Pursuit of Unity in Diversity
Hello, my name is Kengo Senuma, a VP of Organization Division at Zeals Technology Department. Zeals Technology Department unlike many companies in Japan, has a very diverse team of employees. We currently have close to 90 people in the team and 80% of them are non-Japanese, that works from everywhere around the world remotely.
Furthermore, I have started, scaled, and managed multiple organization that are extremely diverse particularly in nationality and culture. Today, I want to explain how this benefits the team in a long run.
Traps Of Collecting Like-Minded People
Many company management often try to embrace creativity and ask the employees to share opinions as much as they can, but at the same time it doesn’t happen at least from the top management perspective. This is not because of lack of enthusiasm or willingness to speak up to lead from the team. This usually occurs when you have a collection of like-minded people especially in the top management layer.
Having like-minded people around you is very comfortable. You tend to agree on many occasions, creating a sense of confirmation bias towards your decisions. This works well sometimes especially in an early stage startups because you tend to have a very quick decision making amongst the founders of the company.
On the later stage of the company, this will unconsciously proliferates a culture where it rewards speech and behavior of the same mind. Sometimes it can be seen as the yes-man culture, and people are sucking up to a boss or bosses. However in reality they usually are not being intentionally political.
How This Issue is Even More Tricky in Japan
Japan has historically a monocultural population which naturally creates a tendency to be in this trap of like-minded people. It is culturally an etiquette that you know what you do or say and exactly when to do that. It is your responsibility to “save a face”, doing or saying what is expected so that the family, the team, or the company will not create others to feel awkward and uncomfortable. This creates extra peer pressure to follow what the originally created like-minded behavior. Everything becomes consensus based. And in case they want to break this and do or say something outside the box, they tend to beat around the bush rather than be direct. This creates illusion of consensus especially from the top management point of view.
What Do You Do To Create Diverse Mind
Ultimately it is not the goal to create a multinational team, but to create a team of widely variant minds where there are perfect balance on disagreement to productively move forward. Here are some of the actions you can take for your team to have more diverse mind.
- Diverse Demographic
Having said that, it is always a good idea to have a diverse demographic in your team. Either nationality, gender, age or any other background that changes their fundamental perspective. This is the easy part. - 360 review
When you have a 360 review, especially when the feedback is anonymous, tends to exclude the peer pressure or the tendency to unconsciously follow the same-mind. Usually this creates a very objective view of everyone including the top management. - Intentionally Position Different Mindsets
When you are in a management position, you sometimes need to position people who you think are off, but somehow highly admired by other people. These are the people who can be successful but not in the way you are used to. These are the people who you can have healthy and productive debate. - Clearly Document Rules and Regulations
There are two reasons why documenting rules are important in a diverse team.
1. As the team has people of different background and culture, they will assume differently about the unwritten part of the rules.
2. Lack of order creates room for politics. This favors the like-minded people to gather to create factions which goes against the diversity. - Embrace the change
In order for the team to accept diverse mind, they first need to embrace the change. Allow outcasts to speak up and take some control. This sometimes goes beyond your comfort zone, but remember, they are usually feeling scarier of you than you are of them.
What Does It Ultimately Bring Us
Like I said, diversity is not about having different kind of passport or different types of sexual partners (that’s “Inclusion” part of D&I). It is about having people with different mind and background being able to create a greater collective intelligence and collective creativity than what sum of the members can bring.
There’s a popular folktale written by Hans Christian Andersen called The Emperor’s New Clothes, where two con artists sells the emperor clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent but doesn’t exist in reality. The story goes on where everyone including the emperor himself, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, pretends that the clothes exists until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all.
Collecting like-minded does this to us, and diversity prevents it. I would like to close this post by a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that explains what we are pursuing as an organization and further:
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
