Celebrating your heritage and adding value by building diverse teams

Diversification isn’t just a strategy for managing financial investments; it’s also the secret to building strong teams. Our sales reps speak to our clients about the Bloomberg solutions that help them diversify their financial assets to generate a better return. Why shouldn’t the same go for our human assets?

Make diversity intentional
I’ve been at Bloomberg for over 18 years and have witnessed how change requires persistent, yet mindful nudging of corporate culture in the right direction. Evolving culture is hard work. And this doesn’t happen overnight and it certainly doesn’t happen by accident.

Building a diverse team requires an understanding that communities forged outside departments and the office has an impact on the way people interact at work. In my role, I have several direct reports and it’s important that I intentionally invest in the people I manage; cultivating relationships and supporting an inclusive environment that allows my team to naturally express their authentic selves. When organizations embrace the idea that everyone brings a different perspective to the workplace, it leads to more effective collaboration and invites people to openly share ideas without the expectation of cohesion.

Instead of focusing on conformity or the expectation that everyone in the organization should think and behave the same, I encourage my team to deliberately seek out individuals who have something to offer that might not already exist on the project.

Celebrate the differences
Having shared organizational values and goals will lead people of different backgrounds in the same direction, but assimilation doesn’t have to mean uniformity. Celebrating the differences and the perspectives that fuel a rich culture leads to camaraderie and solidifies invaluable, lasting partnerships.

Over the course of my career, my teams have always been like family. We worked hard and celebrated one another. There were the great ‘English muffin vs. crumpet’ debates with London colleagues, the competitions to see who could find the answer to a client question first between engineering and product, the sharing of pork buns for Lunar New Year in Trading Solutions engineering, or attending a Diwali potluck with Princeton office colleagues. The idea is to take those small moments and build relationships with people.

Having an awareness of who I am is a core part of my black heritage that has enabled success in my career. The creativity of black culture is the part of my heritage that most excites me. The ingenuity is first. The rhythm is second. The creativity in dance, language, and music. From drums to jazz, to rock, to hip-hop. Who thinks of taking records, putting them on a turntable, finding a break and looping it to make an entirely different sound – which has turned into a billion-dollar industry? It’s a great American story, and one that reflects what is in the DNA of the people of the African diaspora. The battle of the bands that happens every year at the historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, gives me chills. Search for ‘Tuskegee University Ball and Parlay’ and tell me if you would have any more of the ‘Monday blues’ if you woke up to that song every day. The energy and life is amazing.

Being excited about your own heritage and how it inspires you is important for achieving personal and professional success. Encouraging others to share and celebrate what their cultures have to offer — and how that can be used to motivate them and the rest of the organization — helps push everyone forward and provides an understanding of where your peers are coming from and what they value.

Empathy, humility, and hard work
Creativity and innovation require inspiration. Being able to look around and know that you’re supported by a team that not only shares your values and goals but that can offer ideas and solutions that you couldn’t come up with on your own is what makes diverse organizations thrive.

Having spent a bulk of my career in product, it was always about finding the best solution for the client based on the technology at our disposal, and understanding the solution and delivery timeline. I’ve never hesitated to reach out to another colleague to get opinions or advice based on their experience if it meant delivering a better outcome. I would like to think that this attitude and the relationships it created, allowed us to grow our business.

As a leader, my goal is to pick the best talent to get the job done for our customers. It just so happens that when I have looked around, I have always had diverse talent around me. Facilitating creativity among a diverse team requires empathy, humility and hard work —things I attribute to helping shape my career at Bloomberg. Hard work is what we do daily in moving the business forward; humility is how we are encouraged to give back to the community; and empathy is how we can better connect with others.

Bloomberg is proud to celebrate Black History Month to recognize the positive influence African Americans have on our business and our world. By giving a voice to people of all backgrounds, we ensure that our success is built on a solid foundation of leadership, diversity, and innovation.