Best Supported Team I’ve Ever Seen

Yeras ago I was assessing the employee experience of a client’s team. This manager was VP at a multibillion dollar tech company and had just created a team of some three dozen folks. Mostly engineers, mostly new hires, some inherited from other parts of the org. This group was going to be doing leading edge R&D.

For the new team members, here’s the process this manager went through. He spent probably 20 hours or more going through LinkedIn. He did his own search, browsed through who knows how many profiles, and came up with a diverse list. Recognizing it’s critical for a high performing team to have multiple viewpoints, this VP took his list to the internal recruiters and said, “Get me interviews with as many of these people as possible, and anyone else you can find of similar skill level and diversity.”

I wound up doing around 40 interviews with the resulting team. Here’s what I learned.

• Far more than average for a tech team, many folks said they felt extremely supported by their manager.
• More than once, a team member told me “I’ve never had this much support from a leader in my career.”
• Multiple team members said their manager had helped them deal with something really difficult outside of work, but still affecting their ability to work. Things like getting insurance coverage for surgery.

My takeaway is that this leader showed up for their team in many ways because they believe – as I do – there are two axes on which you can operate when performing people operations to improve Employee Experience (EX). One is because there’s discernible ROI for the business, and the other is because it’s a Good Thing to do for humans. These aren’t mutually exclusive.

Helping people deal with potentially life altering events certainly qualifies on the Humanity axis. But how does being supportive of a diverse team score on the Business Value axis?

Here’s a study of 3000 companies showing that diversity in the workforce increases success in developing innovative solutions.

Here’s a study of 200 teams showing a link between inclusive decision making and better business performance.

And finally here’s an article (from Scientific American, of all places!) that straight up explains “The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity.”

I wasn’t surprised by the results of these interviews because I already knew this VP was a great leader. But I *was* surprised to see how many people from a wide range of backgrounds were so quick to talk about how they felt supported on his team. And what did it take to get there? A single leader who put in the time and effort up front to ensure diversity in hiring.

You could be that leader too.

Image courtesy of Daniel Koponyas on Unsplash