back to writings Learn to read the room

If you’re talented, motivated and performing at a high standard, then your career pathway should be clear, even if it’s never easy. The best organisations do so much to attract talent, they’d surely be keen to commit the same amount to retaining it? While turnover rates vary widely between industries and the companies within them, it helps to be both proactive and pragmatic by picking up cues from your environment.

It’s not you, it’s us

Are there people in the leadership team who look like you? Behave like you do? Have similar backgrounds? If it’s a yes, yes, yes then – lucky day! – it seems you’ll get a clear run to the top. But the organisation itself may not last long enough to give you that opportunity. A McKinsey study found that not only do companies with a leadership group diverse in both gender and ethnicity perform better on financial measures, the companies in the lowest quartile were lagging to such an extent that they were 29% less likely to achieve above-average profitability[1]. And there’s an inconvenient truth about high-performing talent: it doesn’t tolerate average and finds below- average positively anathema.

And us as well

Perhaps your organisation is not a great example. Sometimes the numbers at the executive level are just too small to draw inferences. Go wider in your observations to include the entire industry: its events, publications, spokespeople. How many leaders are like you? Is there diversity amongst CEOs and in visible industry representation? Is there a healthy influx from outside, as people bring their transferable skills and knowledge from other sectors to enrich your own with different thinking styles and ways of doing things?

Does advertising material portray a diversity of people in leadership roles? Is there a narrow customer profile, or does the organisation actively engage with diverse consumers and seek to understand their needs? A Deloitte study showed that organisations which go out of their way to meet the needs of their diverse customers – that’s inclusion in word and deed – not only enjoy advocacy from the members of that group, but from others who also see the company in a more favourable light.[2]

Is the cavalry coming?

If there is nobody in a leadership group that you can identify with, chances are there is not a great appetite amongst the decision-makers for that to change. But all is not lost: the industry may still be maturing. Look instead at the level from which the CEO successors are likely to be drawn. How diverse is that cohort?

Crackling with differentiation? Excellent!

Disturbingly homogenous? Not so good.

If there is little diversity at CEO level, executive level and in line (rather than staff) roles, then your organisation, and perhaps your industry, has barely set a metaphorical sandal on road to Rome. It may get there eventually, and reap the rewards of vibrancy, inclusion and sustainable success. You must decide whether you can afford the wait.

Or has it already left?

It’s possible that others have already done this assessment and voted with their feet. If so, this is a sign that the prevailing culture barely tolerates, let alone embraces, diversity. When talented, motivated people leave organisations it’s often to a competitor or to set up on their own. One of the biggest ironies is that, in today’s fast-paced, competitive and highly disrupted environment, executive teams are fostering even more challenge and competition for themselves by failing to include the very people who could provide them a competitive edge through their difference.