This is one of those topics where I’ve watched the conversation evolve significantly over the course of my career. Twenty-five years ago, “diversity” in tech largely meant making sure the team photo didn’t look entirely homogeneous. The bar was low, and most of us, myself included, didn’t think critically enough about what we were missing. The more I’ve researched this topic and reflected on my own experience leading teams of different shapes and sizes, the more I’ve come to believe that diversity isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the thing that makes teams actually work better. But only if you pair it with genuine inclusion. Without that, it’s just optics.

Let me explain what I mean.

The Case for Diversity Is Mathematical, Not Just Moral

There’s a piece of research by Lu Hong and Scott Page that genuinely surprised me when I first encountered it. They demonstrated that randomly selected diverse groups consistently outperformed groups composed of the highest-performing individuals. Read that again, random diverse groups beat curated groups of the “best” people.

The mechanism behind this is what fascinated me. It’s not that diverse individuals are inherently smarter. It’s that they bring different mental models, different heuristics, different ways of framing problems. When you put people together who all think the same way, even if they’re all brilliant, they tend to converge on the same solutions and miss the same blind spots. Homogeneous teams are efficient at confirming each other’s assumptions. Diverse teams are better at challenging them.

Mike Fisher makes a compelling argument along similar lines: diverse teams reduce groupthink and improve decision-making, particularly under pressure. When I think back to the best crisis responses I’ve been part of, the teams that navigated them well weren’t the ones with the most senior people in the room. They were the ones where someone felt comfortable saying “hang on, have we considered this from a completely different angle?” That only happens when you’ve built a culture where different perspectives are genuinely welcomed, not just tolerated.

The Google Translate example is one I keep coming back to. The product was built predominantly by English-speaking engineers, and it showed, the quality of translation varied wildly across languages, and certain cultural nuances were completely missed. It wasn’t a lack of technical skill. It was a lack of diverse perspectives in the room where decisions were being made. The product got measurably better when the team’s composition changed. That’s not a feel-good anecdote. That’s a business outcome.

Stop Looking for “A Players”

One of the most damaging patterns I’ve seen in hiring, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, is the obsession with finding so-called “A Players.” Lisa van Gelder’s writing on this really crystallised something I’d been feeling for a while. The A/B/C categorisation of people is fundamentally a fixed-mindset framework. It assumes that talent is static, that people are either brilliant or they’re not, and that your job as a hiring manager is to identify the brilliant ones and collect them.

The problem is that this framework is a breeding ground for unconscious bias. When we’re looking for “A Players,” what we’re often really looking for is people who remind us of ourselves, or people who fit a narrow archetype of what “brilliant” looks like. And that archetype, in tech, has historically been pretty specific.

A growth-mindset approach to hiring asks different questions. Instead of “is this person already excellent at everything we need?” it asks “does this person have the capacity and drive to grow into this role and beyond?” Instead of pattern-matching against a template, you’re evaluating potential, curiosity, and adaptability. I’ve found that this shift in thinking naturally opens the door to more diverse candidates, because you’re no longer filtering for a very specific mould.

Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with over the years didn’t look like “A Players” on paper. They came from non-traditional backgrounds, they didn’t have the “right” degree, they didn’t ace every whiteboard question. But they had curiosity, resilience, and a willingness to learn that made them extraordinary contributors. A fixed-mindset hiring process would have filtered them out.

Diversity Without Inclusion Is Just Window Dressing

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that I think a lot of organisations struggle with: you can hire a diverse team and still have a terrible culture. Diversity is who’s in the room. Inclusion is whether they actually get to speak, whether they’re heard when they do, and whether their contributions are valued equally.

Jason Wong’s framework around inclusion stuck with me. He describes three inflection points that leaders need to pass through: accepting your own complicity in the problem, believing the lived experiences of others even when they don’t match your own, and being willing to spend actual time and money on making things better. That last one is crucial. Inclusion isn’t free. It requires investment in training, in process changes, in sometimes slowing down to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. If you’re not willing to spend resources on it, you don’t actually value it.

