By Alex White, Head of ALM Research, Redington
Similarly, when comparing candidates for hiring or promotions, the comparisons we make are often only broadly like-for-like, the role of luck is harder to see but potentially more prevalent, and the most valuable qualities may be intangible, or need longer to appear. This means, broadly, that we should assume good sports teams are closer to their optimal setup than good companies are. Another prevalent aspect of many sports teams is specialisation. For many team sports, the traits required (and not required) differ wildly. The Argentina men’s football team, for instance, have Leo Messi (170cm, 67kg) and Emiliano Martinez (195cm, 88kg) at opposite ends of the pitch.
The analogy for cognitive diversity is relatively clear. Most office work is mental rather than manual, so the equivalent of different body types and skill sets is different cognitive types. Having a pool of differentiated experts is likely to be better than having lots of generalists, and this should increase with size- all else being equal, we’d expect companies with thousands of employees to benefit from more extreme specialisation than a team of eleven athletes. The consequence of this argument is that the optimum recruitment for any company is probably more diverse than most companies are right now.(1)
Extending the analogy, extremes get more extreme across different sports. Basketball players are not just taller than average, they’re extraordinarily tall. Shaquille O’Neal is 216cm and 147kg. Equally, Simone Biles is 142cm and 47kg, as different as a large van (3500kg) is to a hatchback (1100kg).
The point is, where the metrics are good, extremes are often chosen.
And yet, only around 30% of those with ASD in the UK are employed(2). Having ADHD makes you roughly twice as likely to be fired (3). Dyslexics earn on average 15% less(4). The prevalence of these is around 1%, 5% and 10%, so these are not tiny demographics, and represent underused potential. You wouldn’t field a football team of 11 central midfielders, but that appears to be how many corporations are run.
Now obviously it’s not that simple. Smaller firms are likely to need more generalists, and people with these diagnoses are on average likely to be meaningfully worse at certain tasks. That said, they can often outperform in other areas (e.g. analytic thinking, attention to detail, creativity, multi-tasking). Which begs the question of whether firms could be more productive with a small rejigging of roles to promote greater specialisation and make use of people with differentiated talents.
Even putting morality aside, one of the harder-nosed arguments for diversity in general is that any company not doing it is missing out on a chunk of the talent pool. With neurodiversity, they may be missing out on explicitly that section of the talent pool that could help most. You wouldn’t drop Messi because he’s no good in goal, but that may be analogous to how society runs itself.
(1)As an aside, it could also be a factor as to why racism appears at least statistically to be less of an obstacle to success in sport than in business. For instance, it’s notable that the ratio of black to white football players as of 10 years or so ago is so much higher than the ratio of black to white managers is now. If we believe biases are likely to have a bigger impact when criteria are more nebulous, then this effect may in part be because the metrics for managers are so much worse, and these biases exist in decisions but only become fully clear in the aggregate. There are clearly a huge number of other interacting factors too though, and I’m hardly an authority.
(2) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-buckland-review-of-autism-employment-report-and-recommendations/the-buckland-review-of-autism-employment-report-and-recommendations
(3) https://adhdatwork.add.org/impact-of-adhd-at-work/
(4) https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/300462102.pdf
|
