The Importance of Personal Network Diversity

Ask 100 business leaders if they’re comfortable achieving critical goals without a sound strategy in place and you’ll get 100 resounding “no’s” as answers. Yet too often companies and their leaders fail to have a sound strategy in place when it comes to increasing diversity. It’s an important initiative that, so far, has gotten more in the way of analyzing where we are at the moment versus thoughtful, creative strategies to do better in the future. While measuring where we are in terms of diversity in our workforce is an important first step to see how far we need to go it is not a strategy for how we get there.

So what will help us get there?

1. Understanding that the diversity lacking make-up of today’s team is largely the result of the fact that 85% of roles are filled from within the hiring executive’s personal network (even more for higher level roles). Even when executives go outside to search firms where they have long-established relationships to help fill new roles the networks of the executive and the search firm can overlap significantly and not be diverse enough to make meaningful progress.

85% of roles are filled from within the hiring executive’s personal network…

2. Acknowledging that one of the best actions we can take to improve the diversity of our company is to improve the diversity of its leaders’ networks. This means a strategic and measured long term effort to identify, reach out and get to know more diverse people that are either qualified today or on a career track to be qualified in the future for leadership roles in your firm. The key takeaway here is that this effort should be initiated today in order to have a more diverse network of qualified candidates in the pipeline for key leadership roles a few months or more in the future.
3. Building, executing and measuring a plan for leaders at all levels to get to know more diverse people in their functional area. There are numerous ways to diversify your business network including connecting and starting conversations on LinkedIn that lead to calls or meetings and even finding people who have more diverse circles than you and leveraging them for introductions and referrals in the future.

As history has shown, your organization will largely be as diverse as the networks of the executives already in it today unless you start doing something differently. And while there are numerous areas to work to address lack of diversity, the most organic, authentic one is simply taking the time to get to know a more diverse range of people doing the type of work your firm does today.

At Prais+Barnette we plan and execute thoughtful Diversity Networking initiatives for our clients to increase their chances of success in achieving such a critical goal. Contact us at info@praisbarnette.com to learn how we can help your firm expand its network.