Three Ways To Check More Than Just Boxes When Adding Diversity to Your Organization
Immigrating to the U.S. as a child gives you an entirely new perspective on what it means to add diversity to an organization.
People talk a lot about diversity — sometimes so much that I wonder if we still remember why. When leaders assemble diverse teams, the conflicting understandings of normalcy can lead to some friction — but as long as people are open-minded to the idea that their normal is not the only possibility, that friction can yield great results. A multifaceted, multicultural team can deliver some very unique and creative solutions in the workplace.
But when leaders hire people for their diversity simply to meet some standards of compliance, they might end up with more than just healthy friction. Unless these hires understand the benefits of bringing together diverse minds for more creative innovation, they may also bring conflict into a team.
Diversity should do more than check off boxes for your corporate diversity requirement; inclusivity for decision-making roles should go beyond basic divisions. Immigrants, like myself, know that diversity of class and culture can bring many benefits to a collaborative effort. To do diversity better, we need to go back to the source of its importance-bringing more diverse perspectives to work together and generate better ideas for business and society.
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How to Stay Calm in a Crisis and Lead Your Team Through Anything
Calmness is the key to leading through a crisis — leaders who stay calm can get their teams through anything.
The pandemic brought a wave of global uncertainties: supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, inflation, rising prices and an oncoming recession. Crisis after crisis has characterized the 2020s.
When facing so much uncertainty, it can be easy to worry about the future. That worry often then becomes doubt, which can quickly spiral into panic. And when we panic, we usually rush. But try to take a step back and think of your last rushed decision that ended up being a good one; panic is never a good foundation for making healthy decisions. Calmness, on the other hand, is the key to leading others through a crisis. Leaders who can stay calm can get their teams through anything.
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Leader v. manager: How managing a company is different from leading a board
In the corporate world, when we finally make it to CEO, we become company leaders. This is not a position many people know firsthand—if Zippia’s estimate of over 38,708 chief executive officers in the U.S. is correct, that means CEOs make up just 0.0001% of the country’s population. C-Suite executives and vice presidents also experience the feeling of knowing what it takes to be a leader, but not all leadership is alike.
How To Drive Your Board To Be As Effective As Possible
Even during the best of times, the future is always uncertain. That’s even more apparent right after several recent periods of disruption: pandemics, recessions and supply chain issues. In the past, boards and board formation may not have meant much to company leadership, but today, a well-designed board with the right collection of skills and experience can get a company through a crisis and significantly impact its success.
Additionally, engagement in the workplace has never been more urgent, and this is just as true for boards. More-engaged teams are more resilient and able to withstand bigger challenges. A Gallup meta-analysis found the most-engaged teams were 21% more productive than the least-engaged ones. Diversity—in race, gender, age and socioeconomic background—benefits any team, including a board, but engagement is what makes those diverse board members the most effective.
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How to Best Recruit Board Members Outside of Your Industry
The value of board members from outside your industry cannot be understated – here’s why.
ew individuals are experts in everything. Even the cumulative expertise in most businesses could use input from more experts in diverse areas. This is why we have boards — a panel of experts in areas that fill in the gaps in our existing company knowledge base.
But even once we find the right group of experts from our industry to take a seat on our board, we would still stand to benefit from the wisdom of more diverse perspectives and experiences. Their range of successes and failures becomes additional resources to put together more tried and tested strategies in the face of new challenges.
Outside board members can bring a lot to a company, but to find the right ones for the job, we need to know what to look for:
Related: How Board Members Can Help You Through a Recession
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How A Diverse Board Can Help Your Company
Diversity is more than a buzzword. Back in 2015, McKinsey & Company called it “a competitive differentiator that shifts market share toward more diverse companies over time.” McKinsey’s research also found that companies scoring the highest for racial, ethnic and gender diversity are more likely to have financial returns above national industry medians.
There are benefits to age diversity as well, including increased productivity and reduced employee turnover, both of which can affect a company’s bottom line. Even socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, mindset and cultural background are ranges of diversity that can arm any team, including a company board, with a competitive advantage.
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How Board Members Can Help You Through a Recession
With recession looming, having a strong board is now more important than ever.
First, COVID-19. Then, health mandates. Add in choked-up supply chains, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising prices, interest rates, and inflation. Economists are starting to unite around the prediction — a recession is inevitable.
No one has a crystal ball, and the future seems more uncertain than ever, but if we break these problems down (e.g., pandemics, war, and rising food and fuel prices leading to a recession), we realize that many of us have lived through similar challenges before. Either we made it out on the other side alive and thriving, or we made mistakes and learned what not to do. These insights are valuable for getting through this next round of uncertainty.
Alone, a business owner can see issues from a limited amount of angles. Especially as first-time leaders, it can be hard to think outside the box with little experience to reference. But, with a board, its members’ expertise can help in more informed decision-making. Leaders can lean into the diverse range of expertise their board members have — their “been there, done that’s” — to tackle challenges and opportunities better and get their company through even the toughest of times, including the oncoming recession.
Related: Building a Better Board: 5 Things Every New Board Member Should Know
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My mentor’s mentor: How to ensure you are choosing board advisors you can trust
The goal of a board is to mentor a company, guide its decisions, and provide advice on best practices. However, most companies don’t consider the benefits that come from mentorship: Greater awareness of new ways of thinking, a challenge to our limiting assumptions, and the sharing of valuable life lessons we have yet to gain. What better way to tap into the skills and expertise board members bring than to connect them with people in the same company looking for mentorship?
Startups And Boards: How To Accelerate Your Growth
Going into a startup, founders have a lot to worry about. Startups have an incredibly high failure rate—a whopping 90%—because of the unique and vast range of challenges their founders face. Founders may not have many solutions to get through those obstacles and often end up learning the harder (and more painful) way to do things, especially when they are going at it for the first time.
It can be challenging for startups to prioritize which fire to address first, the next best steps to take or how to make decisions based on experience without that experience to work with. This challenge is the reason establishing a board should be at the top of that priority list. When startups prioritize founding a board with both inside and outside members, they increase their chances of success.
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Finding the Right Board Members for Your Company is Crucial to Success. Here’s How to Do it.
Finding the right board members for your company is an important task. Here’s what to consider.
Once upon a time, a new startup rushed through the process of bringing board members into their company. Its leaders were young and inexperienced. They went through the process without third-party guidance or a deep dive interview with candidates. They met smooth-talking members looking to be partners and were sold on something grand, but what the candidates delivered was the total opposite.
The partners’ experience was less than they let on. Their mission, vision and values were out of alignment with those of the existing members. Things quickly started to fall apart and the startup founders suffered through years of pain before the company eventually dissolved.
I’ve heard this story many times in my job guiding board formation. So many leaders lament that fewer mistakes would have been made if they had just had connections to more of the right people who matched up with their company’s core values, ambitions and guidance to vet those candidates.
“But none of that happened,” they tell me. “We signed papers and got screwed.”
Not many founders consider their board’s composition, but taking the time and care to cultivate a board of inside and outside perspectives across diverse experiences can be a company’s number one predictor of success. Building a board is a big deal for your company’s success and must be done correctly. Here’s how to do it right.
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