HR and Recruitment

An equal world is an enabled world

On Monday 9 March 2020, Robert Half held a series of Women In Business panel discussions in celebration of International Women’s Day. In light of the ‘Each for Equal’ theme of this year’s, the Robert Half Birmingham panel event discussed the complexities and opportunities women commonly face in the workplace today.

The discussion was lead by Kristen McNamara, Senior Director for Staff Development & Talent Acquisition at Robert Half and the panel consisted of:

  • Gail Bamforth CEO – Patrick Parsons, Engineering Consultancy
  • Sheryl Miller – Transformation Director and Career Coach
  • Hannah England – Olympian & Chair of UK Athletics Athletes Commission

The open and honest discussions from the panel fell into the following areas:

Recruiting a diverse workforce

A common mistake here is seeking to enforce diversity quotas when hiring. If you treat your hiring progress as a box-ticking exercise, you’ll miss out on crucial psychology traits and behaviours as you were too focused on filling your quotas. Instead, focus on matching strengths with the opportunity during the recruitment process.

When you do find someone to join the organisation, especially if they are a minority, they are made to feel welcomed, included, listened to and acknowledged as they can often not fit the existing mould. Diversity without inclusion is exclusion, meaning staff will leave after a negative experience while is unproductive for individuals, the workforce and the company as a whole.

Board diversity

The challenge for boards isn’t simply adding in the diversification of females. It is to introduce people of different age ranges, educational backgrounds, career routes, ethnicity and cultural backgrounds to truly build in a diversity of thought – the real value for decision making.

Unfortunately, the current norms for what leadership looks like is consistently fed to us through our experiences and often what we have seen in the media as we grow up. So anything that differs from this is seen as not ‘normal’ and thus a risk. This dangerous thought pattern makes us see the things we don’t possess rather than what we do. If we feel we don’t have the right traits, it can be self-limiting as we have automatically disqualified us out on in our minds and worse still leads us to believe we can’t add value. We need to develop a growth mindset as there is an exceptional strength in accepting differences as not a danger.

Own your own mindset

Through continuous development within ourselves, we become comfortable in our skin. You can understand where, what, and how you add value to the organisation. Developing these strong personal values and integrity and owning your mindset is a leadership trait everybody at every level adds real value. Not having the same opinion as your peer, that in itself is valuable.

Onboarding and retaining talent

We must be mindful about how we project what we people have to do to be successful – do we expect and are we encouraging them to drop their identity at the door as we are telling them they must ‘be’ a certain way to be successful and accepted

Being genuinely engaged and interested in people when they join is key to learning how people cover their identity and why

Naturally we all probably have done this at some point in our careers to mimic leaders or peers

It is key to create an inclusive environment where people do not have to hide who they are

The challenges to change your culture to be more inclusive is real

Certain commonalities can narrow relationships naturally i.e. those who already work in the business may naturally gravitate towards and build relationships more easily with people who are from similar backgrounds, have a similar style of communication

In turn excluding those who are different even unintentionally

Leading to those individuals feeling excluded and their value being missed

People will hide unique or different interests, talents, and creativity which can add huge value not just to the business but their personal health and wellbeing by simply being allowed to behave authentically

What they also won’t share is any health struggles and personal challenges also which then doesn’t allow to you to support them effectively upfront before one of those potentially becomes an issue

To be an effective leader you need to be genuinely open to diversity and engaged. LOOK for the value

Culture is what you do and say when no one is looking. Its who you are

As Directors and Senior Management: What do your managers and leaders under you stand for?

Are they emotional intuitive with a diverse workforce?

  • The Value of Mentoring and Coaching

A lot of our workforces have a fixed mindset – a win or lose mentality, unless they naturally possess or have crafted a growth mentality

This means stepping out of their comfort zones where they have a perceived risk of losing means people limit themselves and opportunities open to them

This can mean, offering to take on a work project, tasks you could delegate to them, sharing knowledge they have you are unaware of, going for a promotion, learning a new skill that can add value – a real prohibitor to both them and a business

The fear of failure is real and never goes away at any level, after any period of success – but it is how we encourage and behave with our own fear, to channel it in to learning and not label what is essentially a different result as failure

Pampering your ego pollutes your decisions – stay logical. Trying to fail is progress rather than not trying at all!

The perception of ‘what is everyone going to think of me’ – people are usually far too busy dealing with their own preoccupation of their own challenges and issues to watch you stepping out and thinking negatively about your process or outcome

And some people will always judge of you do nothing and do everything – so do it anyway!

Encourage people to be curious

For every time you have tried something and got a different result, not the result you wanted – what did you/they learn?

Probability dictates the more attempts you make, you will end up with the result (and maybe more) that you want

This is why every successful entrepreneur you can listen to tells us they failed 99 times before they succeed at the 100th attempt but they kept on going to reach that rather than giving up at 50

Within sport to be grow, excel, learn to train your mind and body better, you have to be very emotionally vulnerable and totally open to criticism/ feedback. Being totally accountable

You must learn to recover from failure both physically and mentally quickly and effectively – if you carry that failure into your next race, you will make it more likely that you will fail

Dropping negativity internally and externally that slows you down is vital

  • Closing comments and Summary takeaways from the discussion

➢ Have meaningful employee and social forums for staff to be able to have a voice and connect with each other as well as leadership and be heard

➢ It takes WILL, bold leadership and behaviour to create an inclusive and diverse culture

➢ Age does not indicate ‘better’ experience or decision making

➢ To engineer a potential opportunity to get on to a board as a Non-Exec – get networking, create sponsors for you in that network that can support an application (who’s speaking about you when you’re not a room). And source a mentor

➢ Create a people pipeline for talent. Advertise what your culture stands for. Event, social media

➢ Be careful of your self-fulfilling prophecies and that ‘fixed mindset’. Ask and grow

BE MORE BRAVE. Be excited by your own and other people’s ambition and don’t apologise!

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