What it Takes to Build a Diverse Team: FreeWheel's Case Study

It takes conviction to build a truly diverse team.

You have to genuinely believe that a balanced and diverse team will pay dividends for you to be able to achieve what you set out to do. Once you embark on this intentional journey, you will run into a number of challenges that you will need to cast aside, doubling down on your commitment. However, I can say from experience that the effort is worth it, and the lessons learned from a singular focus on diversity can be applied to recruiting and fostering talent from all backgrounds.

When FreeWheel started, there was a strong belief that a more balanced team is a better team. As a technology company, when it came to building out a team of smart people with the right experience, we encountered far fewer female candidates compared to male candidates during the recruitment process.

As the CTO and leader of our engineering group, which, as a discipline, has historically had a bias towards males, I was not deterred. Instead of giving up, I decided to place a heavy bet on recruiting junior talent with an emphasis on female engineers, whom we could then grow and develop.

We focused heavily on recruiting college students with raw talent and developing special sessions with colleges designed to attract female candidates. We talked about how, unlike other startups out there, we had a specific desire to build a balanced team at all levels. We shared our philosophy and approach to tracking female employees' development and progression within the organization, reassuring them that they would be fully supported in their growth, and, crucially, that the company's leadership team is proactively ensuring that this happens.

The Talent Network Effect

This is not unique to our organization but FreeWheel was very successful in bringing in the right talent at the entry level. As we created a reputation in the industry and among college communities as a company that not only valued diversity, but invested in it, the following things happened:

• We attracted female talent who trusted that they would feel support, and in turn invested in their personal development
• Candidates gave up competitive offers (sometimes financially superior) from other larger companies because they believed they could grow faster and go further with FreeWheel
• Those same female team members helped us to hire more talented women into our organization, both through their own connections and the reputation that we created in market

This is what I call talent network effect.

Once you build the reputation as an inclusive organization that helps diverse teams to grow, recruitment becomes easier, even where there are limited candidate pools. It is not, however, as simple as just building a reputation and becoming a magnet to those who see and appreciate the philosophy and effort to build a diverse team. It is not enough to just get them in the door and hope that they will thrive.

The real work begins in developing and retaining diverse talent throughout their career journey.

As a company that has been around for more than a decade, FreeWheel has well-established career tracks designed specifically for individual contributors and managers. With each career track, we specifically focus on female employees with potential to grow and we design career development tracks for them, with them. As result of this focus, we have a strong group of outstanding female leaders both on individual contributor tracks and management tracks, where young female employees can easily identify with them, and view them as role models for themselves. Our "buddy program," which pairs new hires with existing employees as mentors, matches female leaders with female new hires so that our female talent would feel at home from day one and have a designated advocate for their success, in addition to their direct managers.

The benefits of this approach are clear. Your organization becomes infused with the kind of talent you want: human beings who seek community in their work life, who are inspired to grow by those around them, and who ultimately appreciate the effort and buy into the company's philosophy on inclusion.

The Quest for Black Engineers

Building a culture that not only embraces diversity but fosters those who are underrepresented, so they feel truly integrated, is vital for the success of any high functioning team. This applies to all individuals and communities you are looking to attract to your organization, especially those within disciplines with historically low concentrations of diverse talent. This approach applies to all groups and communities that are underrepresented in the industry and certain functions within the organization.

At a time where the spotlight is quite rightly focused on the Black community and their opportunities within society and the workplace, we at FreeWheel are applying the methodologies and lessons learned from attracting female talent to find and attract Black talent. In tandem, we're building out the same types of programs for black engineering employees within our organization.

Every community is different, and those differences are what can truly elevate a team's effectiveness, so while a carbon copy approach may not work, there are elements that can be applied:

• We have to start by looking in the right places for Black engineering talent
• There is likely a need for education around creating awareness of the company, its place within the industry (and to broaden the pool, sometimes awareness of the industry itself) and the approach to diversity and inclusive practices
• Once that is established and we are successful in bringing in Black talent into the organization, we have to create the right development tracks for that community, and pay the level of care we had with female employees in order to inspire, retain and create upward movement
• Use mentorship programs to match Black leaders with new Black hires to provide support and guidance on the Black employee experience and what success looks like
• Again, once we build the reputation and the talent network effect kicks in, it becomes a unique advantage for the organization to fuel further diversity and inclusion

A Mindset

Diversity and inclusion is a mindset. If you approach all of your work with that mindset, you will be better off as a business. By including a more diverse set of people and voices in your team, you get variety of thought and a richer discourse to tackle issues and create innovation.

Applying that mindset enables you to inherently value all types of people and creating a culture that embraces gender, orientation, race and ethnicity diversity. Hiring is a first step but creating an environment that not only welcomes diverse people into the organization but also fosters those individuals and invests in their success is the broader goal.

This is especially relevant to onboarding Black engineering talent (and Black talent across all disciplines) and ensuring that they have the same opportunities as their colleagues and want to stay and grow, just as we focused on for female engineering talent.

Staying the course on building a team that is representative of the communities that your business serves is essential, and it's never been more important that we support our Black community, raise them up, and give them the opportunities that they deserve.

Click the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friends.
The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.