Diversity brings better result

Building diverse project management teams can breed more successful outcomes. Jo Russell explores the importance of working with people who are different to you.

Within the workplace, it is valuable to have variation between individuals.

“This is a golden age,” declares Sue Kershaw, UK head of infrastructure and project management at KPMG. “We will never have this amount of infrastructure development again.” 

Working alongside private-sector investment, the government has created an enormous pipeline of major projects that need to be delivered in the next 10 years, including the Thames Tideway Tunnel, Crossrail, and HS2. Combined, these projects need manpower running into the hundreds of thousands.

Demand for project management skills is high, but many professions in the UK are on the brink of a skills crisis. For example, Kershaw cites the statistic that 80,000 new engineers are needed per year, yet the country is producing just 25,000. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the demand for project managers is also significant.

In order to meet the shortfall across project management, companies need to widen their traditional recruitment pool to attract more skilled people. Simply put: the project management profession needs to attract greater numbers. This means that diversity, far from being a tick-box exercise and a nod to corporate social responsibility aims, is a necessity.

What does a diverse workforce mean? Diversity is not just about gender. It is about socioeconomic background, race, sexual orientation, age, physical ability, religion and political ideology. Within any given group – including the workforce – it is valuable to have variation between individuals. Diversity makes us smarter.

Greater than numbers

Diversity is far more than just a numbers game. The value of diversity in the composition of project teams, and the positive impact it has on team performance, has been demonstrated, both academically and anecdotally. 

Writing in Scientific American, Katherine Phillips, professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, cites numerous examples of research that demonstrate that socially diverse groups (those with a diverse mix of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than homogeneous groups.

“With a diverse team, you don’t assume that everyone has the same knowledge,” says Manon Bradley, development director at the Major Projects Association (MPA). “When you assume that you all think in the same way, you make shortcuts to decisions. But when it is quite clear that there are people in the room different to you, it makes you stop, explain your position and ask for other people’s thoughts and experiences. It takes longer and is less comfortable, but you reach better decisions.” 

Naturally, it is possible to have a wide range of people available to you and still not listen to them. Diversity does not, in itself, create the conditions for success, but it helps to avoid creating an ‘echo chamber’.

An enhanced form of communication leads to better problem solving, more creative solutions and a more relaxed atmosphere. When working at the Olympic Delivery Authority, Kershaw recalls that the make-up of her team, which included “one guy aged 70, one aged 17, and everything in between”, meant that there was no hierarchy. “Nobody felt they had a point to prove, and there was no game playing. People could be honest and open,” she explains.

Her team’s success did not happen simply because the team was diverse, but because it was also well led. Diversity is just one part of a wider management and leadership toolkit. It is another string to the manager’s bow.

In addition, the more diverse a team, the more likely that it will reflect its client base, and that any decisions made will be relevant to those clients.

Breaking barriers

If the benefits are clear to see, why do problems in implementation occur? If an organisation is recruiting a lower proportion of people from diverse groups than exists within its recruitment pool, that suggests that the recruitment system itself is creating barriers. Also important are expectations and perceptions about whether ‘people like me’ work in the recruiting organisation.

A typical barrier lies in the way a job is advertised. “You can get very refined and say: ‘We need a chartered civil engineer with 15 years’ experience.’ But do you?” says Bradley. “By putting these types of attributes in their job descriptions, organisations are essentially describing the applicant as a white male, because, 15 years ago, the people who were becoming chartered engineers were all white men. The job description has therefore already defined the people that will apply. Companies should ask: is it necessary?”

You could also, arguably, fall foul of anti-discrimination legislation in requesting a certain number of years of experience, as it automatically removes younger people from consideration. It also encourages an attitude that time served is more relevant than actual ability and competence.

Bradley believes that many project managers currently working on large engineering construction projects are not primarily using their engineering skills. Instead, they are managing people, and so their ability to communicate, manage and provide leadership is more important. 

“We should be selecting on these criteria. Job descriptions should be based on competencies rather than qualifications,” she says.
Internal resistance to the implementation of diversity policies and practices can create further barriers. Diversity can be a sensitive area and needs to be handled carefully. People draw their own conclusions from things that are communicated to them, and these can sometimes be wide of the mark. 

“We often hear things that aren’t being said. If, as a successful white man, you hear somebody suggesting it is time we had greater diversity in our project teams, what you might hear is ‘It’s time we got rid of you’, which is hugely threatening. But what is actually being said is: ‘We need a wider range of people, not necessarily less of your sort,’” says Bradley.

