Diversity is the Secret Sauce

For Women’s History Month, our Saatva Women’s Empowerment Leadership Lobby (SWELL) employee resource group collected recipes, connecting our colleagues to memories with or of special women in their lives.  As it turns out, many of the women we love cook by feel:  a spoonful of this, a little bit of that, simmer for a while.

In many ways, the best teams are built in the same way that the best meals are prepared: with a variety of high quality ingredients (employees!), careful preparation, and a healthy dose of intuition.

I thought about that recently when it occurred to me that our recruiters, Patrick J. Mulvey and Tanisha Mighty, intuitively prioritize diversity when they build teams.  This may show up as an observation that a hiring team needs someone with more experience to ground the group in best practices, or a fresh-off-campus perspective to infuse the group with new ways of approaching our work.  Employees who speak or sign in different languages are a welcome addition, broadening the ways in which we connect with one another and with our customers.  Pat and Tanisha masterfully add that special element that a hiring team may not even have known it needed by presenting candidates with diverse identities, skills, and experience.

On a personal level, the rich diversity on my own team makes me feel safe.  It protects us from lazy thinking and the shortcuts associated with unconscious bias.  We don’t engage in the groupthink and false assumptions often associated with homogenous teams.  Each member of my team has a unique identity and background, and there is overlap among our intersectionalities.  One of the best results of our diversity is a high degree of empathy for our employees, as someone on the People team can identify with nearly any employee from nearly any walk of life.

Just recently I was with my team for a quarterly in-person session, and we had invited our Brand Ambassador & Corporate Social Responsibility Program Manager, Annette Honeywell, to join us.  Annette is HR-adjacent, and we like to keep her close.  Not only because Annette is a wonderful colleague to work with, but also because she brings an ingredient to the team that we would otherwise lack: tenure.  Without Annette, the average tenure on our People team is less than 18 months.  As Saatva’s first employee, Annette has seen the company evolve, and she understands how certain processes or structures came to be, ideas that have been tested and why they may have succeeded or failed, and she often knows the hidden talents of our long-tenured employees.  Her unique perspective is incredibly valuable and adds depth to our secret sauce.

There are countless studies that substantiate the quantitative value that diversity delivers to a business’ bottom line.  It seems that the corporate world is just catching onto something that loving cooks and skillful team builders have known intuitively for ages:  diversity is the secret sauce.  Hiring teams that value the unique attributes of potential employees and prioritize this diversity as an asset set the table for a company culture that enjoys diversity in its workforce.

This article has been reposted on LinkedIn.