If you hire enough people who think like you, you’re not building a team, you’re building an echo chamber, writes Kevin Horton
Picture: Alamy
A few years ago I was standing in our office looking around at the team and I realised that everyone looked a bit like me. Not necessarily literally, but they often had the same background, same instincts, the same way of looking at things.
It reminded me of that scene in Being John Malkovich where every face in the room is his. I’d built a business full of younger versions of myself without ever intending to do it.
I’m not alone in this. “You remind me of a younger me” is a cliché compliment handed down from senior leaders to early-career professionals. But if you hire enough people who think like you, you’re not building a team, you’re building an echo chamber. The same ideas are repeated back at you, with no one in the room to challenge them or bring something new.
Alan Milburn’s NEET report suggests that the attitudes and perceptions of current leaders are a major challenge behind why around one million young people in the UK are not in education, employment, or training.
The resulting policy recommendations are expected to be published this autumn. In the meantime, I’m urging business leaders to stop hiring in their own image.
Instinct is not a hiring strategy and it doesn’t scale with a business. It’s narrowing opportunities for young people, and it’s restricting business growth.
SME leaders in particular, who don’t always have the hiring processes that larger businesses rely on, are often guilty of the tendency to filter out young candidates who think or present differently. It’s not intentional or malicious, but their strengths are harder to notice instinctively when they don’t look like the strengths we perceive in ourselves.
At K2 Architects, we were an established business, but we weren’t perfect. Productivity was lower than we wanted, and we lacked processes and systems. We were also missing a strong shared identity, despite me hiring versions of myself over and over.
The turning point came through leadership training on the Help to Grow: Management Course, taught by the University of Liverpool Management School.
It gave me something I didn’t have to work with before: a framework.
We built competency-based job descriptions, with clear levels of career development mapped across the practice. It gave me the tools I needed to completely change our hiring approach, taking me out of my comfort zone and making it impossible to hire on gut alone.
The diversity that we have introduced and integrated into the team has been hugely beneficial – even a game changer – to our organisation’s performance. Varied thinking produces original approaches, which produce better work and ultimately enable us to compete against established firms with deeper pockets.
Productivity amongst staff was a concern before the Help to Grow: Management Course, but has also been transformed. Before, our utilisation rate was around 75%, but today it’s closer to 100%. I learnt a lot about how to incentivise staff and keep them engaged.
Developing a stronger, clearer sense of what we’re about as a business has helped as much as the incentives; people want to work somewhere with a genuine vision.
As an SME firm, K2 will never out-resource bigger national firms. What we can do is out-think them, and that only happens with a genuinely diverse range of perspectives and skills.
When everyone in a business looks and thinks the same, they end up competing with each other.
When they don’t, they collaborate and the work gets better.
My challenge to other SME leaders is this: look honestly at who you’ve hired in the last two years. If they all remind you of a younger you, ask yourself what strengths you may have been filtering out without realising.
Instead of thinking of Gen Z candidates as a harder-to-manage version of the workforce you’re used to, build the structure to see their strengths.
You’ll find they bring exactly what your business is missing.
LBC Article published 29 Aug 2026
