Building diverse teams: Mohak Shroff

- What's cool about Mohak Shroff is that he started here at LinkedIn as an engineer, and I've learned so much from him throughout the years. He's helped me grow my career, and truly cares about the diversity of thought and representation of multiple perspectives. He knows this will create a better product, and that's what we're going to talk about right now. You started here at LinkedIn as an engineer, and now you're running all of engineering. How do you think about talent and how you're building the team? - So I think it's actually two things. I think there's hiring, and then there's kind of investing your own talent. So there's mentorship and coaching, and we'll talk about both. Hiring should never be about quotas, and like I must have blank. It's about hiring the best person for the job. And the problem that we all have when it comes to hiring is we don't necessarily hire the best person for the job. We hire the first good enough person for the job. And the problem with hiring the first good enough person for the job is we have a systematic problem in educational institutions that are graduating a majority of people with a very homogenous background, you end up hiring a lot of people, or you end up encountering a lot of people with the same background. And then you aren't really hiring the best person, you're tending to hire just the first good person. - Right. - And so I think one thing that has to be changed in the hiring process is demanding that you see a broad slate of candidates, and when I say broad, I mean broad by way of background, broad by way of diversity of thought. You know, people sort of classically go to the idea of diversity is gender, diversity is, you know, ethnicity or what have you. And really I think our diversity is diversity of background, diversity of expertise, diversity of experience. And when you bring that kind of diversity to play, then it naturally does impact other kinds of diversity, the ones we classically think about, but it really builds incredibly powerful teams. And in my personal experience, so I recently had to fill an executive role, as you know, we had a very senior role here that we were attempting to fill. I told our recruiting team I would like to talk to candidates with these backgrounds who aren't what I normally see. And I was blown away because they were the two best candidates I've spoken to in my entire experience as a leader in technology. And it was like where have you been all my life? (laughs) Like, where have you been? - That's awesome. And it turns out I just wasn't asking. - Yeah, and I love the way that you just summarized that because I hear about that, where we want to have a diverse set of candidates that come in, and I go, oh, are we lowering the bar? Oh my gosh, it gets me so frustrated every single time. We're raising the bar, which is absolutely right on, and I think another thing that I like out of that example is you intentionally did that, I remember being part of that process, and I was able to see it, and then I'm hiring folks in my own team, and guess what, I feel empowered to demand the same thing. - And magic, here they are, spectacular. - Does diversity impact decision-making and execution? Raise the bar by empowering others to share diverse ideas. Can you explain to me, I know how it feels, I would love to know from your lens of where you think the conversation has changed here at LinkedIn. - So first off, a testament to the importance of building diverse, inclusive teams is the topics around diversity and inclusion actually start to rise when we had diverse and inclusive leadership. So I remember back to when you joined the team and started pounding your fist on the table very nicely. - Very nicely. (laughs) - It was not so pound, more of sort of like a patting your fist, your palm on the table and saying look, this is a problem both for yourself as well as for many of the women and other people who felt excluded at the company. And if you hadn't been included in the leadership ranks, if your voice hadn't been heard, if we hadn't brought you to LinkedIn none of that would have happened. So I remember years ago, I was in a meeting, we were talking about a fairly technical topic, and it was essentially, as many rooms in technology can be, a room full of men. - Yes, unfortunately, but it's changing slightly. - It's changing, and thank goodness it's changing. But it was a room full of men with one woman leader. The men, myself included, were essentially in an escalating screaming match. So it starts off as a pretty reasonable conversation and it just keeps getting louder, and I want to make sure you hear my voice. And so it starts to get really, really loud. This woman essentially never had a chance to get her voice, you know, just get a word in. - Yeah, try and intercept into that. - Could not at all. And so she was kind of leaned back, sort of the classic picture of disengagement, leaned back, and the leader in the room, incredibly thoughtful, mindful, inclusive individual, in this act of inclusion, leaned in, almost literally leaned in and said, do you have anything to add? Essentially quieted the rest of us down and asked her if she had anything to add. She said her piece, it was about two or three minutes of a point she was trying to make, and in this hour-long meeting the only valuable thing that was said was by her in those two or three minutes. The entire meeting would have been a colossal waste of time if not for letting her speak or pulling her into the conversation. And that act of inclusion had such tremendous power, because it really did three things. One, it made her feel included. I'm positive, prior to that incident, she felt deeply excluded. She felt like she didn't belong. She probably felt a strong imposter syndrome of I can't, I don't know... - I can imagine the war zone going on in her head. And it's not just her, back to the point that it's not just gender, it's more introverts, you know, very different, and extroverts, try and get an introvert into the conversation. - Yes, and so that's exactly, and so like the second thing is that act of inclusion essentially impacted everybody in the room, myself included, where I was like oh! Yeah. If that hadn't happened, we would have made a bad decision. The outcome would have been worse for a lack of inclusion, for a lack of diversity in the conversation. And then the third thing is literally, not only did we learn, but the actual outcome was better. So these things, when you put them together, it's just incredibly powerful what a single act of inclusion can do. - Be an advocate for the voices on your team. Create a space for others to speak. (soft music)