The Importance of Having Diverse Executive Leadership Team

During a crisis, having a diverse stock portfolio will help you be more resilient. Even if some stocks fall, others will rise during the crisis and help you ride it out. The same is true with your team – particularly your executive leadership. 

Having a diverse leadership team will help you navigate times of crisis as you’ll be able to draw from a well of unique backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. Companies that hire diverse executive teams actually report a 19 percent higher revenue than those that do not. Here are a few things you should think about when constructing a diverse team.

Diverse Backgrounds

Inviting people from different backgrounds into your team is one of the easiest levers you can pull to help get your company through a crisis. While it may be more difficult to come up with an answer that everyone agrees on, it will usually lead to more creative ideas and opportunities. 

In fact, a 2009 study done by the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin proved that while the team may not be in agreement, the end result will usually be better. They performed an experiment where a group of three students from the same fraternity or sorority was solving a murder mystery. Halfway through, half of the teams were joined by another member of their fraternity/sorority while the other half of teams were joined by an outsider.

As a result, the teams that were joined by an outsider rated the experience as more difficult, though about 60 percent of these teams were correct. On the other hand, the teams that were joined by someone from the same fraternity/sorority rated the experience as easier, but only 29% of them were accurate.

Even if your team is less harmonious, look at your own KPIs and see how a diverse range of backgrounds and belief systems can help reach your company’s goals.

Broad Leadership Experience

While creating a team with diverse backgrounds will help bring varied cultural values to the table, experience fills in any knowledge gaps and helps put those ideas into action. 

Therefore, it’s no surprise that diverse teams also make better decisions 87 percent of the time.

For example, if you hire an executive that previously worked at Google and another executive that previously worked at Amazon, those two employees probably have radically different problem-solving methods. This is great for your company because if you’re trying to solve a problem with the Google employee’s suggestions and it isn’t working, you have another person on your team with an entirely different set of problem-solving skills. You’ll be able to pull from the best of both worlds.

Technical vs. Business Expertise 

Most smaller businesses can get by with in-depth technical expertise in their field and providing amazing quality work. However, if the business is going to continue growing, they need to bring in experts with more expertise on actually running a business rather than just completing client work.

In fact, about 23 percent of businesses fail because they don’t have good leadership.

Bringing in someone with great business expertise will help you develop processes, create an inbound marketing strategy, and enable your business to scale without too many hiccups. Ask yourself, if you were to get all of your dream clients tomorrow, would you be able to handle the workload?

On the other hand, a lot of businesses focus too heavily on growth and sacrifice the work itself. In these cases, the company usually has a very strong executive team that understands how to develop strong processes. They often believe so much in the processes that they feel they can hand the majority of the core client work over to a lower-level employee or intern to complete.  

In this scenario, the client will probably receive mediocre work as the employees carrying out the processes still need to be innovative thinkers to stay ahead of the curve. These companies typically have high churn rates but a lot of customers.

Think about how you can mix the two together to bring together innovative, field experts with experienced executive leaders that know how to build strong processes.

Unique Personal Viewpoints

If you have a group of people with different viewpoints, you open your company up to a whole new wave of innovation and creativity. 

The key to making this successful is ensuring that each employee understands that his/her viewpoint is valuable. Creating a company culture where people feel safe to share their viewpoints will help businesses best leverage the unique personal viewpoints of each employee. 

We Can Help You Hire a Diverse Team of Executive Leaders

Think about how your company leadership is currently structured. Do you have a strong leadership team along with strong experts working on your core offering? Are your employees happy with the current arrangements? Listen to them and they will tell you if they feel you could have a more diverse team.

Finally, look at your KPIs. You want to have a diverse team because it will help you grow faster. Think about your current hiring process and see how you can amend it to include more diversity into your team.

TD Madison can help your organization weather tough times by helping find the right senior leadership with diverse experience and skillsets. Contact us to learn more about our senior leadership recruiting process.