A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Yesterday I wrote abut new approaches to recruiting, a la online puzzles, to find tech talent from non-traditional sources, as well as advice from a successful entrepreneur who says that the most important traits to look for are behavioral and can only be identified through good interviewing, which requires time.
All this says that younger entrepreneurs are willing to try radically new, as well as mastering old, approaches to finding talent.
The one thing I’ve found that many are not willing to do is hire outside their peers.
An old attitude that dates back decades (if not centuries) and which can be boiled down to five words—“people like me,” which defines your “comfort zone.”
It doesn’t matter that it’s illegal to say it involves age, but it does.
The bias is dangerous, especially when hiring more senior people as you grow. Consider these points,
Can that brilliant developer you hired lead?
Does the Twitter whiz kid understand creating and implementing a complete marketing strategy?
What exactly does a twenty-something a year or few out of school know about employment law, strategy, team-building, managing, conflict resolution, contract negotiation, the list goes on and on.
Whatever gave people the idea that creativity and innovation dropped off as experience increased?
One of these days in the not-too-distant future you are going to lose out on an opportunity because you are outside the company’s/manager’s comfort zone and the company is going to lose out on the richness of your experience.
How do you hire? What have you missed out on recently?
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I read an interesting article from a Forbes advisor called A Young World is No Place for Old Corporations; in a nutshell it talks about nostalgia for “what the WSJ calls America’s ‘Midcentury Moment’, those post war “golden years of the 1940’s, ‘50s and early ‘60s?” The boom years when Americans forged the world’s new super power, as those in Europe diminished.“
It goes on to say, “During this time US companies became dominant corporations on a world stage, strongly influencing how business was conducted all over the world.
Fast forward to 2011, America now competes in a fierce global market against young and dynamic economies.”
It lauds the dynamic spark that drove the US economy; a common theme, but one I get tired of seeing.
Tired because it only tells only the upside of the story and ignores so much.
I am neither an economist nor an historian, but here is my view of the same history.
European industry didn’t diminish, it was crippled by WWII.
The US became dominant because we were the only country in a position to produce as opposed to spending our efforts and money to rebuild.
In other words, in comparison to the material and psychological devastation experienced by the rest of the world what the US suffered was more like a serious inconvenience.
But not too inconvenient, since we kept on producing and selling.
War’s end left us in the cat-bird seat—not rebuilding, just retooling to sell what the rest of the world needed to rebuild.
A lack of competition breeds arrogance, sloppy practices and fat—fat management and fat labor; it is easy to succeed in a world with little-to-no competition.
When countries no longer needed us because they produced their own we were surprised; when they went beyond and more efficiently produced what we produced and innovated where we had not bothered we were shocked.
When comfortable, we humans seem to believe that some version of what is will always be; it isn’t that we don’t believe in change, but we seem blind to radical change.
We are taken by surprise when it happens and long instead for whatever version of the “good old days” brings us back to our (false) comfort zone.
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.
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.
Shortly after I started writing Leadership Turn I did a post about diversity, ending with this—
“Another way to look at it is that any increased spending on diversity development is an investment and will be more than offset by the increases in innovation, productivity and revenues. If spending $100 results in a bottom line increase of $1000, did you really spend the $100, or did you gain $900? $900 that wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t invested the initial $100.”
How do you define diversity?
True diversity isn’t just diversity of race, gender, creed and country, but what I call the new diversity—all those plus diversity of thought.
Think about it, if a manager really works at it she can create a rainbow-colored group who all think the same way—George W. Bush’s initial Cabinet was ethnically diverse, but their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) was homogeneous.
It’s far more difficult to put together a group of totally diverse thinkers. Managers tend to hire in their comfort zone, but more and more that refers to how people think, rather than how they look.
So what should you do to ensure that you’re building a truly diversified team?
Here are five key points to keep in mind when you’re both hiring people and managing/leading them.
Avoid assumptions. People aren’t better because they graduated from your (or your people’s) alma mater, come from your hometown/state or worked for a hot company.
Know your visual prejudices. Everybody has them (one of mine is dirty-looking, stringy hair), because you can’t hear past them if you’re not aware of them.
Listen. Not to what the words mean to you, but what the words mean to the person speaking.