I’ll be honest, the first inflection point was the hardest for me. It’s uncomfortable to accept that you’ve been part of the problem, even passively. I’ve run meetings where the loudest voices dominated and I didn’t intervene. I’ve hired for “culture fit” without examining what that really meant. I’ve assumed that because I didn’t see a problem, there wasn’t one. Accepting complicity isn’t about guilt, it’s about awareness. You can’t fix what you won’t acknowledge.

Cate Huston’s point about cultivating a respectful environment resonates here. She argues that success in teams happens interdependently, it’s not about individual heroics, it’s about creating the conditions where everyone can do their best work. That means actively cultivating respect, not just assuming it exists because nobody’s complained.

Practical Steps That Actually Move the Needle

So what does this look like in practice? I’ve seen various approaches across the different organisations I’ve worked in, from growth-stage startups to large corporates, and the things that actually work tend to be surprisingly simple. They just require consistency and intentionality.

Inclusive meeting practices. Round-robin sessions where everyone gets a turn to speak. It sounds almost patronisingly simple, but the impact is real. Addy Osmani describes using this approach at Google, and I’ve adopted variations of it myself. When you go round the room, you hear from the people who would otherwise stay quiet, and those people often have the most thoughtful contributions, precisely because they’ve been listening and thinking rather than competing to speak first.

Ideas and Concerns forums. Give people a structured, safe way to raise issues and suggest improvements outside of the pressure of a live meeting. Not everyone processes and articulates their thoughts at the same speed, and that’s fine. What matters is that the channel exists and is genuinely acted upon.

Mentorship pairings. Deliberately pairing people across different backgrounds and experience levels. This isn’t just good for the mentee, it’s transformative for the mentor. Some of my most significant perspective shifts have come from mentoring someone whose experience of the industry was fundamentally different from mine.

Cultural exchange. Osmani describes cultural exchange meetups within teams, and I think this is underrated. Creating space for people to share their backgrounds and perspectives, not as a forced corporate exercise, but as a genuine opportunity to learn from each other, builds the kind of trust that makes inclusion real rather than performative.

Remote-first or remote-friendly working. Silvia Botros makes the point that enabling remote team success naturally enables hiring diversity. When you’re not constrained to a single geographic location, your talent pool expands dramatically. This is something I’ve seen play out directly, teams that embraced remote work before it was fashionable had access to candidates that office-bound competitors simply couldn’t reach.

Don’t Offload Accountability

Will Larson makes a point that I think every engineering leader needs to hear: don’t offload accountability for diversity to your recruiting team. It’s tempting to treat this as a pipeline problem, “we’d love to hire more diversely, but the candidates just aren’t there”, but that’s a cop-out. If your pipeline isn’t diverse, that’s your problem to solve, not recruiting’s.

More importantly, Larson argues that you should track retention and promotion, not just hiring ratios. It’s no good hiring diverse candidates if they leave within eighteen months because the culture is unwelcoming, or if they’re consistently passed over for promotion. The numbers that matter aren’t just who you bring in, they’re who stays, who grows, and who leads.

I’ve worked in organisations that were proud of their diverse hiring numbers whilst simultaneously haemorrhaging diverse talent. The exit interviews told a consistent story: people didn’t feel included, didn’t see a path forward, didn’t feel their contributions were valued equally. The hiring numbers were a vanity metric masking a cultural failure.

The Long Game

Building diverse teams that actually work isn’t a project with a completion date. It’s an ongoing practice, a set of habits and values that you embed into how your team operates every day. It requires humility, because you’ll get things wrong. It requires patience, because cultural change is slow. And it requires genuine conviction, because there will always be pressure to take shortcuts or declare victory too early.

What I’ve found, across different organisations and team sizes, is that the teams which embrace this genuinely, not performatively, are simply better at what they do. They make better decisions. They build better products. They’re more resilient under pressure. They’re more creative in how they solve problems. And they’re better places to work, which means they attract and retain better people, which creates a virtuous cycle.

The research supports this. My experience supports this. And if you’re leading a team right now, the question isn’t whether diversity matters. It’s whether you’re willing to do the actual work to make it real.