The last few days we’ve been talking various aspects and effects of respect, but one of the most important to business is its effect on creativity and innovation (they’re not the same thing), although we touched on it when talking about the drawbacks of a “nice” culture.
The opposite of respect is disrespect and if it permeates a culture you can count on four things.
From this perspective, “misfits” are valuable to companies. They don’t quite fit into a specific team. They’re always challenging why the company does what it does. They’re rebellious. They’re independent. They can seem counterproductive to everything that a manager needs to achieve—to maintain order.
But those are the people that are going to change the game on how your company innovates.
As a boss, culture is your responsibility. You can’t afford to assume that your boss or their boss will make the right choices.
No matter the scope, within your organization it’s your choice.
Facebook really stuck its foot deep in the doo doo pile when it claimed its racial diversity numbers, which are even worse than its gender diversity stats, are the result of a lack of qualified candidates.
In a post shared widely on social media, the computer science student and iOS developer took Facebook and its Silicon Valley peers to task for focusing on whether potential employees are a “culture fit” — an ambiguous gauge often used to defend discrimination.
But that, of course, depends on what is meant by culture.
Culture is a reflection of the founder’s/company’s actual values — values equaling stuff such as how customers are treated and whether politics will rule over merit.
Culture is not a function of perks — or it shouldn’t be.
“Most of tech recruiting is currently not built to look for great talent,”wrote Thomas in her post.
“I’m not interested in ping-pong, beer, or whatever other gimmick used to attract new grads. The fact that I don’t like those things shouldn’t mean I’m not a ‘culture fit’. I don’t want to work in tech to fool around, I want to create amazing things and learn from other smart people. That is the culture fit you should be looking for.”
You wouldn’t necessarily expect tech, with its penchant for data-based decisions, to cherry-pick the stats, but Facebook is an amalgamate of human beings and their biases, so it’s not that surprising.
It reminded me of how teens of every generation display their rebellion against society through their choice of clothes, while simultaneously making sure they “fit in” with their peers.
This is most easily seen in a subgroup like the goths, whose black clothing and makeup sets them apart from other teens, but within which a rigid dress code prevails.
Unlike the Silicon Valley I knew in the 1980s and 90s, today’s Silicon Valley is far more homogenized and undiversified, with little perspective on the “real” world.
The result is that it’s far less creative and exciting than it once was.
Silicon Valley groupthink is also the force behind what Danielle Morrill, CEO & Cofounder of Mattermark, calls the “tyranny of should.”
But sometimes when I am able to quiet that story down, I catch myself listening because it is just so much easier to have someone else figure out what I should do.
In the first days of this new year I urge you to choose between taking the easy road of groupthink and should or following Sam Altman’s path of most resistance.
“You should ignore what your peers are doing or what your peers or parents think is cool. (…) And that’s the hardest part. We’re all so much more susceptible to that than we think.”
Yes, another ‘should’, but not all ‘shoulds’ are created equal.
As always, it’s your choice.
That’s both life’s greatest joy and its greatest fear.
Spending time with entrepreneurs is always enlightening.
I was at lunch with a group of them when talk turned to the current “media bashing,” as one person called it, tech was getting over the lack of diversity.
“Jason” said focus was critical in a startup and it was achieved best when the founders hired their friends and friends of friends.
He went on to say that while he understood the importance of diversity in a large company, focus was rarely a byproduct of diversity.
I asked if he considered focus to be as important for investors.
He said of course and went on (and on) explaining why it was even more important with investors, since they usually comprise the startup’s board.
Most hung on his words, since Jason was the big name that day (personally, I found him arrogant and patronizing).
They found that the probability of success decreased by 17 percent if two co-investors had previously worked at the same company—even if they hadn’t worked there at the same time. In cases where investors had attended the same undergraduate school, the success rate dropped by 19 percent. And, overall, investors who were members of the same ethnic minority were 20 percent less successful than investors with different ethnic backgrounds.
Conversation more or less died after I shared the URL with them.
They were too busy reading and then we were out of time.
I had a solid dose of déjà vue when I read yet another article about the cancellation of Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, but this one from a different angle.
What about all the single people? And all the people without kids? We need to stop acting like they’re not part of the work-life conversation.
Some things never change.
I never married and after five decades in and around the workplace I find it dispiriting that almost nothing has changed.
