Confident Leadership

It's an interesting point you bring up because a lot of people do kind of just gravitate to the people they already know, they're comfortable with their experience, they're comfortable with their backgrounds. What would you say is the most difficult challenge then of building a diverse team?

First of all, you have to be the kind of leader that is comfortable being a leader to people that you don't know, to people that you didn't work with before. Very often I see people come into a company or start a company, and they surround themselves with people they're very comfortable with. And what that does is perpetuate the network, the streaming of the network that is already in place, and that biases people against diverse candidates for sure. So I think you have to be comfortable and confident that you can be a leader to any type of person, and just have an open mind about building teams that represent broad bases of the types of people you want to feel included in your company.

What if you're sort of in that middle tier or you're a new manager, you're not feeling the kind of confidence you just talked about, and maybe you're not so comfortable working with people from different types of backgrounds? How do you address that? How do you overcome that?

We haven't had to overcome a lot of it at Veracyte because from day one, we were built on such a diversity of experience and exposures and global ethnicity, just from the nature I guess, of starting up here in the Bay Area was probably part of it. And then secondly, I didn't work in the Bay Area. I came to the Bay Area to start Veracyte. So by nature, I didn't have a network around me of people that I could go tap to bring into the company. And so when that's the backdrop for building something, then you truly post the positions and allow the resumes to come in and you're interviewing purely for the kind of talent that you think is going to be needed to build the company. When we have middle managers today that are uncomfortable taking the risk that they might hire someone that maybe had a different training that what they believe is the ideal training of the job, sometimes you just have to force the hand. Because in my experience now, leading businesses for -- I've been in diagnostics over 40 years, almost 14 years of building Veracyte, once people experience the power of different approaches, different experiences, contributing different perspectives, different personalities, all of that is diversity. And when people experience the power of them in the company, they're much more open at not even thinking about the fact that they're building diverse teams, they just naturally migrate to that.