I'm all for diversity in business across gender, race, age and skill. Diverse teams on average make better decisions. Doing the right thing is good business.
But an increasingly hysterical campaign to promote diversity risks turning Corporate Australia into a quasi boy-girl band with one of everything to please the audience.
We risk a form of corporate social engineering that emphasises appearance over performance, allows opportunists to use the "diversity card" to get ahead, and leads to the best person for the job being overlooked because they are too homogenous.
When did companies lose the ability to choose the best team for the circumstances?
If we are not careful, the fiftysomething white male who has decades of industry experience will become even more of an endangered species in business, overlooked for promotions because other candidates are seen to be more diverse.
High-performing teams that, at face value, lack diversity will be broken apart because their organisation needs to look more diverse to appease left-leaning literati.
The governance community will talk up its diversity achievements on boards (off an awfully low base) even though it is arguably a secondary issue for key stakeholders, such as fund managers who invest our superannuation.
Fund managers I know want directors who have deep industry experience, are across the detail and hold management accountable. They don't obsess nearly as much about board diversity as boards and companies themselves (and directors who want plum roles).
I know of some companies that have changed reporting lines in their organisation structure to include a woman in the executive team. Better gender balance makes sense, provided it is not manufactured or roles are not elevated for diversity appearances. Genuine corporate leaders, male or female, want to be judged on merit and detest tokenism.
Corporate Australia has itself to blame for letting the diversity argument get out of hand rather than advocating for sensible, measured, equitable progress in this area.
It's hard to pick up a newspaper without some business leader blathering about the virtues of diversity and their firm's new goal to improve gender or race diversity in senior management. Funny how firms are never held accountable for these initiatives.
Diversity is a fashionable, safe thought-leadership position for business leaders. Nobody will question their argument, for fear of offending people.
It's too much spin. The same organisations who gush about diversity often have disgraceful gender pay gaps. Or barely any Asian-born leaders in the firm or at board level. Or they discriminate against older workers who are paid more than younger ones.
Some accounting firms have the hide to criticise boards for being "old boys' clubs", yet their profession has a poor record of ensuring diversity at graduate level which translates into genuine diversity among the firm's partners.
Law firms go on about the importance of having more female partners yet, for all the flexible working policies, still expect mid-career employees to work crazy hours. Is it any wonder diversity suffers when staff have to find a new job to balance family and work?
Corporate Australia should put its money where its mouth is when it comes to diversity and help the market decide whether companies are sufficiently diverse.
Better reporting on diversity from listed companies – and a wider spread of companies providing information in this area – would help. Stakeholders could sell shares in companies that lack diversity or support those that champion it.
Also, a broader diversity debate is needed.
Corporate Australia stands at the cusp of the new machine age, yet our boards have limited expertise in technology.
Our boardrooms are among the world's oldest and have generations of directors who never grew up with technology, yet are expected to govern through an unprecedented era of digital disruption. Why don't we hear more on skills diversity?
We stand at one of the greatest business opportunities for Australian business in history: the rise of the Asian middle class. Yet our executive teams and boards have pathetically low Asian representation. Why don't we focus more on improving racial diversity, to help business capitalise on the Asian Century?
The ageing population, always promoted as a threat, is one of this country's great assets and opportunities. Why don't we talk about age diversity in organisations and harnessing the potential of older Australians in self-employment or corporations?
I would love to see people with disabilities given more opportunities in self-employment and better support for seniorpreneurs (older entrepreneurs) – positions this column has long advocated. But the diversity campaign is almost entirely about gender.
I get why the debate started with gender and can see how it will extend to other areas in time. However, the risk is too many people jumping on the bandwagon, skewing the debate and imposing unnecessary and unrealistic diversity expectations on other companies.
Or extrapolating research that shows diverse teams make better decisions, and diverse organisations deliver better long-term performance, to all situations. Some companies perform perfectly well with teams that tick few diversity boxes.
I understand why people who have been overlooked for roles because of race, gender or other unfair factors are pushing for greater diversity. Or why they feel diversity progress is too slow. Diversity campaigns are achieving change (the rise in the proportion of female board directors is an example).
But promoting people because of their characteristics, rather than on merit – if that is the case in a growing number of organisations – prolongs problems of the past rather than fixes them. It's just a shortcut to more discrimination.
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