Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is known for driving hard when executing his single-minded focus and getting what he wants. As billionaire Mark Cuban told The New York Times in a recent profile of Kalanick, "Travis’s biggest strength is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals."
So, why is Uber's record of diversity hiring so low? Women hold just 22% of leadership roles at Uber and white people hold 77% of such roles at the company, according to Uber's diversity report, which was released in March.
Could it be that diversity isn't a big goal for Kalanick?
Just to be clear, we all know diversity in tech is low and I could use almost any CEO as an example here. Recent figures from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the male-female breakdown of the top 75 leading Silicon Valley tech firms was 70/30. (This disparity further grows when you look at gender distribution in executive ranks across all companies, roles and industries in the U.S.). Hispanics and African Americans make up 6% and 3% of the employees in such firms, respectively. What's puzzling is why take-no-prisoners CEOs like Kalanick aren’t applying the same rigor to this problem that they are to other knotty issues.
My Journey
When I ask CEOs why they don't have more females, I get a lot of responses centering on "we can't find them" or "there aren't enough women in tech." The answer is essentially "I can't get it done."
What's interesting is that they never have an answer like this when I ask about how they are getting more customers, how they are working toward making their customers happy or what they are doing to increase their market size. They know that an answer like this is unacceptable for those business issues.
Embarrassingly, I had the same issue and I had the same answer to the question until an enlightened CEO I work with gave me an assignment. He told me that I was responsible for the issue and I needed to take the leadership role to make it happen. "Figure it out," he said, "it is not going to happen until you take the leadership role." I realized that he was right and I started my journey to address the issue.
I talked to people in my network about the issue to try to get some ideas. One of my advisors recommended that I speak with the National Center for Women in Technology. We ended up working with them closely to better understand the issues and to adopt some of their best practices in our organization.
Ultimately, I realized that treating this issue like any other business issue was the best way for our firm to address it. Set numerical goals alongside other business goals, appoint responsible people to nail the goal, get assistance with generating ideas to improve the goal and measure results and adjust accordingly.
I also realized that there are many small adjustments that need to be made in the process of hiring, on-boarding and ongoing management that make companies more attractive (less onerous?) for a diverse set of people. It is not rocket science, but like any business issue it does take focus and grit over a long period of time.
As we began to make progress on our efforts, we have found additional great organizations that have helped us. For example, Coco Brown and her organization, Athena Alliance, help companies get more female board members. We have teamed up with them to help our portfolio companies get introduced to the right women in their network. Also, one of our portfolio companies in Utah recently accepted theElevateHER challenge, a set of goals developed by the Woman's Leadership Institute in Utah. In our experience, these organizations and organizations like them are extremely helpful in offering ideas and assistance to companies that truly want to address their diversity issues.
As I started to get a handle on the issues and began to make progress, I began talking to more CEOs about the diversity or really, lack thereof. Awareness has picked up noticeably over the last couple of years and some organizations made considerable progress. That said, most are relatively early in their journey or have not yet started.
My impression is that there is still a lot of confusion about the business opportunity in front of CEOs. At first blush, it might seem like this is a "political correctness" issue rather than a true business opportunity.
Framing the issue in stark economic terms, McKinsey ran the numbers and found that for every 10% boost in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior-executive team, earnings before interest and taxes rise 0.8%. The same results play out relatively consistently with every dimension of diversity.
From a different angle, the book and movie Moneyball is all about how Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland A's, discovered a hidden talent pool that others ignored. His results were spectacular, at least until other teams started recruiting from the same talent pools.
My advice to everyone is to start by focusing on the business benefits of increasing diversity in your organization. Get the full understanding that diversity is a real business opportunity in addition to it simply being the right thing to do. Once people gain this knowledge, it is straightforward to address like any other business opportunity.
