What’s with all the women and foreigners?

I am in no doubt that we are now one of the most diverse creative teams in the market. And for once, I’m proud to say it didn’t happen by design…

Team photo shoot in our Dubai studio — January 2018.

This is a repost from my LinkedIn.

We have more women than men in our team, which is great news.

With all the recent furore around equality for women*, I wanted to share this positive news with you, to confirm that there are real, positive cases of where women are doing it for themselves.

Whilst my team and I are well connected, seldom are we all together at the same time; typically spread between our studios and being out in the market with our clients. So it wasn’t until we all returned to base for an overdue team dinner (and impromptu photo shoot!) in Dubai that I noticed there were more women than men in the room. Now you might be wondering why I didn’t know this already, but trust me it’s not because of ignorance. The truth is I simply haven’t needed to think consciously about the gender balance of our team for a while. For over a year now, it’s been a pretty even split, but even at a 60/40 ratio (which we were still proud of), it was skewed towards the men. Now the pendulum has officially swung the other way and we have the most amazing group of girls delivering some of the most interesting, innovative and creative digital transformation programmes in the middle east — a region not always famed for equality. This regional stigma, by the way, is a somewhat unfair reflection of the reality. We have so many women-led organisations and leaders here, plus progressive change programmes that often outstrip those in other parts of the world.

We have all heard of instances where organisations have put in extra mechanisms to encourage more women to join them and progress quickly. Whilst it is true that in aiming for equality, using positive discrimination as a method to achieve it can be a contradiction, the simple fact that the gender gap is so wide in the first place means I remain in favour of (well controlled) tactics that speed up the process. At least for now. Thankfully, this approach isn’t one I’ve ever had to use myself, as every team I’ve built over the years has been a good overall balance. Thinking back, the worst ratio I’ve probably had was 70/30 in favour of men, but that didn’t last long.

However, whilst this milestone is an important one for us, it isn’t simply the fact that we are now a female-dominant team (in a Big4 global consultancy I might add!) that is so cool. What pleases me even more is that it’s just happened naturally. For us, this is simply a consequence of hiring and promoting people based 100% on their talent. It just so happens to be that more of them are now women. The professional services industry usually gets quite a bad rap for its gender profile, so it’s that much more pleasing to see my team continue to be disruptors. Even for us guys in the team, this is a hugely positive thing, because it continues to keep us all in a level playing field and we can be comfortable knowing that we just need to be the best we can be and we can flourish — gender isn’t a factor that influences whom we hire and how they can progress.

Foreigners are taking all our jobs, which is awesome.

When I left London just over two years ago to build a new team in the emerging markets, I had a goal to ensure it would be a true reflection of the societies for which we would be designing experiences. But it wasn’t my only goal. I also needed to ensure that as we would grow, we’d do so through acquisition and development of genuine talent. We simply couldn’t put our brand at stake by swelling headcount to cater to targets or politics, nor would we survive in the market if we had lots of people, but failed to translate that into the high standards of delivery we promise.

So, it’s taken time. Longer than I would have liked for sure. But the result of taking the sure and steady route is that not only have we continued to reach our ‘goal weight’ in numbers, we’ve managed to maintain (and exceeded) our quality goals.

In the same way that having more women than men is a consequence of our people strategy rather than intentional, we also now have a team that reflects the cultural profile of our unique market — with over 15 nationalities represented already! I could not be more proud to say that my inner-circle team is authentically: Emirati, Saudi, Jordanian, English, Indian, Iranian, Austrian, South African, Lebanese, Philippino, Palestinian, Pakistani, Scottish, Kenyan, Turkish and Russian. And if I expand to the outer-circle of the extended EY Customer Advisory team the list probably doubles again. Certainly I could add German, Canadian, American, French, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Australian and Spanish without even thinking too hard!

Now you might think this has been easy to achieve — after all, if we have all these local and expat communities living across the region, surely it will just form naturally. Well, you’d be wrong. Or at least based on my own journey of team building and what I see in other firms around us. As you might expect, I know a good number of the creative, technology and consulting businesses in our region quite well and they certainly don’t have this level of variety in their digital, design and innovation teams. A few of them have large clusters of Arabic speaking expats, so that helps with localisation and others have strong Indian foundations which keeps them well immersed in the community. But they remain spikes rather than the norm and in a number of cases, they are actually counter-productive, as deep-rooted cliques can develop and create internal political circles. Now to be clear, I am not knocking them in comparison to where we are today — these teams have often been fused together over a short period of time, or have longer tenures and legacy to account for. This type of team development or business growth creates a cultural void and it’s very hard to fill. We certainly had the benefit of starting from scratch and by not having any one dominant group, it means we are not influenced in any particular way that affects our team culture or our work ethics.

