Functional Diversity: How Tech & Non-Tech Employees Work Together

We recently ran an inclusion & diversity workshop that focused on bringing the tech and non-tech functions in the organization to collaborate better together. Early on in the day, our facilitator posed a seemingly simple question to the group:

“How would you describe the group that you do not belong to?”

The purpose was to get the technical staff in the room to describe the non-tech folks (HR, sales, legal), and vice versa. Here is what we captured in the training room:

Needless to say, the differences couldn’t have been starker and the descriptions were negative and full of stereotypes.

We used this exercise as a tool to build awareness and visualize unconscious biases that exist between two (or more) functional groups. While we often address visible diversity categories, like gender or race, we tend to ignore the hidden (cognitive) diversity that are also part of our company’s DNA.

Unconscious biases are hidden beliefs that often have a significant impact on our responses and perceptions to people, places, and situations.

Are ideas from tech staff always better?

Most organizations suffer from a cognitive divide in their functions. As tech and non-tech staff often work in silos, subcultures develop within an organization that can make it harder to find a common ground to communicate. Each function forms its own agenda and creates an “Us vs. Them” atmosphere. Whether it is the in-house lawyer lecturing the marketer about a high-risk campaign, a non-technical project manager trying to get a developer to commit to a tight deadline, or the HR business partner strapped on resources for a complex R&D project, we experience the impact of functional silos every time we work cross-functionally. In some organizations, we are witnessing a certain (unconscious) preference for their tech employees’ ideas and input over others.

One client that we worked with discovered in employee interviews that a culture of censoring ideas had been established. The organization seemed to only be open to the ideas of those “tech superstars” who had been successful in product development, and who were primarily based in the U.S. Ideas from others were viewed with much greater skepticism, regardless of their value. While in principle, people agreed with the corporate value of “We want an environment where all ideas are considered;” in reality, this was not happening.

What effects, do you think, are at play in the described situation?

Let’s stick with this example: The favoring of ideas from tech staff is most likely a combination of various group effects and biases. For one, we tend to favor opinions and input from those that are very similar to us. The organization described above has a lot of technically skilled people in higher management positions. They are more likely to seek input and pick ideas from other tech staff, without being aware of it. This is called INGROUP BIAS or FAVORITISM.

Once the culture of “tech superstars” is established, we then seek to confirm the notion that great ideas come from tech people. When our expectations are based on these assumptions, we look much harder and better at the input from tech people, because “we know” they will be better. On the other hand, we listen to (possibly brilliant) ideas from non-tech staff with much more skepticism. We call this CONFIRMATION BIAS.