Be open to the radical. Don’t shut down because an idea is off the wall at even the third look and never dismiss the whole if some part can be used.
Be open to alternative paths. If your people achieve what they should it doesn’t matter that they did it in a way that never would have crossed your mind.
Finally, remember that if you’re totally comfortable, with nary a twinge to ripple your mental lake, your group is probably lacking in diversity.
I received a very irate email taking me to task for saying (in yesterday’s post), “I think that people still prefer their own comfort zone (whatever that might be) and probably always will—the goal is to expand it, since eliminating it is highly unlikely…” After removing the expletives the gist was that as a person supposedly teaching leadership why was I condoning closed-minded attitudes, even bigotry?
Short answer, I’m not, but I’m a realist.
Long answer, I’ve always believed that it’s great to work for an ideal, but you have to function in the real world and the real world is populated by people and people are a long way from ideal—additionally, my ideal is very likely not your ideal, so who chooses? What I consider close-minded or bigoted is very likely another person’s passionate belief—to me there is no “right.” Even when I’m violently opposed to the thoughts expressed, I remember S.G. Tallentyre’s (not Voltaire) comment, “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”
Back to practical.
I first wrote about comfort zones in a column I used to write for Microsoft Development Network (msdn) in 1999 (Hiring in Your Comfort Zone) and the idea hasn’t changed a lot.
Our comfort zone is where we all prefer to do things. People want to spend their time with people like themselves. This isn’t about simple labels, such as race, religion or gender, which are more society’s labels. Our own subjective labels have more to do with schools (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Cal, etc.), specific professions (not fields), companies (think McKinsey), compensation, attitudes, clothes, etc. It’s how we choose to connect, because, true or not, Yale grads believe they have more in common with other Ivy League alums than with Cal or Columbia. Doctors hang out with doctors, usually those with the same, or similar, specialty or employer, but rarely with nurses or radiology techs. We like enough knowledge commonality so we don’t feel ignorant, but can still learn; we like to be with our “equals.”
It all boils down to, “people like me” (PLM).
And that may be fine in our personal life—but not so fine in our professional life, especially not for managers responsible for hiring. The broader the PLM definition the longer it takes to become noticeable, but it’s usually there if you look for it.
The long-term cost to companies is high. This is especially true when there’s a change in management, since the new person’s PLM rarely matches her predecessor’s.
When the choice is between the best applicant and PLM, PLM usually wins out, slowly lowering the quality of talent.
PLM homogenizes the staff; reducing diversity of both thinking and thought (methodology and result) and it’s that diversity that supplies strength, creativity and innovation.
PLM wreaks havoc on retention efforts and often drives out legacy knowledge.
PLM hiring may affect just one part of a company or create a ripple effect, e.g., lowered innovation slows product development delaying delivery, crimping sales and keeping the company from achieving its revenue goals.
All of this and much more is the product of a PLM mindset and the narrower the mindset the worse the damage.
Back to what I said at the start, I’m a realist and I do not believe that it’s possible to truly eradicate PLM from your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) more often it’s driven underground making it harder to recognize than when it’s overt.
I do believe that the definition of PLM can be expanded, since MAP is not, or should not be, carved in stone. Rather, like you, it’s vibrant—living, growing, and changing as you live, grow and change.
Sometimes having the things you know instinctively, or from casual observation, confirmed by expert studies is downright depressing.
I noticed it while growing up, fought it over my 25 years headhunting, wrote and article about it in 1999 called Hiring in Your Comfort Zone, and blogged about it last March in People like me.
“It” is homophily, it’s been around forever, it’s an attitude I personally dislike and it keeps getting worse.
“Smith-Lovin’s research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do.”
As deplorable as this is from the social science perspective, it can be the kiss of a very slow death for companies.
Managers who, unconsciously or not, hire in their own image, no matter how they define that, do their employers harm.
A workforce that homogenizes along any lines is a workforce that will either miss, ignore, or be unable to reach a part of their market.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
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Yesterday I wrote abut new approaches to recruiting, a la online puzzles, to find tech talent from non-traditional sources, as well as advice from a successful entrepreneur who says that the most important traits to look for are behavioral and can only be identified through good interviewing, which requires time.
Shortly after I started writing Leadership Turn I did a 