Diversity fosters empathy, which fuels good design

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work in teams that have mostly had a good degree of diversity. It may be because this is important to me that it’s either evolved around me or something I’ve gravitated towards. As I was growing up, my city and school were not very diverse at all actually, not that it ever caused me any major problem thankfully, but by the time I left as an adult it was certainly one of the major attractions of moving to a bigger city — the chance to meet, greet and understand different types of people. This really was the genesis of my central passion of human-centric design now that I think about it.

Growing up as a liberal Muslim, I’m always quite proud of the story of my first year in London. By chance, my first job was for a Jewish owned legal software company, my housemate was literally called Israel and our best friends were the oddest couple I’ve ever known; an Iraqi Shia and Jewish heiress. Some of the best times I’ve ever had were with this crazy mix of people who never gave a second thought to the cultural differences we should apparently hold against each other. I lost any inclinations of religious judgement/prejudice I may have had from that time onwards for sure.

It was only really a couple of places I worked in Hertfordshire where gender balance became skewed (ethnic mix was still very good though — made lifelong Dutch and South African friends here), but that was more indicative of the testosterone-heavy tech business culture than the geography itself. Case in point being an agency in the Oxfordshire countryside I spent a few years at, which was a fun and diverse place no matter what lens you looked through (young and middle-aged men & women, global immigrants, multiple LGBT, single mums, retired men, you name it we had it — it was a Trump nightmare really.)

When I returned to my hometown of Nottingham to set up my first agency, I was conscious that it couldn’t be compared to my experiences from London for cultural diversity — few places in the world can stand up to that benchmark frankly. So it did take a little bit more engineering to make sure the team profile was well balanced. And although there were many reasons I eventually chose to relocate back to London again (after about 5 years split between the two cities), the prospect of raising my children in a diverse urban hub was a major one. We made full use of that vibrant culture both personally and professionally before our journey took us to another multicultural centre in Dubai. Jumping forward to today, here in MENA and as we expand into Africa, all of the preceding stories above have resulted in culturally mixed environments being ingrained in my psyche. I am humbled at the sheer level of diversity we have managed to build as a team in MENA and now as we extend into Africa it’s massively inspiring to work with such a mixed profile on a daily business.

Yet, despite all the different nationalities we have in my team, we all share a common language and culture — around people-centric design and innovation. This is exciting because the diversity actually improves creativity levels and effectiveness of the teams work — from the alternative perspectives and challenge to the ability to hyper-localise and communicate, with accurate visual and vocal dialect. Real world examples of this include:

• Understanding the nuances of the vast Indian community we have around us (52% of the UAE population!)
• User experience improvements we can make to products/services that have high levels of Philipino customers
• Infusing international standards into a local context through Arabic speaking British expats
• Resonance of deliverables and client conversations thanks to our GCC nationals.
• And of course — genuine empathy across all of the customer groups we target through our work.

These are just a few headline examples, but every day we see new and wonderful ways in which the culture of our team continues to become one of our biggest value propositions.

So, what might I ask you to take away from my latest musing? Rather than arbitrary advice, I’ll offer you a promise, depending on which scenario suits you the most.

If you would like to join our team:

I promise there will be three things which we will ruthlessly assess you on: Your age, gender and ethnicity won’t matter to us — we’d like you to demonstrate your talent, ambitions and personality, because we co-create our culture on these foundations.

If you want to work with me/us:

I promise that I will remain a passionate advocate and ambassador for human equality across everything I can influence; whether it’s the people in the team, the clients we serve or the customers who need us.

If you are building a digital/design/innovation team:

I promise to share my own learnings that might be helpful. In my experience, it’s a really hard team profile to build, but also a hugely satisfying one. Equally I’d love to hear your experiences in doing this as a way to help improve myself.

If you agree/disagree with what I’ve had to say:

I promise to be very receptive to your feedback and would love to discuss alternative or complimenting views.

If you found the post title misleading or provocative:

I promise to apologise — it was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. Must be my love for British satire ;)

If none of this resonated with you at all:

I promise to write again soon. Better luck next time.

Thanks for reading. #equalityforall

* It’s been so bitterly disappointing to hear so much of this in the media recently. Whether it’s the sexual abuse scandals in Hollywood, the proliferation of rape in India, unequal pay in industry or the lack of women rights (still!), I am really hoping that all the attention on the issues creates a massively overdue sea change. It does feel like 2018 has the opportunity to go down in history as a pivotal period for gender equality to improve its balance. Let’s all keep working towards that.