Need another business case to support diversity? Well hiring people from different backgrounds will improve the IQ of your team, says Jan Hills
Thirty years ago as a young graduate I did an internship at the newly opened Equal Opportunities Commission in Manchester. At the end of the work placement (that’s what we called them then) I wrote a paper for my course saying equal opportunities legislation would enable women to move into roles that mainly men occupied, equally men would move into traditional women’s roles if they saw them as more fulfilling or gave a more satisfying career path.
Well some of that has happened!
Men now do a number of roles that were the sole preserve of women back then like nursing and personal assistant jobs. Today one in 10 nursing roles are held by men compared to one in a hundred 50 years ago, but only 8.7 per cent of UK engineers are women, the lowest percentage in the European Union. So as the numbers show, women haven’t moved into male dominated roles quite so easily.
But what about the business case?
At an HR leaders event I attended recently, many of the professional services firms speaking talked about their business case for diversity and inclusion. Most business cases seemed to be built around important issues like demographics which clearly show that if you are going to hire for the future you will run out of suitable graduate candidates pretty soon. Therefore, businesses need to show talented potential recruits in economies like China and India that their organisation is the sort of company the best talent would want to work for.
One thing struck me as missing: the business case based on business performance.
Vast amounts of data show that diverse teams perform better.
In my own field of leadership and neuroscience, research by Chris Chabris PhD from Union College, at the University of Washington, and an associate at MIT, shows that team intelligence is variable, measurable, and most surprisingly correlates more to the social intelligence of the team members rather than to the team’s IQ.
Chabris’ research suggests the IQ of a group is actually about communication. This can be either non-verbal and unconsciously understood or verbal and explicit. Women tend to be better at reading unconscious signals and social cues, so the higher percentage of women in a group correlates with higher group intelligence. His research shows that for a more intelligent team the gender and diversity mix matters. The research also found that encouraging all members to have a voice to offset women’s tendency to hold back also increases team intelligence.
So where is this business case? It is easy to quote turnover and wasted training money but if you are in an intellectual business surely the horse power or rather brain power of your team must make for a more persuasive business rationale.