Nearly 50 years ago at the age of five, Peter de Norville, whose parents were in the British Army and stationed in Kenya, stood up for a little Black boy being picked on by a group of older white children. That encounter began a
"I just remember feeling at the time, 'This isn't right; I must do something about it,'" says Norville, who left the playground encounter bloody, but also with a new friend he still returns to Kenya to visit. "I couldn't help but get involved."
Norville eventually joined the British Army, signing up to work in bomb disposal and doing tours of duty in Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda, among others. He followed this with a job on a game reserve in Malawi protecting elephants from ivory poachers.
"I'm sure my thought process was, 'I still want to go and have this big adventure, but I'd rather do something that helps instead of hurts,'" Norville says. "I saw humanity at its worst on a regular basis, and it made me think about the things that I could or should be doing."
From the game reserve, Norville moved first into "the slightly less dangerous world of investment banking," then to management and consulting in areas like strategic workforce planning, talent strategy and eventually,
"Up until this point, I'd always looked outward," he says. "It hit me that there was a whole host of personal things that did have something to do with it, and it cemented in my mind, yes, I want to help people, but I also have an understanding of what it's like to be in the minority."
Norville talked with EBN about how his own identity has shaped his approach to DEI, and why diversity and a sense of belonging among employees is a big part of what makes a business successful.
How has your role at Sage helped you reflect on your experiences with diversity and made you more empathetic toward others?
I'm autistic — I was diagnosed five years ago, but I've known I was autistic since my mid-twenties. The diagnosis hasn't really impacted me one way or the other, but that experience made me think I don't want people to have to have a diagnosis — for autism or anything else — to feel excluded. Inclusion should be the standard. If I choose to disclose, that's up to me. It doesn't get in the way of my doing work on a daily basis.
I have twin sons, now 11, one of whom is autistic and one who has ADHD. All three of my children are mixed race. After my mother left the army, she became a rally driver and an accident left her in a wheelchair, so I also know what living with a disability is like.
The other thing that has influenced my thinking is that I identify as pansexual, and throughout the entire time I was in the British Army, this was illegal. I could have lost my job if the people I was closest to found out, and it's incredibly hard to keep a big part of yourself secret when the people around you know everything about you. I don't want people to have to live like that, and I wanted to create an environment where they didn't have to. The one thing I said during my interview process at Sage was I want to be completely open, honest and transparent about everything we do. If we get something wrong, I want to tell people. If we get something right, I want to tell people. I want to share the journey with everybody. Sage has stuck with it every step of the way, and that is why I chose to be here doing the job that I do.
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How can employers best demonstrate their acceptance of employees, regardless of any differences or disclosures?
The really simple answer is to ask them what they want, but as HR professionals, we don't get the opportunity to ask everyone individually, so it's up to us to remove as many barriers as we can. For example, on my first day at Sage, the person looking after our early careers (the equivalent of an apprenticeship or internship in the U.S.) asked me if I would look at our grad scheme and make sure it was accessible to everyone. Before I looked I asked, "Do you need a college degree to be on the grad scheme?" The answer was yes, which meant it was not accessible to everyone. Do we want to hire the best person for the job, or the person that's best qualified on paper?
Some organizations say they want neurodivergent [talent], but then you need people to have a diagnosis, you need people to be comfortable sharing, you need people to be labeled. Whereas if you just make [the workplace] open to everybody, it doesn't matter what their background is. It's about looking at what I can do to remove barriers from the process, as opposed to what I can do to identify key groups and then create something separate for them to join the organization. When people feel like they belong, that's when they do their best work.
How does that play out in your hiring process at Sage?
I like to focus on the skills that people bring. I tend not to ask too much about past experience, because with the right manager, the right team and the right support, anyone can flourish and thrive. What I want to know is, what are the skills that will make you shine in the workplace? Are you a great problem solver? Are you a great empath? Do you have a passion for something in particular?
One key part of this is I'm very comfortable knowing where my own strengths and weaknesses are. I'm very comfortable adapting myself to manage the people around me. What I'm really looking for are people who can do the things that I can't, and people who notice things I don't. That's what makes us a strong team.
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How do you extend these practices to benefit the company as a whole, and why is this so important for a business's growth?
The reason we do DEI at this company is very simple: Our leaders only know the things they know. In order to innovate faster, make better informed decisions and see challenges earlier, I need to surround them with people who know the things that they don't. My job is to surround or fill our leadership teams and our management teams with people who have a wide range of backgrounds and who are not afraid to share their voices. That's what I'm trying to achieve, that is the purpose of DEI, that's why my job exists.
Now, to do that effectively, I need to make Sage more inclusive. I have to work behind the scenes to change the system. There's always going to be somebody who's less good at something than someone else, but the dividing line between the two is never anybody's gender, the color of their skin, who they choose to fall in love with, their religion or any of those things. And so it's not people that are broken, it's the system. I say DEI works best when people don't realize it's happening [because] it's me putting things right behind the scenes. It's changing the way we acquire talent, how we change the process of people coming in. All of those things happen and it has a huge impact across the whole of the organization.