The original version (before my time) was “Jim won’t mind, because he’s single”; the great improvement is now it’s “Jim or Judy won’t mind, because s/he’s single.”
Back then companies/managers assumed that singles were easy to relocate, because they didn’t own homes and moving costs would be minimal, since singles don’t own furniture or much stuff.
There are plenty of managers who still think that way.
Males were given hiring preference, because “they had families to support,” and while it may be 2013, that attitude still exists, however deeply buried.
Bias.
Unconscious or not, it has the power to taint, damage and even destroy anything/everything.
Last Thursday we looked at the need for women employees (with clout) considering the new reality where women have become the majority of early adopters.
Let me make something crystal clear; diversity involves far more than people looking different—true diversity will occasionally make you uncomfortable.
Not the discomfort that stems from bigotry, but the kind that that rattles our assumptions and makes us think.
Rather than reinventing the wheel I am reposting (with light editing) something from several years ago that hits the true diversity nail on the head.
Another way to look at it is that if spending $100 results in a bottom line increase of $1000, did you really spend the $100, or did you gain $900? That $900 that wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t invested the initial $100.
Any increased spending on diversity development is an investment and will be more than offset by the increases in innovation, productivity and revenues.
The real question is how do you define diversity?
Old diversity focuses on diversity of race, gender, orientation, creed and national origin.
New diversity includes all of the above plus diversity of thought.
Think about it, with a little effort a manager can create a diverse group who all think the same way—George W. Bush’s initial Cabinet looked 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 and more and more that refers to how people think, rather than how they look.
So what can you do to ensure that you’re building a truly diversified team?
Here are five key points to keep in mind before and after hiring.
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.
Most importantly, if you’re totally comfortable, with nary a twinge to ripple your mental lake, your group is probably lacking in diversity.
Monday Slacker Manager wrote that people quit managers, not companies; I took that further in my Tuesday post saying that
Adequate managers manage employees.
Good managers manage people.
Great managers manage persons.
Marvin commented that this also applied to families, saying, “It was a great reminder that people don’t leave families, they leave the leaders of that family. … Adequate husbands/fathers have a wife and kids, Good husbands/fathers provide for their wife and kids, Great husbands/fathers learn the individual needs of their wife and kids and serve them accordingly.”
I know from Marvin’s site that he is coming from a Christian perspective and I respect that.
However, I’m not willing to assume that the male is the ‘leader’ in a marriage—nor do I think the woman is (no offense to any same-sex couples reading this) and I certainly hope that the kids aren’t.
I think marriages should be partnerships, with both contributing to the vision and each leading within his/her strengths and supporting the other as appropriate—and I don’t mean this in the traditional sense.
Next, I’m not completely comfortable with the paraphrasing.
Having a wife and kids is possible for any male with $20 bucks for the license (it’s probably gone up) and active sperm and those two things certainly don’t make them adequate in my mind.
The ‘good’ ones provide what? Food, shelter and safety or more intangible things, such as love, respect and acceptance.
There’s nothing wrong with the definition of ‘great’ as long as it includes unconditional love, unconditional respect and unconditional acceptance for life choices—barring those that are illegal—that may not agree with others in the family.
I also think that ‘great’ is more than serving individual needs in kids; sometimes their needs shouldn’t be served or they will come to expect that. Serving is also about standing back and letting the kid make mistakes starting at a very young age. No parent serves their child by smoothing every kink, filling every pothole and easing every difficulty on the road to adulthood.
Serving is about being sure that kids are exposed to and learn to deal with the real world, one that doesn’t always live up to expectations or work the way one wants.
My own opinion is that this can’t happen if the child is raised in a homogenous environment spending their time with like-minded people. I also think it’s unfair to the kid, because eventually they’ll have to function in the real world, which is messy, diverse and often uncooperative.
This is as true whether it’s the Latino kids living in the Mission District of San Francisco being able to do everything in Spanish except school or the home-schooled kid whose entire world and contact revolves around their family and church.
Homogeny is crippling when it comes to producing adults who can move in a diverse, multicultural, multi-thought, multi-everything global economy.
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.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
On one of the last days of 2015 I read a great article about the 
I had a solid dose of déjà vue when I read yet another article about the cancellation of Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, but this one 
Last Thursday we looked at 
The ‘good’ ones provide what? Food, shelter and safety or more intangible things, such as love, respect and acceptance.
