Thursday 27 October 2011

Employers Employ People in their Own Image.

In running an HND unit in employability skills and team building recently we discussed the anomaly of  homogeneous teams being the norm as opposed to balanced teams or heterogeneous teams.

In Meredith Belbin's model a performing team is said to be best composed of different personalities and skill sets - diversity is the aim for a performing team. Why do we see so many teams that have the opposite. Corporate organisations often recruit on "team fit" which means people recruit in their own image or to fit in with what we have already.


There are all sorts of issues around this including some typical recruitment nightmares for job seekers. One trend seems to be if you haven't been doing the similar role in very recent times recruiting managers don't want to know.  Another is the "recruiting in your own image" where line managers view people like themselves and   consciously or subconsciously reject people on initial CV search that don't fit the norm or mould - i.e. they recruit existing industry players who work for big corporate organisations  like themselves, rejecting people from outside their industry or ex freelancers and contractors because they don't understand their backgrounds, lifestyles and CVs. What a missed opportunity this is for getting in some fresh ideas and approaches!

The result here is all sorts of anti diversity behaviours and in some cases quite discriminatory certainly from an ageism perspective let alone anything worse. This narrow approach isn't complementary to the Belbin approach is it?

So many ex-colleagues and associate consultants  tell us anecdotes of corporate short sightedness resulting in rejection at a very early stage of the exhausting recruitment process.

Most are older employees who said to us that they where told that they don't fit in with the team profile by recruiting managers in their thirties, or that their skills are not recent, even though most of these people held senior roles in these skill sets earlier in their careers with seriously success records behind them.

So is this naivety or is it  protectionism by younger managers worried about employing older workers or challenging individuals from outside the industry  who might perhaps know more or be in fact more competent than them?

The resulting insular and non performing teams in many of Britain's larger corporate organisations is a significant concern in any organisational design.

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