This module is about how our brains affect our decision-making. A topic we can't leave without saying something about bias, discrimination, and diversity. The number 1 thing that you want to know about this topic is that diversity winds. Study after study has demonstrated that the more diverse a team is, the better the quality of the decision-making that's going to come out of that team. Diversity has been measured in studies and all ways, certainly around gender and around race, but also industry, background, geographic, ethnicity, lots of things. It's really something, the fact that we even debate and discuss these things in the modern world is a little bit crazy, because diversity wins. It is true that in some instances, it may take a little bit longer to make a decision because you have all these different points of view and there's going to be some difference of opinion that has to be addressed. Maybe in emergency situations, the leaders got it the side and go and move quickly. But in almost any other situation, which is to say the vast majority of situations, diversity really will win. By the way, when you think about diversity, interesting research has focused on let's say, a couple of studies on this. How many women you want or board of directors to enable you to get the type of diversity that could actually create this value that I'm describing and it's actually interesting. One person is okay, but then they're often seen as a token representative. Two people is better but if it's two people that say to women and 10 men, the two women sometimes, because feel like they have to prove they belong there and they feel that pressure from other people. Sometimes they start the clash and so there's a magic number here. The magic number is three. Somehow, when you go from one to two to three, you get this critical mass and three people then become a unit or a group that can enable some of these positive elements of diversity. I have to say though, when it comes to decision-making as great as diversity is, diversity does not mean we make a consensus decision. We know that if you want to make a good decision, you have to make a decision. You can't just pass the buck and you can't always try to talk endlessly and get to the lowest common denominator. I'll say more about this in Module 4, but how to make better decisions. But at this point, just keep in mind that consensus is not equal to diversity. Diversity adds the value, but at some point somebody's got to make a decision. We know about silo management, very common. What does it mean? Every function is kind of in their own world. Marketing people think one way and operations people think another way, and finance thinks a different way, and they don't often connect. That's yet another reason why diversity can play a big role. But it's also a place where leaders have to play a big role. If you're a leader of a team, so Step 1 is you want to create that diverse team, but Step 2 is you have to help them think about how they can break through across those silos. You want each person to be as expert as they can in their own area, but you still need to be able to integrate them. The job of a general management job of a leader is to accomplish that integration. Let me add a few other things about diversity and inclusion that I think is relevant and give you a couple of examples. I'm going to elaborate on some of these examples in Course 3 on super bosses. But I'll share with you one really interesting example from Bill Walsh, who was one of the most famous football coaches in the history of the National Football League in America, the NFL. Years ago, he realized that they were retired football players that have the aptitude and the interests to be coaches, to be on coaching staffs, but had never been given the opportunity. Why? Because they were black. He saw that and he says make any sense at all. He created the first, let's call it internship program for retiring players that happened to have the interests and the aptitude to join a coaching staff and that were African-American. Long and behold over a period of time, there was a pipeline of talent and people that maybe would not have had that opportunity before. I say that as an example because if you want to create more diverse teams, if you want to avoid some of these biases that we've talked about, you have to go out of your way sometimes to make that happen. You'd like to think it's just going to happen naturally, but we have to be proactive in the same way that Bill Walsh was proactive. The trick is to think about how you could do that for any type of person you want, any type of background that you want that maybe is not your standard. By the way, when you do this, it's a competitive advantage. If you can attract talent that other people are not attracting for whatever reason and we know talent is such a critical component and success of any organization, it becomes a competitive advantage. I've one other point to mention about diversity in the context of our course now, and that it's got to be supported internally, not just by going out of your way to try to source talent, but in how you manage and support people with diverse backgrounds. It requires more than lip service. My colleague, Ella Bell from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College has talked about co-conspirators. These are people that will support others and will support minorities and women on the job. She liked the term co-conspirator even more than ally because it implies a level of action. It's not just someone who's going to be helpful. It's someone's going to take action. Some people use the word sponsor or sponsoring to describe that. In my podcasts, The Sydcast, there are a bunch of people I've interviewed where they talk a lot about the role of sponsoring and how that makes such a big difference. The podcasts with Julie Quenneville that I've put into your optional readings or listening in that case, in this course is a great example of someone who understands that it's not enough just to mentor somebody, even though that's good. What becomes really important is to sponsor them, to be that co-conspirator. What that means is that when there's an opportunity, this co-conspirator/sponsor will go to the boss and the boss's boss and say, she's great or he's great. You got to create this opportunity for them. They deserve this opportunity. They'd become your internal agent, and that makes a big difference. I did want to say something about diversity in the context of our discussion here, we'll talk about diversity and other contexts as well when we talk about personal leadership in Course 4. But you can see how if these emotional biases can take us in a direction that's really wrong, we've got to do something about that. I'm supporting diversity in the ways that I described, are things that have to be essential for all of us as leaders, as managers, and as people.
