Your company diversity and inclusion champions must be crying rainbow colored tears of joy. Some tipping point has occurred as each meeting you attend looks like a well-cast 90’s era Benetton commercial. You see so many different accents, colors, ages, and gender parts represented each day. Well done. You are sure to get the different points of view promised to you by the righteous and awesome goal of a well-executed diversity program.
Looking across the conference room at all your, coincidentally beautiful, and ethnically ambiguous colleagues, you think about your own diversity journey. At first complete resistance and cynicism. You remember saying sharply to your team “let’s just focus on hiring the best person.” Strange how the “best” hires always seemed to look like you? Conversation and corporate camaraderie was so easy then as you just hired clones of yourself. No awkward silence as you all had the same shared memories to key off of. It was so easy to build products with and for your buddies. This ensured the clone army remained strong as “team fit” became the code word for “not like us” on the interview loop.
Then you started to collect your own life experiences; kids, a health scare, looking after older parents. Your market started to change too. Skilled college grads were ignoring your hiring pursuits as they could see from a kilometer away your merry band of clones had no clue about the future. You had a team that had zero insight into the growing international medley of consumers ready to become 1st world consumers.
Through a combination of business necessity and ageing into some limited wisdom you realized the value of dropping the clone army hiring strategy. Yes, this lead to some uncomfortable, individual scenarios where ethnicity, gender, and visible tattoos, became part of the undocumented hiring conversation. A necessary jump-start for cultural progress.
Finally you have your dream team in place. Looking around you have a mix of looks, backgrounds, and experiences; check, check, and check! When you get to discussion and problem solving where is the diversity of thought? You look high and low but your cadre are giving you the same tired ideas that your clones used to give you. Over months you probe into why the magic is not happening. As you listen to the banter you hear from each person the same humble bragging script of home renovation, vacations, and tales of high achieving kids or pets.
All that rich cultural history and diversity of experience you hoped to tap into has been undone by the corporate benefits package. Once you get into the corporate machine and the trappings of upper middle class life we become more cohort than individual. The corporate drone life trumps culture every time.
Today you synergized* 600 people out of their livelihood. You will be known as the great savior for your division, at least for this review period. They will say “you made the hard choice.” In practice you made some slides with 2×2 decision matrix grids, efficiency measures, and key words like op-ex and cap-ex. People like all that. It helped that you socialized the plan with stakeholders to give the key decision makers an opportunity to insert their own roadkill into the grinder. There will be so much synergy here everyone wins. Everyone? Not really.
You said “negative success” today during your project status meeting. Clowns wear suits now.
Shallow Corporate Drone 