Men need to make space at the leadership table
When we occupy all of the leadership roles, we stifle diversity all the way down
Over the last couple of years, several of my friends have landed coveted leadership roles at a company that I’ll call BIG DESIGN STARTUP. First one guy that I know joined as a VP, then a close guy friend took another VP position, then another friend became a director. Just last week, yet another guy I know joined as their newest VP.
I’m honestly excited for my friends. From the outside it looks like they’re getting a fun band together to go on tour. Who wouldn’t want to get on that bus? But, I find it striking that almost every leadership position on the design team at BIG DESIGN STARTUP is now held by a white guy.
When privileged men hire their privileged friends, the result is often a team of mostly other men who are similar to them. Not shocking.
As an industry, it feels like there is now at least a whiff of recognition that diversity, of all kinds, is important. Emily Chang’s excellent book Brotopia gets name-dropped and I increasingly see men refusing to participate on conference panels unless there is diverse representation. But reading books, tweeting support, writing articles like this one, and enforcing norms at conferences are the easy things to do. They don’t cost much at all, just a little discomfort.
To make real change happen men of privilege need to do things differently, like making space for others. When white men squat on all the leadership roles, we suck all of the air out of the room and the status quo is maintained.
For five years, I sat in a very exclusive chair as a design partner at Google’s venture capital arm, GV, alongside four other guys, advising startups, speaking at conferences, and getting paid handsomely to do so. We were the largest team of design partners in venture capital and used our position to push for changes in the tech design world that we valued.
We all fit a similar profile: five bespectacled, white, cisgender, straight guys from middle class North American backgrounds. Sure, we talked about our lack of diversity a bit and I felt bad about it. But unless one of us left this amazing job there didn’t seem like much that we could do. Until someone finally left five years later, nothing changed.
I got hired as a design partner because I had experience, but also because I was close personal friends with an investing partner who was buddies with the guy who founded GV. The four other design partners sitting around that table with me were also skilled, but they were all men with prior connections to each other and to the leadership at GV. We hired our friends and people we knew well — disproportionately guys who were similar to us.
This situation is everywhere you look. All-male or almost-exclusively white male leadership teams are ubiquitous in tech.
Being a design partner at GV was an incredible job. But, our team’s lack of perspective became increasingly obvious. We were missing important voices. It took a lot of women and minority voices shouting loudly and repeatedly for me to realize how limited our view was.
If I could go back, I would do things differently. Many many many many excellent people are doing the backbreaking work to drag the tech world forward — men with power need to get behind them more. If I was hiring design leaders, I’d follow many of their lessons, like:
Build a diverse leadership team early on
If I’ve learned anything about diversity in the last few years, it’s that you should start building a diverse team at the outset. You will build better products and a better company culture from the start. And, if you have a diverse team from the early stages, it will be much easier to hire and maintain a diverse team going ahead.
By the time that you have men occupying most of the leadership positions, it’s a deep ditch to climb out of. Avoid becoming yet another company that claims to care about diversity when the evidence shows that it’s never been prioritized.
This is one thing that Slack, for instance, has done pretty well. Hiring a diverse team wasn’t an afterthought, it was built into the company DNA from early on. They have built a phenomenal team.
Run a rational hiring process
Put in the work to run a real hiring process as Lisa Burrell explains so well in HBR. Hiring our friends is lazy. “Wow, Pete wants to join us. Let’s make a role for him!” This scenario happens all the time. It’s exactly how GV’s first design team was formed.
Your buddy might be great, but is he the best possible person for the role? Have you even looked further afield? Identify the skills needed, write a real job description, and do a legitimate talent search.
We ran a rational hiring process when we hired the next group of design partners at GV and the results were (predictably) less homogeneous. Kate Aronowitz and vanessa cho are phenomenal design leaders who have taken the team in a new direction.
Build a wider network
As people like Tessa Ann Taylor make clear, you need to expand your pool of candidates. Get out of your comfort zone and actually get to know a wider group of people. Not the “famous” guys (disproportionately men of privilege because our culture is structured to reward them with exposure). Not the guys you want to get a drink with. Not the guys who you always run into at conferences. Not just friends of your friends.
Building a wider network isn’t rocket science, but it actually takes some effort. At conferences, get to know people outside your network. Message someone that you admire and buy them a coffee or have a video chat. If you live in SF, get outside the tech bubble and get to know leaders from other states and countries. Heck, at least follow some other people on Twitter. Your network will snowball: a wider network leads to having an even wider network.
And, most of all listen. Tamp down your defensiveness and use your empathy to hear where other people are coming from.
Get comfortable getting uncomfortable.
Cast a much wider net
When we hire from the same pool, we end up with homogeneous teams, as Lydia Dishman makes clear. Whether it’s recruiting people who are already “well-known in design circles”, only people from “the right schools,” or only from our social circle, the pool of applicants are skewed towards the biases of those groups.
Just look at Forbes’ 100 Most Innovative Leaders list, which came out just this week. The three guys who made the list based their “thoughtful methodology” on who was already popular — if the media (people like these guys) and venture capitalists (disproportionately male) don’t already think you’re cool, you aren’t innovative. Seriously, just read this nonsense. By this bullshit standard, there is only one innovative woman leader in America.
If you don’t get outside of your biased club, the results will be club members only.
Re-examine what “great fit” looks like
It’s really tempting to hire leaders who “just get our culture” and who “can hit the ground running.” This is one of the reasons why hiring your friends is so tempting — you’re sure that guy is talented and you’re sure he’ll just fit in right away. But, these innocuous-seeming hiring codes create mono-cultures, as Rachel Bitte from Jobvite explains.
You are running a marathon, not a sprint. Hire people who will be excellent for the next five years at your company. Don’t optimize for someone who can contribute on Day 1. And, your culture shouldn’t be static. By hiring people outside your immediate group, you will change your culture for the better — and make better products and better decisions over the long term.
Invest time to on-board and support your new leaders to build a strong, diverse culture together.
Leadership positions at companies are in limited supply. You can’t keep adding people to the C-suite and there’s limited growth at the VP and director levels too.
If I won’t join a male-only conference panel, why would I join a male-only design team? I’m embarrassed that I joined GV without thinking twice about the make-up of the team. My embarrassment does little good for other people who could have benefited from sitting in that design partner chair for five years. The design partners who hired me should have run a real hiring process and I should have had the guts to ask them what their process was.
Should men turn down positions if the hiring team is running a biased process? Maybe, yes. Especially if you can afford to. Some of us are in very privileged positions where we can work just about anywhere. It’s incumbent on men in power to use that power to not take up all the chairs around the table.
It is especially necessary that men in positions of power exercise their power to work with women and minorities to fix broken hiring practices… starting from the chair you’re sitting in today.
Why write this? Does the world need another privileged guy writing another Medium post, especially since women and minority voices have been making practically the same case for years? Another guy saying he screwed up in the past and promises to do better, is not news. I am writing this to underline that we continue to make the situation worse and unless we stop being passive nothing will change. Inaction is as bad a negative action.
I look at my peers who just added another white guy to the leadership at BIG DESIGN STARTUP and all I can think is, “What the actual fuck are we doing?” I look at my peers at Forbes who say that 99% of innovative leaders are dudes: “What the actual fuck are we doing?” We need to change what we’re doing.
All the evidence and the plans are in front of us. Yet, without actual effort and without just a little sacrifice we’re stuck standing in the mud wringing our hands about how hard it is to move the needle on diversity.
