Start with Why
The marvellous Simon Sinek has a book on communication called "Start with Why", where he talks about the "Golden Circle".
- What: the products and services that your company sells.
- How: what you are offering is different or better
- Why: your underlying purpose
People often jump straight to the "What", but great communicators start with "Why"; being able to articulate why they do what they do. It's not about profitability - that's a result - it's all about purpose. Why do you get out of bed in the morning and why should anyone care?
So, for a first blog article, here is the Why of Divrsity:
To enable employers to develop data-driven insights that enable them to make measurable progress on workplace Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, Bias and Belonging.
We all know that Diverse teams are more innovative: the super-cool McKinsey study tells us that companies with >30% women executives outperform companies with fewer female executives; and we know that the likelihood of outperformance is even higher for diversity in ethnicity.
But a lot of senior executives have a myopic view of diversity. We've all spent years listening to them mumble about the importance of diversity with no roadmap or real metrics to understand and solve the problem.
Often, targets focus purely on gender diversity, and year-after-year those targets are missed due to "supply and demand issues", But could we make measurable progress by prioritising other forms of diversity and ensuring that our organisation is truly inclusive and representative?
How many of us know what percentage of our employees are uncomfortable at events involving alcohol? Can we all say that our interview panels reflect all the dimensions of diversity in our employee base? And do we know whether it's a small group of straight, middle-aged, white men talking to the press; or to our customers?
You've got the win, so get the win
What we find particularly interesting, is that a lot of firms have done great work building their socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, social, and sexual diversity but are squandering the employee/employer brand benefits because they lack the data to demonstrate their success.
As the legendary W Edwards Deming put it:
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”...
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