Companion Planting for Diversity in Support
At least a thousand years ago Indigenous people in North America were already planting maize, beans, and squash together. The maize stalks provided a structure for the beans to climb, the beans fixed nitrogen into the soil, the squash leaves provided shade to keep in moisture and repel weeds and pests. Together these “three sisters” produced more food more reliably than any one could on its own.
Companion planting of this kind has probably been around as long as people have cultivated plants. By paying attention to how plants naturally grew, and noticing which ones thrived together, people could find the most effective combinations.
An alternative to companion planting is to fill an entire field with just one plant. This is more efficient to sow and to harvest, but such a monoculture often requires higher pesticide usage, tends to deplete the soil of vital nutrients, and uses more water.
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Perhaps we’re not so different from plant life as we like to think. Within our companies and industries we tend towards monocultures (the young white male monoculture of tech being a prime example), because they are easy. Hiring your friends or people who look, sound, and think like you is easy, and just like in agriculture it can generate significant speed advantages.
The costs of a corporate monoculture are not immediately obvious, until the cultural soil is depleted and the “pests” of laws, customer churn, market saturation, and limited perspectives arrive to destroy a now-fragile system. Not that all combinations of plants (or people) are beneficial. The Greeks and Romans knew that some plants were toxic to others if grown close together, and some people are similarly toxic to their colleagues. Root them out.
Customer support teams, in my experience, are typically more diverse than other parts of tech, though that’s not saying much. I suspect that’s only because they tend to be lower paid roles with fewer barriers to entry, and emphasise the (massively undervalued) “soft skills”, allowing for a broader range of hires.
Even so, as major corporations lurch away from diversity and inclusion those of us responsible for hiring and sustaining support teams are confronted with a decision. Do we take the easiest path, hiring purely on “culture fit”?
Or will we do the hard work of acknowledging our limitations and biases, creating systems to address them, and building more resilient, more creative, more adaptable teams that integrate different backgrounds, cultures, and approaches? Will we practice companion planting, understanding how our varied team members can work together and improve each other’s output?
Which path will lead to better customer experiences? It seems likely that a more diverse team will be more effective at helping our even more diverse set of customers, understanding them more deeply and providing new and different ways to communicate with them effectively.
There is a lot going on in the world that we can’t really affect, but this is one small area in which we can make things a little bit better. We can become gardeners for our teams, removing the weeds around them, defending them against pests, providing them with helpful colleagues who can share new skills, tools, and perspectives.
Gardening is good for the soil and the plants, but it’s good for your state of mind too.
P.S. Companions don’t even have to be in your own company. Recently on The Supportive Podcast I interviewed my long-time support friend Sarah Hatter. She’s helped me grow in my career more than any other person. She is the maize to my squash, as I am sure she would definitely prefer me never to say.
Mathew Patterson
After running a support team for years, Mat joined Help Scout, where he helps people deliver better online customer support. Subscribe to The Supportive Newsletter or find him on LinkedIn.
