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Abandon the “similar to me” effect
As leaders, we have a tendency to hire and promote people who remind us of ourselves, people who look like us, people who grew up in the same town. There’s even some research suggesting that if you played lacrosse, you see more potential in fellow lacrosse players than you do runners or people who don’t play sports at all.
It’s long past time for us to abandon the “similar to me” effect and recognize that the more different someone is from you in background, in experience, in styles of thinking, in worldview, in skillset, the more you’re going to learn from them. Diego Rodriguez coined a great phrase that I think captures how to overcome this bias. He says instead of just focusing on culture fit, we should also look for culture contribution.
And that means asking what are the demographic similarities that bind us together in this organization? What are the functional backgrounds that we all share in common? If we’re an engineering culture, we may need some design thinkers for example. And what are the national similarities or regional similarities that we share? If we all come from the same place, it’s probably time to diversify.
I think the diversity and inclusion conversation, tends to focus narrowly on gender and maybe on race. We also need to look at diversity of skill. We need to look at diversity of thought. We need to look at diversity of culture, of sexual orientation, of experience. If you look at the data, it’s very clear that the more that you can stretch people, out of their comfort zones, the more uncomfortable they get.
But that discomfort is actually good for learning. The more uncomfortable you are in a group, the more you tend to explain yourself clearly, the more you tend to listen carefully, and the more you tend to take seriously viewpoints that aren’t familiar to you. And I guess the punchline here is that we all need to get a little more comfortable, being uncomfortable.
Enrich your culture
Something people overlook about potential is that it doesn’t just reside in a person. It often exists in the fit or misfit between the person and the culture of the organization they’re in. Too many leaders end up gauging potential based on fit. Let’s say, for example you’re running a very task oriented culture. You prize excellence of execution, speed, efficiency, and results. You’re going to see potential in people who are also task-oriented.
Well, guess what? Research shows that if you hire a relationship-oriented leader, they actually add more value to a task-oriented culture, because they’re filling a gap. They are enriching your culture as opposed to cloning it. The same is true in reverse. If you are a highly relationship-oriented organization, if you care deeply about community, about inclusion, if you’re big on belonging, you actually get more value out of a task-oriented leader who’s going to then fill a gap in your culture.
So, I think when you’re looking for people who have a great deal of potential, one of the most important exercises that you can undertake is to ask what is missing from our culture? And then how do we find people who are going to stretch us in directions that we don’t normally go?