to new experiences, new people and new ways of thinking—but that was then and this is now.

Years ago, when writing about hiring, I said,

People want to spend their time with people like themselves, that is their comfort zone, and that is where they hire. Managers prefer to hire people

• from backgrounds they understand;
• working in areas in which the manager feels knowledgeable;
• with experiences and education to which the manager can relate; and
• with a resume that makes the manager’s decision look good even if the hire doesn’t work out.

Homophily has been increasing in most social settings, including the workplace, over the years and now young people have climbed on that bandwagon with a vengeance.

Instead of the adventurous attitudes that have always been the province of youth, they want to avoid discomfort; sidestep as many human vagaries as possible and spend as much of their time as possible with people like themselves.

This is especially true of college freshmen.

Helping them avoid discomfort is a market nitch occupied by the likes of Lifetopia and RoomBug, in collusion with their universities, as well as open sources such as URoomSurf and, of course, the ubiquitous Facebook.

But some worry that it robs young adults of an increasingly rare opportunity for growth: exposure to someone with different experiences and opinions.

“Very quickly, college students are able to form self-selected cliques where their views are reinforced,” noted Dalton Conley, an N.Y.U. sociology professor…

It is not a lack in the diversity of race, nationality or even gender that is worrisome; rather it is the lack of diversity of thought.

Homogenized thinking kills creativity, stunts innovation, increases intolerance and supports bigotry.

Homogenized thinking destroys leadership—today’s and tomorrows.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetone/3648783142/

Innovation is crucial to success, especially in today’s economy, and diversity is crucial to innovation.

But diversity refers to much more than race, creed, or gender.

Juicing creativity and innovation requires a strong diversity of both thought and skills within your organization—homogenizing your workforce dilutes the juice.

Thought Diversity

True mental diversity is about MAP and mental function, not just a race and gender. I’ve known managers whose organizations were mini-UNs with equal numbers of males and females, but they might as well have been cloned from the boss, their thinking was so identical.

There are three main ways to homogenize thought

• Hire all the same types, most often “people like me;”
• scorn/belittle/reject anything that doesn’t conform with your own MAP/ideas/approach; or
• allow others in your organization to do the first two.

As your organization grows more diverse you want to celebrate controversy, encourage disagreement, and enable discussions—all within a civilized framework that debates the merits of ideas, not individuals.

Skills Diversity

Skills homogeny is just as detrimental to innovation. As with MAP, people tend to gravitate towards people whose skills are within their or their group’s comfort zone; worse, managers may be unaware of the full range of skills available within the group.

The fix for skills homogeny is far simpler, since it requires awareness and mechanical action, rather than changes in MAP.

Use this three-step process to better identify and access your group’s skills

1. Skills survey: Have each person in your group create a complete list of all their skills, not just the ones they’re using in their current job, but also those from previous positions and companies, as well as skills they’ve developed outside of work. Have them rate each skill 1-5 (five being the strongest) based on their expertise. (I’ve yet to see a manager do this who wasn’t surprised at the results.)
2. Skills set matrix: Using a spreadsheet, create a matrix of the information.
3. Repeat and update: go through the entire process and update the matrix twice a year; add every new hire’s info immediately.

Be sure to consult the matrix every time you develop a new position or replace someone, whether through promotion or attrition.

Knowing all this gives you tremendous staffing flexibility. For example, you may have someone in your group who’s developed the needed skills on a new project and would be thrilled to move to the it. Then, using the matrix, you can design the new position to fill other skill gaps, both current and future.

The end result is a well-rounded organization of people inspired to learn new skills, because they know that they won’t be relegated to a rut just because “that’s what they’ve always done.”

Viva La Difference is the rallying cry for the anti-homogenizing movement.

(For more on how to diversify click here, here and here.)

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Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr

A few days ago an executive I’ll call Dan called me to bemoan the lack of creativity in his organization and I told him to stop hiring dogs. He informed me that he had great people and when I agreed he demanded to know why I called them dogs.

The problem is that Dan hires people he likes who fall inside his comfort zone, so his organization gets along well. And while it’s well diversified from an HR point of view it has little mental diversity.

It’s a happy place, kind of like a dog park with a large variety of breeds and mutts all well socialized to play together and those that don’t play nice are asked to leave.

That kind of peace may be good for a dog park, but it can mean death for a company’s innovation efforts.

Unfortunately, people have been moving away from thought diversity for quite awhile now. The attitude has a name, homophily, it’s been around forever and it’s an attitude I run into frequently when it comes to hiring, although it’s rarely intentional. It’s a word you should learn just so you can avoid it.

It’s what makes it difficult for Dan’s people to be creative; when something is suggested it’s often accepted with little discussion and even when a counter idea is presented it has similar DNA.

It’s not that Dan needs to toss a bunch of cats in the middle, but he does need to start hiring people that come from a variety of companies and industries, with different experiences and with whom he may not be as comfortable as he is now.

It also means that Dan will have to work harder.

Not because his people won’t get along, but because diversity of thought does foster exactly what Dan wants—higher creativity.

Creativity means multiple ideas with no common DNA leading to passionate champions, intense discussions and heated meetings. Dan will have to actively manage the various elements if he wants to harness that energy for the benefit of the organization.

Whether you consider yourself a manager, a leader or a combination thereof, the more mentally diverse your organization the more difficult to manage, but the rewards are high for doing it well.

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Image credit: sxc.hu

I’ve written several times regarding how stuff posted online will never go away—no matter what you do—and the impact this has/will have—especially on your professional life.

Between now and June 15, Harvard is doing an interactive study on the subject. Read the case study and think about how you would handle the situation.

Information found on non-traditional sites needs to be taken with anything from a grain to a pound of salt, knowing that much of what’s written in social media is often untrue or, at the least, vastly exaggerated.

People do grow up (one hopes) and we’ve all done/do silly/stupid things in our lives—from birth to death—that we don’t expect to be widely publicized. The problem today is that our best buddy, who thinks something is really funny/interesting/gross, will post it somewhere to share with friends, and from there it travels over the world.

But what if the information is more serious and from a reputable news source?

Would you hire an activist involved in protests? Activists are passionate and you want passion in your people.

Would it depend on whether you agreed or disagreed with their cause?

This is the essential question—since a “yes” leads directly to homophily and guarantees less creativity/innovation in your organization.

More and more, management is recognizing that hiring and retention are Yin and Yang—two sides of the same coin, tightly interwoven, and blowing one means blowing the other.

Poor hiring leads to high turnover. High turnover shrinks your candidate pool because it wrecks your street rep and, as described yesterday, street reps are forever. Good, bad or indifferent, nothing fades away in this digital age.

Bad hires have four basic ingredients—

• charm,
• bad reqs,
• poor hiring skills, and
• homophily—

all of which are a function of MAP and can be overcome.

Good hiring means

Hiring the right person into the right position at the right time and for the right reasons.

Change any “right” to “wrong” and you’ll likely have a bad hire, not a bad person.