The Power of the People You Overlook: The Hidden Value of Tapping Nontraditional Talent Pools DO GOOD AND DO GOOD
THE TABLE STAKES OF PERFORMANCE
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
When you discuss recruiting with HR professionals, 48 percent of them will tell you their biggest problem is finding a deep enough pool of talent to make good choices about hiring. When you ask managers what is their biggest frustration with HR? They can’t source talent as effectively as they would like. So there’s complete convergence.
Why give a bonus for a normal part of the job? There are leaders who fall into the trap of incentivizing what should be table stakes performance. As it is, executives get paid to do the basics, to do the work. Incentives should be reserved for extraordinary performance, the extra.
More importantly, in its current form, intersectionality is the state of the art but falls woefully short of achieving prioritized identity factors. Focus on stackable diversity, where the core is true identity, and distal factors are relevant but not as important as core factors.
It’s about growing that talent pool to include untapped resources, increasing the pipeline, and closing the skills gap. We have to unlock the talent and tap the potential by valuing workers who have been overlooked, marginalized, and discarded. Morally, it’s a move in line with diversity and inclusion (D&I). Morally, we can all have a warm feeling about it. But business-wise, it’s a cold, hard necessity. INCLUSION ISN'T A TWITTER POST There is a resistance out there from the evangelists of the status quo. Why disrupt the norms? Why go outside comfort zones? Why fix what works at least well enough? They don’t see the business benefit of opening doors to others. I was once challenged in my career on this. A friend of mine who works for a manufacturer in the agricultural business space told me the following: “Johnny, I get your argument. But it’s a specious one when I’m hiring from a sales department standpoint. Do you know who buys tractors? It’s not some Black guy. It’s not even some Latino guy. It’s a white, midwestern farmer. If I rely on just market dynamics, it’s hard to argue for a sales force that shifts representativeness of the consumer base.” The problem with being closed-minded like that is what you’re hanging your hat on. It’s a narrow case to make. But when you look at the most successful companies on the planet—like Apple, for one—they don’t have any Black products, right? Apple doesn’t build an iPhone for Black people. The guy wasn’t suggesting there were Black tractors; he was making the case that the decision maker was not likely Black and therefore he was hiring the person who would relate more to the buyer, not unlike making the case for Avon hiring a predominately female workforce. 10
www.HRProfessionalsMagazine.com
If you really believe that hiring marginalized groups and nontraditional workers makes your company better— and this is what you should be doing— you don’t incentivize a regular day at the office.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS To win the future of work, you must look past traditional talent pools—truly inclusive organizations leverage differences for both growth and innovation. The problem is that finding a model for great inclusion is almost impossible. People ask me all the time, “Who is getting diversity and inclusion right?” I am confident that no one is getting it right. There are those who get it relatively right. That means some are simply trying harder than others, with programs ranging from truly inclusive leadership development to social efforts for seeding relevant fields. Others engaging in relative rightness include those investing in their communities or innovation programs for diverse populations. As leaders, the lesson is clear, and not in relative terms, either. We should do three things: invent, invest, and implement those programs best suited to our culture and communities. If the imperative is inclusion for females in STEM, then focus on those programs and do not feel negligent or guilty for honing in on one area.
“Stackable diversity” is an alternate view of intersectionality, where a person’s identity is defined by stacking identity characteristics from least important to most important. (The most important play a vital role in defining the individual’s view of themselves.) This represents a cleaner view of how humans manage (cognitively speaking) their identity and perceptions of inclusion. Here are some key questions you should consider making part of your Reset repertoire: • What does “inclusive” really mean for me and my organization? • Should I fear people becoming hawkish about our values? Will they make the culture exclusive rather than inclusive? • Can we live with trying as opposed to always succeeding? • What are my organization’s imperatives for achieving inclusion? • Do we have a metric like SHRM’s Empathy Index to assess inclusiveness? Adapted from Chapter 6 of Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval (PublicAffairs), by Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., President and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