Rather than helping, quotas can exacerbate this sense of fear and resentment. Anyone who falls outside of a quota can feel threatened by anyone who falls within, which immediately sets up a bad team dynamic. Conversely, the person within the quota may suffer from an element of impostor syndrome, wondering whether they have been appointed because of the quota system, rather than their ability to perform.

Effective messaging

The starting point to increase diversity must be to entice more people with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives into the profession. APM chairman Steve Wake believes that the messaging needs to change.

“Up to now, we have been too focused on talking to the same set of people with the same message. These are people already working in conventional project management. It’s effectively singing to the choir,” he says.

However, presenting project management as a life skill that helps people work more effectively, tackle problems and create solutions together will, he believes, create a far wider audience. Wake is keen to reach out to people working in industries such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals and law who perhaps have not considered the extent to which they are performing a project management role, as they are not performing their functions under any set of professional rules. 

Broad appeal

Making formal project management skills more appealing to younger people is also important.

“If we position project management as a life skill and encourage it as, for example, a subject on the national curriculum, I wonder what the world would be like? It ought to turn out better citizens, better able to organise themselves, to the benefit of society as a whole,” suggests Wake. Teaching project management skills at school would also introduce the profession to the most diverse group possible.

Kershaw agrees, adding that women are typically under-represented in project management. Not enough women are joining the profession because it is not seen as sufficiently exciting early on, she says, and girls are failing to perform in subjects such as maths and science: “The messaging needs to be changed to make it more appealing to girls who, with softer skills such as team building, have so much to offer.”

Girls are not afraid of hard subjects, and it is so satisfying, once you are in the profession, to be able to point to things that you have created and know that they are lasting structures that will benefit everyone, Kershaw adds.

Another initiative that Wake hopes will both have a positive impact on diversity and increase membership at APM concerns the creation of networked groups. 

Within APM, groups can be set up and run a supportive network. The purpose of the networks is to share experiences with a like-minded peer group. 

“Our challenge will be to make it a two-way communication. We want to say: ‘As a group, work together to discover how project management has meaning to you in your working life and let us know,’” says Wake. “Through networks, we can target groups that we don’t currently reach. If diverse groups start to come in this way, I would hope that it would become self-perpetuating, in that the networks can start to help shape what project management becomes.”

This approach sits more comfortably with Wake than actively targeting specific sectors of society: “I would feel inauthentic if I pursued specific diversity targets. But if I can explain how project management can relate to any given group of people, and look at how we can get the message across and create meaning for those people, that makes more sense.” 

More than a nice-to-have

Despite barriers and latent fears, the direction of travel for diversity is forward. Major projects such as HS2 demand diversity through the supply chain, and that the value of diversity be evidenced. Bradley reports that the overwhelming response from the MPA is that this is an issue that matters and is being taken very seriously. 

“At an event we held recently, we had dinner for 20 people, who are all heads of major projects, and they are not looking at encouraging diversity as a tick-box exercise. It is seen as, ‘we need to move forward with this or we will fail through lack of talent’. This is a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have,” she concludes. 

 

Gender balance, equality and diversity

Although often mentioned in the same breath, there is a difference between gender balance and diversity, says Manon  Bradley, development director at the Major Projects Association.

"As women are not in the minority, this is a different issue to that of ethnicity, religion or other areas of diversity. We are also not talking about increasing the diversity of genders in the workplace - there are just two. 

"Gender balance in the workplace is about having more women in male-dominated roles and vice versa. As it turns out, the major projects worls is very male dominated, so for us it is about getting more women involved. But if we were in the teaching or caring professions, for example, it would be the other way around."

The idea of how to achieve a better gender balance and greater equality has moved on, continues Bradley: "In the 80s and 90s, the view of equality was to treat everybody the same and deny that there is any difference between them. But that's not right. Giving me, a short female, a step to reach something on a higher shelf is not the same as giving a six-foot man that same step. Eqaulity of opportunity means giving me a step and giving him nothing. That is not favouring me, that's just giving us equality of opportunity so that we can then both reach what is on the high shelf."

To create and sustain equality. there needs to be an acknowledgement that there are differences between the sexes, continues Bradley: "We are brought up differently.with different expectations. We come into the workforce and behave differently. Women are more risk averse, while men are more confident and likely to shout about their abilities. Instead of saying, 'we should behave more like each other', we need to learn, as managers, how to manage people appropriately, according to their strengths."

Jo Russell is a business writer and editor.