Equals. A physical manifestation of LinkedIn with diversity and inclusion hardwired in.
Are you unintentionally contributing to a lack of diversity and inclusion in your organisation simply by the way you network? If you stop and look at the makeup of your network, is it diverse — I mean truly diverse — or is it full of people a bit like you?
We all do it. I do it too. We do it because it’s easy. We do it because it’s comfortable and reassuring, and it reinforces the world we know. I’m not saying you’re a bad person because of it. But as we get older, busier and more settled in our personal and professional lives, we rely on these shortcuts more and more, and our professional and personal circles increasingly begin to mirror ourselves, our experiences and our life-choices.
So if we look closely, I bet the people who you and I really rely on — and who rely on us — for advice, for information and for opportunities, are actually pretty similar to ourselves. And this is a problem for two reasons.
1. It’s a problem for you.
Because your ‘strong ties’ — the people you are close to and share an affinity with — move in similar social and professional circles and so share the same ideas and information as you. And while this is nice and comfortable because it reinforces your world and your worldview, it also reinforces blindspots and biases, reduces creativity and stifles innovation.
It’s actually your ‘weak ties’ — the people on your periphery like your acquaintances, friends of friends, colleagues we occasionally interact with and people from the past who we used to be close with — who are the most important in terms of innovation, networking and opportunities because they move in different circles to you and so have access to different ideas, different information and different worlds.
This isn’t a new observation. Back in 1973, the sociologist Mark Granovetter demonstrated this in his groundbreaking paper ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. In fact, in his book ‘The Start Up of You’, Reid Hoffman acknowledges that Granovetter’s insight was one of the founding pillars of LinkedIn.
But what many people don’t remember is that in tiny print in a footnote on page 107, Reid Hoffman also observed that ‘quasi-strong’ ties — people who are both different from us yet close enough so as to make introductions — are the most valuable and uniquely expand the total breadth of our network. And I think we all instinctively know that the best professional networks are cohesive and diverse and full of those quasi-strong ties, yet many of us still gravitate towards people similar to ourselves.
2. It’s a problem for the organisation(s) you work in.
Because despite well-intentioned efforts, broadly the same people with similar backgrounds, education and life-experiences still ‘make it to the top’ and therefore continue to hold disproportionate power. In part, this is due to that shortcut — or affinity bias — of shared experiences and privilege (school, university, socio-economic background, race, gender…), and the ability to quickly form relationships on that basis that feel deeper and more trusting than they actually are.
At its worst, this means that people with power and privilege share it — consciously or unconsciously — only with each other. Just look at the discussions being had right now in mid-2020 around structural inequities in society and the lack of diversity in many workplaces.
And current approaches and standard workplace Diversity & Inclusion mentoring, reverse-mentoring, shadowing and networking programmes just aren’t working. This is because they are transactional, short-lived and reinforce power dynamics. (They also rarely involve enough, or any, fun.)
They are transactional because they tend to focus around specific problems and goals, such as career progression. They are short-lived because of their focus on measuring outputs (e.g. how many meetings?) rather than impact (e.g. how were lives changed?). And they reinforce power dynamics because — necessarily — the relationship involves an experienced and ‘successful’ senior, and less experienced junior. And on D&I programmes, the senior is invariably (but not always) a person who belongs to a demographic which holds disproportionate power and privilege.
Not only that, but their impact is quickly lost because the basis of the relationship is often simply about learning ‘the rules of the game’ rather than changing the rules themselves. They’re about someone from a less privileged background learning how to ‘succeed’ in a system built by and for the privileged, from someone who is invariably themselves privileged. They’re not about the participants seeing beyond the job titles to who each other really are and forming a genuine relationship.
Company D&I programmes are often not about changing the system or creating real diversity in the workplace, but rather, being co-opted into it and people from diverse backgrounds learning to adopt the traits and behaviours of the stereotypical (white, middle-class, male, extroverted) ‘leader’.
I’m not going to claim these as original insights — there are many better and more insightful activists and thought-leaders who work in this field and on whose shoulders I stand. But they do reflect my own personal (albeit privileged) experiences as well as the many (many) conversations I’ve had with colleagues and friends over the years.
And I want to do something about it.
So for the last year, I’ve been bouncing my ideas off academics, thought-leaders, organisational experts and diversity and inclusion specialists. And I’ve been talking with people in different organisations who feel blocked, not understood or who have struggled to be heard or feel valued for who they are.
And from all those conversations, I’ve developed a concept I call ‘Equals’.
Since the start of 2020, I’ve been running a pilot and together we’ve been testing and iterating this concept to make it the best it can be. We’re still learning but we’re making it better each time. And we truly believe that the ideas behind Equals can make a difference. One person, one cohort, one organisation at a time.
So, what is ‘Equals’?
Equals is a self-led, activities-based networking programme designed to turn all these problems on their head: at its core, it is about doing different things with different people from different backgrounds. We create shared (and sometimes awkward) experiences between people who are deliberately selected to have different characteristics and to come from different backgrounds. Over a period of time, each session is always suggested and led by a different participant based on their own passions and interests, which tackles the power imbalance inherent in other mentoring and networking initiatives while also addressing their short-lived and transactional nature.
As a result, a new, cohesive and diverse cohort can develop, creating a strong network of people who share knowledge, support, influence and opportunities with people who are different from themselves, now, and as their careers progress both within and beyond their current organisation.
‘Equals’ is about creating Reid Hoffman’s quasi-strong ties in the real world. It’s like a physical manifestation of LinkedIn with diversity and inclusion hardwired in.
If you would like to build better, more diverse and more inclusive networks both inside and outside your organisation in order to embed radical and long-lasting change, then get in touch or find out more here. I’d love to share in more detail what we’ve been doing, and to see how we can make Equals work for you.
