Using Diversity to your Advantage when Building a Workforce

[caption id="attachment_1512" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Howard Dean: Former Governor of Vermont"][/caption]

As the architect of the grassroots-driven “50 State Strategy” that Barack Obama used as the backbone of his successful campaign to the White House, Howard Dean knows how to build an organization from the ground up.  As an opportunity for us to preview some of the topics he will discuss at the Global Institute for Leadership Development in October, Governor Dean has provided us with an adapted excerpt from his book, You Have the Power, which he wrote after his 2004 campaign for President. -Jeremy Hill

In order to lead an organization, one of the things that must be done right is to deal with diversity issues.  Race, Gender, Sexual orientation, immigration status…all are hot button issues that will come up in any large work force.  But if the workforce doesn’t look anything like the people you are selling to, or making things for, or teaching, then your organization is less likely to be successful.  I usually start off talking about diversity with the following true story.

When I was Governor of Vermont, I always had a female chief of staff.  Chiefs of staff mostly do the hiring, and it wasn’t long before I noticed that my office had become a matriarchy. The vast majority of senior staff were women.  Half the Cabinet appointments were women, and half of the Judicial appointments were women.

One day my chief of staff came to my office and told me she was going to hire a new policy analyst because someone was leaving to go to the private sector.  “I just want you to know that you’ll be seeing a new face around here,”  she said.  Normally I would have thanked her for letting me know and we would have moved on to other business.  Instead I said, “Let’s discuss this for a moment.  There’s a tremendous gender imbalance in this office, and I wonder if you could find a man for this position?”

She looked at me and immediately answered, “You know Governor, you’re right.  There really is an imbalance in this office.  But it’s so hard to find a qualified man.”

This story always makes people laugh, and hopefully it makes them think too.

All of us can recognize ourselves in stories like these. As human beings, we are all more comfortable hiring people like us.  People who look like us, people we went to school, or church, or synagogue with.  It’s not just 55-year-old white guys like me who do it.  Women do it, African Americans do it, Jews do it, Catholics do it, Gay people do it, etc., etc.  Everybody does it, and doing it doesn’t mean we are all racist or bigots.  But in a country as diverse as ours, ethnocentrism ends up leading to institutional racism if one group of people does the vast majority of the hiring.

The trick is to understand what subconscious decisions those who do the hiring are likely to make outside the hiring process, and figure out how to compensate for that.