(Our insights come from conversations with over 2000 executives world-wide.)

In leadership, personality and culture is more of a determining factor of success than any speciality skill. In any executive search assignment, ‘cultural fit’ trumps experience on a candidate’s prospects and may even determine whether a candidate makes it onto the short-list at all. According to Thomas Friedman, 70% of executive hires fail because of a lack of cultural fit. Yet, the moral injunction to push for a more diverse leadership is mentioned in almost every client brief. ‘Get us more women candidates’, ‘HR will not allow us to proceed if we do not interview more diverse candidates’, ‘We clearly need more diversity at the top’. I now tell me clients (as a strategic rather than as a search consultant) that they must either aim for cultural fit, or diversity. They cannot have both.

To expose the contradiction, simply replace both concepts with their synonyms. We may replace ‘cultural fit’ with ‘homogony’, ‘sameness’, ‘appropriate candidate’, and with it some of the slanting notions proponents of diversity tell us about – ‘group think’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘glass ceiling’. Now take ‘diversity’ and its synonyms – ‘difference’, ‘variety’, ‘alternative’, and with it the virtues preached by those same proponents – ‘innovation’, ‘openness’, ‘inclusion’. The contradiction is best characterised when contrasting ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ as respective synonyms for ‘cultural fit’ and ‘diversity’.

If you really want diversity, it means that you are ready to challenge the status quo of your leadership team, it’s way of thinking, its culture, and all those lovely comfortable attributes that made things so predictable and safe. As I mentioned in The Daily Telegraph recently, you should not do it because it improves your image. The recent backlash against the DEI agenda can be attributed to this contradiction. At first, many an organisation agreed in principle that leadership should reflect society. Most genuinely believed in it.

However, it has now been seen as a costly distraction from fundamental organisational goals, despite DEI proponents drawing links between diversity and innovation, and higher employee retention. At leadership level where cultural fit determines so much, diversity can be that unspoken (perhaps unspeakable) risk to the homogony that brings executives together, given them an implicit reason to collaborate, where not only strategies but also intuitions are shared. If their homogenous culture has worked well so far, morality and inclusion just do not jump out as business reasons to put all that at risk…or so the implicit argument goes.

Collaboration at executive level is a rarity, and according to the Harvard Business Review a company may lose an average of 21% profit simply because members of the c-suite do not get on. Why then force difference? Why then force diversity when it is hard enough to establish points of similarity and shared benefit? This is the dilemma proponents of DEI (such as myself) must answer, and must answer more now that the adverse tides are rising. The answers must not only show that innovation is possible, it must also show that it is probable, even direct. The first part of the answer I give to my clients involves approaching CEOs with brutal honesty. Why advance DEI? If it is for reasons of impression or social morality, it is very likely to fail, and has for many. You cannot hire people for non-business reasons and expect business to succeed.

This is a brutal truth, but it would be a disservice to my clients if I did not spell it out in these terms. However, and to their surprise, this does not entail a rejection of diversity. Far from it. The second part is to understand the constitution of the c-suite. What type of people are its incumbents? Where are the points of collaboration, and where are the dysfunctionalities. These will almost definitely reflect quite neatly on the strengths and weakness of the entire organisation. For instance, it is no point forcing through a diverse CIO for the sake of it when, for example, the main dysfunctionality lies between two other executives on the team.

The third part is to re-define diversity. Controversially, I argue against social definitions – gender, race, age. These are merely corollaries or indications. I define diversity as ‘a different way of thinking’ (and at this c-suite, this will change things). A white South African male in my view is more diverse in a UK-based company than a white British woman who shares much of the background and education of her peers. This ties to the first point. If you, as a CEO for instance, realise that your executive team has reached its limits in innovation, collaboration, and overall strategic thinking; that you are falling behind your competition and your recent interventions have not succeeded; that you cannot get the most out of your employees, or that your attrition rate is high, then you most definitely need someone at the top who sees things differently. A new type of leadership training is required to help c-suites achieve their raison d’etre.

A new way of thinking is required where a leader’s prospects is measured by their decision-making and collaborative abilities; where the c-suite rises above itself to become more than the sum of its parts. If leadership wants this, they will see a diverse leader, not as a way of improving their public impression, but as someone who makes a contribution towards the wider goal that they themselves cannot achieve on their own. They perceive the promise and the ability of this leader, not their diversity status.

Therefore, the perceived failure of DEI and the consequent inclining of industry away from it, always inevitable because it was founded on a contradiction. For so long we all went to independent consultants to help our companies become more diverse – introducing inclusive behaviours, quotas of recruitment, and so on. Few of these worked long term, and at executive level they have worked very little. What is needed for organisations is for the link to be made between its current leadership state, its motivation to change, its understanding of its own cultural limits, and the bravery of its leaders to see solutions outside themselves and what they know. Only then will they be ready to be diverse and enjoy the business benefits that follow.