How to achieve a diverse workforce without making race or gender more important than competence
By: John Chuang, CEO, Aquent

When I first started my company in 1987, I believed that if I hired according to merit and turned a blind eye to race, age, and gender, I’d get a diverse and balanced workforce. I was idealistic and, moreover, I disliked affirmative action because it allowed people to typecast me. Did I get into Harvard University because I was a minority? I worked hard for my own success and felt that I should be recognized for my efforts, not my ethnicity.

After eight years of frenzied growth with $50 million in sales and a staff of more than 150 people, I thought my “meritocracy” was doing rather well. Then in the course of an interview, a New York Times reporter remarked that our organization seemed skewed by gender and race: white males at the top level of executive leadership and a preponderance of white females in clerical positions. When I looked at the numbers, I realized that although my company mirrored the industry, it lacked diversity.

Looking back, here’s what I think happened. My initial blind hires were based on experience. The staffing industry has historically been skewed toward secretarial and clerical occupations. By choosing employees based on experience, I hired a disproportionate number of women in “traditional roles” which didn’t help my company in terms of true diversity.

Second, my management team consisted of my friends and friends of friends. When you’re in the initial start-up phase, you’re not thinking about diversity for the future, you’re thinking about getting sales, and you count on the people you know. The pitfall of hiring friends is that they tend to be like you. Before you know it, you’ve got a lot of the same kind of people making critical management decisions.

So what’s wrong with that?

Diversity helps you make better decisions. Can a bunch of white males create a sound maternity policy? Not likely.

Externally, as markets become increasingly diverse, managers need to be intimately acquainted with them. In our industry, decision making is critical, and marketing decisions are the most important. In our Los Angeles office, when a major demand existed for animation artists, many of whom came from China and Japan, we hired a Chinese staffer intimately familiar with both cultures. By doing so, we were able to supply our clients with a number of highly skilled animators. Our office even sponsored that staffer’s citizenship application, recognizing the value she brought to the organization.

Internally, as a management team made up of college friends, we missed things all the time. Because we were all the same age, we created advertising materials that we liked but nobody over 45 could read because the typeface was too small. Ageism never occurred to us.

Balance strengthens a business structurally. It’s also good for recruiting. When I was a graduate student at Harvard Business School, it was common for all recruiters to trumpet their equal-opportunity efforts, but I knew many talented minority graduates who looked carefully at the actual diversity and composition of the recruiting companies and avoided those that appeared imbalanced.

How can a business claim to be the best if the organization is so lopsided? Clients will, in many cases, judge a book by its cover, and your workforce is your cover. Our imbalance didn’t help our advancement toward true innovation in business.

So how do you achieve this balance? If you’re a young company, it’s a matter of conscious action in the beginning. The solution is to manage balance and diversity from day one. Don’t put yourself in the position of having to institute a hiring policy in which you put ethnicity or gender above qualifications; in that case, you do a disservice to the candidates, your current employees and yourself.

Our solution was to bring more people into entry-level positions who reflect the ethnic composition of the country - and of the countries in which we do and would like to do business. We’ve made sure that our pool of entry-level employees is proportionally balanced in terms of gender, ethnicity and age. Although we have diversity goals we don’t have quotas and will never promote a less qualified person over a more qualified one. Today, we have an internal staff with a wider perspective, and a more diverse workforce that can benefit our customers.

From my own experience, I can tell you that that achieving and maintaining a diverse workforce makes the difference between an upstart venture with no future and a solid, well-balanced company with the foundation to survive almost any obstacle.

John Chuang is co-founder and CEO of Boston-headquartered Aquent (www.aquent.com), a professional services firm delivering Creative and IT solutions. Over the past 15 years, the company has grown to a $300 million business operating in 15 countries.