I am confused why people are so outraged at the idea that some part of selecting people to work with may be based on whether you get along with them.
People are social beings. Part of working together comes from feeling like you want to cooperate. You could have someone who is incredibly smart and clever as your business partner, but will you really feel like you want to go the extra mile for him/her? Do you have to watch your back constantly? Do you have the same goals in life? Does every interaction drain energy from you?
We come from families, social structures. We have people in our families who are incompetent but we love them. It's not unreasonable to think that some of this behavior would continue in our work worlds.
"Diversity" in the trendy usage today, for most people still doesn't trump whether you want to work with someone, and that hopefully doesn't have much to do with race/background/gender/etc. I say hopefully of course, and helping people overcome or not be prejudiced that some characteristic correlates with ability/desire to work with them, is an important thing to do.
But forcing people to believe that someone's <x> characteristic is more important than whether you want to work with them is a recipe for dissatisfaction and backlash against people who insist that it should be so.
People are social beings. Part of working together comes from feeling like you want to cooperate. You could have someone who is incredibly smart and clever as your business partner, but will you really feel like you want to go the extra mile for him/her? Do you have to watch your back constantly? Do you have the same goals in life? Does every interaction drain energy from you?
We come from families, social structures. We have people in our families who are incompetent but we love them. It's not unreasonable to think that some of this behavior would continue in our work worlds.
"Diversity" in the trendy usage today, for most people still doesn't trump whether you want to work with someone, and that hopefully doesn't have much to do with race/background/gender/etc. I say hopefully of course, and helping people overcome or not be prejudiced that some characteristic correlates with ability/desire to work with them, is an important thing to do.
But forcing people to believe that someone's <x> characteristic is more important than whether you want to work with them is a recipe for dissatisfaction and backlash against people who insist that it should be so.