You Ask, I Answer: Diversity and Inclusion in Agencies?

In today's episode, Molly asks, would you say that most agencies who want to support inclusive marketing or sell it, don't really have an inclusive or diverse organization. Oh, Molly. This is one of my favorite bones to pick about a lot of uh agencies, particularly in marketing, uh, PR, and advertising. They are very strongly monocultures. It's not just a lack of diversity, it is a monoculture of people, a monoculture of thinking, a monoculture of behavior and values.

When you look, go to the top three PR agencies or the top three marketing agencies in your city. Go to the team page, go to the leadership page, and look around and just do some counting, particularly if you are an area where you know the demographic distributions. For example, years ago, I worked at an email marketing company, uh, and it was based in Atlanta. And if you looked at the leadership page of this company, it was 80% male and 100% white. Now, if you know anything about Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia is an extremely diverse city, but the majority population is black.

Right? So if an organization was representative of the population that it was serving, it would also be majority black, right? And there wasn't, out of 75 people on staff, there was not a single black person at that agency. And when I asked them about it, they said, Oh, we couldn't find any qualified candidates. I'm sorry.

This is a city of what? A million people, two million people. You can't find one person here that doesn't look like you that can't do the job that you do, which by the way is just attend meetings all day and drink coffee. I'm pretty sure I can find a whole bunch of people who could do that. Um, Molly, you are a hundred percent right.

There is a very, very distinct lack of diversity, particularly at the leadership levels in marketing, advertising, and PR agencies. And again, just do the leadership test. Go to the principles page, go to the the leadership page on any agency's website and tally up the numbers, right? Who is there? Now, should you be hiring people just because they are like Korean, for example?

No, you should still be hiring qualified people, but there are so many biases, extrinsic and intrinsic biases that we have not solved in hiring. We have not solved in hiring. Even though solutions exist, we've not solved because organizations, by and large, don't seem willing to make a commitment to that, to those changes. And yes, some things take time, right? If you've got an agency that's been around for 70 years, right, you're probably still waiting for the last generation, two generations to retire.

Um, but your mid-level management should be more diverse, right? Because as as time goes on, that mid-level management gets higher and higher and eventually should represent the the place and the talent pool it draws from. For an agency that was started, say in the last 20 years, an agency started in the 21st century. There is no excuse for a lack of diversity. None.

We have known that diversity and inclusion is important. McKinsey has written a number of studies saying that that diverse and inclusive organizations are more profitable, right? So I believe in it was like a 2017 study they said that on average, organizations with diverse and inclusive leadership were 14% more profitable than organizations with monocultures, which again is not a huge surprise, right? The the more different viewpoints you have in the boardroom, the more solutions or potential solutions you have to be able to draw from, right? If you've got people who are black, who are female, who are non-binary, who are uh American Indian, who are uh East Asian Indian, if you've got people who are old, people who are young, people who have are gamers, people who are just uh just gay, all these different backgrounds, all these different lived life experiences have come with winning strategies, right?

Someone who grew up Asian in an Asian culture has some winning strategies they take from their culture. Someone who grew up Catholic has some winning strategies they take from their culture, and you need as many of these as possible. Where you run into trouble is when you have a monoculture when everybody thinks the same, you then can't come up with new ideas. You can't come up with better ideas. When we look at things like machine learning and AI, these things are being trained on massive data sets that represent the scope of human experience.

So if you're trying to match the outputs of what machines can do, you too have to draw from the scope of human experience, not just from a segment of it. If you want to be competitive against what machines can do. So yes, I would say that there are a number of organizations, not just agencies either, all companies. Again, go to the leadership page of any company and look at the breakouts. What percentage of the leadership of a company is one gender or another, right?

If you're representative of the population, it should probably be about 40, 40, 20. 40% uh identifying as male, 40% identifying as female, and about 20% that chooses not to identify. Uh, if you look at the the statistics about Gen Z in particular, the first generation that has felt the freedom to express themselves by non-traditional gender constructs. It works out to 20 to 25% of them don't identify with a classical heteronormative role. So just on that basis alone, you look at the leadership page and you should see that level of representation.

If an agency that says it's diverse and inclusive is doing it. Now, if an agency does not make that claim, if an agency says, no, we don't care about diversity, or you know, they just don't mention it, then yeah, I would say you don't have to uh call call them on it because they're not, they're not saying there's they're not saying something that they aren't, right? If, on the other hand you have an agency that loudly proclaims you know they're talking about diversity and inclusion and and uh they support black lives matter that's good we want them to do that we want people to do that but then you look at the leadership page and there's zero black people there's like okay well you need to do some more work you need to do some work to to get to the point where the people that you claim to represent are in fact actually part and parcel of the business and then though it's not easy right it is not easy to change cultures it is not easy to move people in the direction that a the culture overall is moving um there are a lot of folks who don't see the value in it um and there are some folks who believe that um greater diversity and inclusion means less opportunity for them which depending on their level of skill might be true right if you have if you open up a hiring pool to everybody and you know 40% of the hiring pool is terrific and 20 you know 60% is not and you've got somebody who's in that 60% category yeah there are fewer seats available for people who are who don't meet the qualifications regardless and they might have this is the difference they might have had a chance previously when you excluded large groups of people right if you excluded all women for example then yeah by definition the that person with mediocre to to poor skills might have slipped in under the radar because there were, you know, uh there were fewer people candidates available to fill those seats. Once you open things up and say, hey, let's try hiring from the other 50% of the population, um the overall talent pool rises, the number of competent people in the talent pool rises, and employers have their choice of an overall bigger part of highly qualified people. And so all those people who are at in the less qualified part, they are gonna get left out.

And so it then creates an onus of responsibility on those individuals to skill up, to skill up to get better at what they do, whatever it is that you do, um, so that you're more competitive in the global workplace. The biggest threat, uh, and I'm gonna say this real carefully, but the biggest threat is not diversity or inclusion. The biggest threat is machine learning and AI for a lot of roles. Because right now, machines can do mediocre work. And if your skills are below mediocre, your career is in danger, not from a woman or black person or Korean or a gay person.

It's under threat from a machine that will do your job or good chunks of your job for pennies on the dollar of what you cost as a human. If companies are continuing to be highly profit motivated, which in a capitalist economy they will be, um the machines are gonna be your first choice. Not the diversity hire, the machine, because the machine doesn't get sick, the machine doesn't catch COVID, the machine doesn't show up drunk, the machine just does its job, right? And that's going to be the biggest challenge for people in any industry in the next 20 years. So you've got to get skilled up.

Again, not to be saying that you know a diversity hire or something is taking your position, but the machines will be. The machines absolutely will be. And this holds true for everybody, regardless of your background, regardless of your ethnicity or your sexual orientation or whatever. We are all in a race to become better because our machines are becoming better. So diversity and inclusion is something that is absolutely important.

It is the critical path to getting to better results because of diversity of thought. Good question. A whole lot of time. But um, I think that's a good place to leave it for now. Thanks for asking.

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