Diversity is still the point

Among the highest ranks of American business and politics, there is a disease spreading. It’s always been there, just under the surface, subtly warping the actions and views of the richest and most powerful people. Lately, though, you can see its boils and pustules rupturing through the skin of almost every one of those clawing, sweaty dudes.

The disease is egomania, or we could call it hyper-individualism. It’s the belief that in order to solve the problems of the world all that is necessary is the force of will and to dismiss the ideas and opinions of everyone else. It’s a toxic regression; an abandoning of everything we’ve learned in modern history.

Even if a stopped clock is right twice a day, it’s still wrong the rest of the time.

This egomania can be understood much like a virus. If you sit in a room full of measles, you’re very likely to contract measles. In that way, the illness is acquired from the environment. Some people may be more susceptible than others, but catching a virus isn’t your fault.

This hyper-individualism is a mindset that many business leaders are prone to. In some ways, you need to be a bit of an individualist to be a leader at all; it’s a lonely and sometimes thankless job. Striking out to do something new and bold requires a self-confidence and a courage that many lack.

But no leader reaches the top alone. By definition, building a company requires hiring people to do its many specialized jobs. Leaders must balance their vision and gut instinct against the experience and knowledge of the people they hire. Any successful business incorporates the work and expertise of its many employees.

Yet somehow, at the very top, a bubble can form. Within that bubble is the one person who credits the success of the business to their own singular vision and willingness to eschew all contrary opinion. Within that bubble, this “virus” of egomania appears, and it is incubated by the systems we’ve built that are biased toward the profit motive.

I saw this happen with my own eyes, unfortunately. In the late 2010s at Wayfair, after the business had grown to over 12,000 employees across the US, Canada, and Germany, you started to hear stories from within the executive circles. I had been leading our “development platforms” team for some time and I was well-connected across engineering leadership, which gave me at least a keyhole view into what went on in the C-suite.

The bubble was forming and the hyper-individualistic virus was reaching a deadly concentration within it. In a meeting about warehouse logistics, it was said that CEO Niraj Shah insisted on some type of conveyor belt configuration that his top warehouse people disagreed with. People whom, I will be crystal clear, he himself hired to manage these problems.

The way it was described to me (because I wasn’t there) was that it became a throw-down battle over how to solve this one specific problem. Something so specific, so in-the-weeds that a CEO should probably not even know that it is happening.

When you’ve achieved billionaire status and worked so hard and poured yourself into understanding every aspect of a large and complex business, and when people around you are constantly applauding your every move, it’s all too easy to slip into this hyper-individualistic micro-management. Surely I must know better, is the frequent thought that the virus creates.

But do you, really? Have you achieved your success by knowing everything?

In America at large, there are strong and vocal forces at work decrying diversity and inclusiveness as “woke” and undesirable. The grasping, fragile men who are saying these things all think they got to where they are through sheer force of will and by dismissing the ideas and opinions of everyone else.

In no area of life is that less true than democratic politics. Again, by definition, these people got to where they are because people voted for them. Many of those people, I would assert, did not know what they were voting for, but regardless, our leaders need us, whether they realize it or not.

Leadership requires vision, and often a singular sense of purpose. But great leaders don’t have all the answers, they know how to ask great questions.

The answers that emerge will only be as informed and insightful as the collective experiences of those being asked. Seeing around corners requires people who have been down many different hallways, and if you surround yourself with people who are just like you, you aren’t going to get the answers you need. It may feel comfortable, but the comfort is the warning sign.

Ironically, nobody at the top of American business today got there without embracing the ideas and feedback of others. They just conveniently forgot about it. It turns out that when it comes to building a large, successful enterprise, diversity is still the point.

There is a certain leadership failure mode that can ultimately slide into egomania, and I believe that it’s partly a function of impostor syndrome. Even the most successful and accomplished people often, secretly, don’t think they earned it.

The balancing act of leadership is bringing a vision and a clarity of the problems a business is facing while simultaneously allowing the team to do most of the work of solving them. When your inner narrator is whispering “they put you in charge to do this, you need to show that you are good enough and smart enough,” it’s easy to rob the team of their agency.

It can feel vulnerable to say to the team, “These are the problems we have, what do you think we should do?” But that’s exactly what great leaders do.

A great leader can describe problems in such narrative detail that it motivates the team to act on them, they believe in the team so completely that their faith fuels the team to move with purpose, and they can recognize when proposed solutions fit the problem, and they ask the questions necessary to shape early ideas toward that perfect fit.

Long gone are the days of leaders who say “do this,” “do that.” Today’s leaders ask “what about this?” and “what about that?” Learning to ask precise, probing, open-ended questions is one of the most powerful skills any leader can invest in.

Only by asking the right questions can you capitalize on the huge breadth of experience and perspective that you hired. To do anything less is an abdication of responsibility in my opinion.

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