How Clones Suppress Business Performance

This sounds like the beginning of a thriller movie… the new person walks in the door, and he looks, talks, and dresses like everyone else in the office. He’s of a similar temperament, too. To even the most casual observer it doesn’t take long to ascertain that the company has brought in (another) clone. Scary, right? No matter the daily press about the importance of diversity and inclusion, this still happens in workplaces every day. The practice of hiring clones is still a thing in some parts.

It might seem easier or safer to hire or promote someone who is just like you. You understand how their mind works, and you share fundamental values and a world view. You could practically finish one another’s sentences! You have some assurances (since they also attended your alma mater and studied the same major) that they have a certain set of information. Bringing them on board allows you to provide an opportunity to a someone in whom you have a vested interest, and at lower risk than an unknown, unfamiliar candidate. Ramp up time is shorter because there is less ground to cover in training them. They see what you see and think what you think. Efficient, right? Right?

So why are we calling this a scary proposition? It’s scary because this person, this clone of you, shares more than your values, education and temperament, even your gender. He also shares your blind spots and assumptions. With a whole team of clones around the meeting room table, ideas are fielded, validated, and acted upon before they are thoroughly analyzed. The team selects a course of Plan A action before exploring alternatives. Heads nod, the rubber stamp is applied, the team declares victory and the meeting declared adjourned. You swear you can hear the horn from a racing locomotive in the distance.

When most of the seats around your meeting table are occupied by clones, the clones tend to overpower the outliers, the nonconforming contributors. On voice votes the “ayes” are easily louder than the “nays”. It doesn’t take too many repetitions of this scenario for divergent views to be left unspoken. The outliers become spectators, disengaged. Ultimately, they may choose to look for a place where it is easier to contribute more fully.

Clone culture is fed by the idea that perspectives are right or wrong, good or bad, to be filtered in or out. This is a misguided perspective – there is almost always more than one answer that will help you achieve your desired result. Moreover, how can you truly know whether a decision is “correct” until you test it? The paragraph above about the clones in the meeting says nothing about the outcomes of the decisions the group made. The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. It’s in the results. And the cost of a bad call can be devastating, even deadly. Someone needs to do something to slow things down a bit and discuss the ideas fully in the meeting room before incurring the cost of implementing them.

What if, instead of cloning themselves, the group were to strive for the opposite of that? What if they intentionally incorporated divergent lived experiences, different levels of education, and dissimilar perspectives in their pool of decision makers? These might come from gender, ethnicity, age, education, neurodiversity, or a variety of other factors.

Research shows that diverse groups perform better than do homogeneous ones. McKinsey & Company’s 2015 article on the topic indicated that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially. They said that gender-diverse companies correlated with outperforming the national industry median, and ethnically diverse companies were even more likely to outperform their industries. Conversely, companies that lagged in diversity tended to lag in financial performance too.

In 2020 Harvard Business Review wrote about how it’s not enough to simply bring diverse individuals onto the team. Many companies have failed to benefit from increased hiring with diversity as a priority because while they became more heterogeneous, they failed to tap the diverse knowledge and experience of their diverse team members.  You can’t simply “add diversity and stir” and expect your company to benefit.

Part of company culture is determining who is here, who has a voice, and who is going to listen to it, learn from it, and act upon it. Hiring and promoting clones is like talking to yourself in the mirror. Don’t you want to leverage every bit of intelligence available to your team and expand, even challenge, your understanding? This isn’t because it’s nice to do, or even the right thing to do, although we’re not arguing that it is inherently both of those things. This is because clones cost your business and diversity feeds it – if you truly access its resources.