Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Early on in my career, I was up for a new job but first had to find someone to fill the old job. After months of searching, I thought I had finally struck gold. My candidate breezed through the interview process and I couldn’t wait to hear from my boss.

“What did you think?” I asked her with excitement.

She smiled. “I liked her. She had all the right skills and experience. She would be a good fit for the organization.”

Almost in passing, she added: “I can see, especially, why you would like her.”

That last sentence took me by surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Well, she is just like you. She has the same strengths, the same weaknesses, the same background and the same blind spots. She thinks like you. She is a mirror image. She even looks like you! And while I agree she’s a good candidate for the job, let me be clear: We only need one of you.”

Ah. There it was: implicit bias, long before the term was even coined. I had done what so many of us often do. I had been drawn to the comfortable and familiar; to someone like me. My boss was right. Without even realizing it, I had sent her a carbon copy of myself.

Implicit bias is well-recognized and well-researched. It has been documented in media stories such as this one in Forbes, in educational coverage like this and in thought leadership blogs like this.

Maybe it’s natural to gravitate to those who are like us when we’re building our teams. If we don’t work against that tendency, however, it might prove to be our fatal flaw. Diversity — particularly in a non-diverse team — is not a nice to have. It’s an essential business requirement. It needs to be at the top of the “critical skills” list for which we recruit. Same thinking gets you same solutions. It is not the kind of thinking that carries you forward or that meets the needs of an evolving world.

By the same token, we need to open our eyes to the fact that diversity must be more than just representation. Diverse team members must be empowered to share their voices and unique experiences. They need to be fully embraced in the push toward better.

We grow as individuals, teams and organizations only by warmly welcoming new people, new ideas and new ways of doing things. We need to dig deeper, always, to find and include those perspectives.

As my boss wryly noted all those years ago, carbon copies of the talent you have will never get you the future you need to build.