Diversity (DE&I)

Does this sound familiar?

Your customers are becoming more diverse, your market is changing. But look at the sales team, and certainly at commercial leadership, and you often still see the same profile. Not because anyone wants it that way, but because recruitment, evaluation and promotion quietly repeat the existing situation.

• The sales team looks very alike, while your customers are increasingly diverse.
• Women and people from minority backgrounds join, but do not move up into sales leadership.
• Exactly this talent leaves faster than average.
• An unconscious bias training was given, but little has changed.
• Shortlists for key commercial positions keep showing the same profile.
• The company grew with trusted people from its own network, and that network is running dry.
• The shareholder asks for concrete ESG goals and reporting, including on team composition.
• The group's DE&I ambitions are clear, but do not land in the daily reality of sales.

Good intentions are usually plentiful. What is missing is an approach that changes the systems, not just awareness.

Our approach

We treat DE&I like any other commercial challenge: with data, clear goals and ownership by management. Our approach has five steps.

1. Baseline

We map how hiring, promotion, attrition, evaluations, pay and the allocation of accounts and regions work out for different groups. We also measure how inclusive the team feels: do people dare to voice a different opinion, and does everyone feel heard?

2. Recruitment and selection

We make role profiles and selection more objective, with criteria set in advance and structured interviews. This widens the candidate pool and reduces the chance that the choice falls on whoever most resembles the assessor.

3. Fair systems

We review evaluation, compensation, promotion criteria and portfolio allocation for transparency and equal opportunity. Small differences in who gets which accounts grow over the years into large differences in results and careers.

4. Development and progression

Diversity at entry level means little if talent does not progress. That is why we build targeted growth paths into sales and commercial leadership, with mentoring and sponsorship by senior leaders. It is the same Development Driven thinking we use to recruit commercial leaders: talent grows where ambition, role and development are aligned.

5. Leadership and embedding

We place ownership with management, with concrete goals, regular progress measurement and visible role models. After one or two periods we review together what has changed, in numbers and in culture.

Why this approach works

Diversity and inclusion in teams have been studied extensively in the leading international management and marketing journals. The findings are more nuanced than the public debate suggests, and that is exactly what makes them useful:

• Diversity alone is no guarantee. Diverse teams can perform better, but also worse. The difference lies in how the team handles it. Where different perspectives are truly used, diverse teams perform better, especially on complex problems.
• Inclusion is the precondition. Teams in which people feel safe to ask questions and voice a different opinion learn faster and perform better.
• Training alone changes little. One-off trainings rarely have a lasting effect, and mandatory trainings can even backfire. What does work: clear accountability for managers, mentoring and sponsorship.
• Inequality often sits in systems. Organisations that see themselves as fully meritocratic sometimes allow more inequality in evaluation and pay, precisely because nobody checks anymore. Transparency and accountability reduce those gaps.
• Structured selection is better and fairer. Fixed criteria and structured interviews predict job success better than an unstructured conversation, and leave less room for bias.
• Diversity at the top pays off. More women in top management is associated with better company performance, especially in organisations where innovation plays a major role.

Bart Dietz, founder of SalesQuarters, is affiliated with Rotterdam School of Management and translates these insights to the reality of your organisation. As an executive search firm, we also see every day what the commercial talent in the market looks like, and where it is.