Authentic Diversity

Through your lens as a woman leader in tech and business, what does building a diverse team mean to you and why is this so important?

Well, to me, a diverse team is one that has many different sort of backgrounds, life experiences, perspectives that they bring to the table. It goes to me beyond just do you have a different education, background?
It’s, have you experienced different things in life? Are you going to come to us with some new ideas that the existing team may not have thought about? And it’s very important because you need that variety to make sure you’re building a more comprehensive product, a product or service that’s going to be meaningfully applicable to a broader set of customers.
But that variety to me, also makes the work environment so much more fun. When you have a team that is bringing in all of these new, different life experiences that we’ve lived, we learn so much from each other and it opens up our own horizons into thinking about the world a little bit differently than we did before. So, to me, that’s a very important reason to make sure you have diversity in the teams.
What is especially important to me, though, is you encourage those diverse voices to be speaking and to hear them and to listen to them. To me, the worst thing you can do is hire a “diverse team,” but if you expect everybody to behave in the same way, you’re really not encouraging diversity.
When you do bring in people with different ways of communicating different styles that they may have, you need to encourage them to be their authentic self and create the right mechanisms for teams to still work together effectively, but recognize that it’s not necessary or even right if everybody is operating and sort of working in the same style, you’re really not encouraging diversity at that point.
So with my teams, I emphasize not just having a diverse team, but encouraging those sort of diverse experiences and ways of working to come through and shine and use that as a way to learn from each other as well.