Start-ups Will Always Win When Run By A Diverse Team
This article is written by Brian Malika, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Andrea Barrica is an entrepreneur in residence and pitch coach at 500 startups. They welcome in their San Francisco office entrepreneurs from all over the world to help them create growth engine through sales and marketing. They help them understand how to fundraise and create a community and a network in the Silicon Valley. Andrea is passionate about emerging markets and believes in the potential of Turkish entrepreneurs.
Because of the mere fact that every start-up founder would wish to expand their market base by winning over new customers that are diverse, then it's important to note that it's equally important for every start-up to consider employing team members that are diverse in nature.
Since this is the only way that a unique set of skills can be brought on board to reflect the tastes and preferences of diverse customers that each and every start-up wishes to win over.
What A Diverse Team Looks Like
So, I will highlight six important diversity faces that you can emulate at your start-up team. However, based on social and geographical realities facing your area of operation, you are free to analyze the prevailing human diversity issues at hand and emulate the same in your teamwork.
That being said, please scroll down to the six points below on how a diverse team for a smart start-up looks like.
1: Age
As much as experience comes with age, you should not only concentrate on employing team members that are older. Make sure that you bring on board even the young, middle-aged and adolescents since even though they might not have the desired experience that is needed in your start-up, still they have the first-hand experience to relate with issues facing their age mates and this could be important to enabling your start-up to relate with all age requirements on ground .
2: Gender
Equally, do not be mislead that the nature of work your start-up is involving in itself only requires a particular type of gender. Because you might just be wrong. This is because all the genders have special spectrum view on work issues and this might be used as an advantage to better the innovation in your start-up. Therefore, open up space where you can engage all the types of genders in your workspace.
3: Educational scope
Just because your an engineering tech start-up does not give you the assurance of having a successful team if you only employ team members that have an engineering background. The is because different career backgrounds have different implications on an employee’s viewpoint on innovation at work.
For example, an engineer might concentrate more on improving the product or service while a social worker or marketer might concentrate more on creating better relationships with the customers. There, make sure that you blend the professional team members profile’s being brought on board.
4: Disability
One of the customer needs that have always been misunderstood are those of people living with a disability. Many companies have left the tastes and preferences for people living with a disability out of the bracket because they just don’t understand this customer niche.
However, your start-up can make that difference and win over the loyalty of customers living with a disability by employing team members who are living with a disability to come on board and help in innovating solutions that can make your product and services to be more inclusive of every taste and preference for customers out there.
5: Economic Background
I know most start-up founders would prefer to have hustlers in their tea of innovators. This is because it is believed that hustlers are go-getters due to their low resource setting background.
However, when you equally have team members that come from well to do families to be part of your team of innovators, then you get assured that you will have ideas that cut across the board in terms of satisfying customer tastes and preferences.
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