Get Smarter with Diverse Teams: Three changes to boost innovation and performance
Originally posted on LinkedIN
Diverse teams outperform homogenous ones. Despite the wealth of evidence demonstrating the value of team diversity, many organizations are still missing out. Why? Most leave high-performing diverse teams up to chance.
Diverse teams excel
When a diverse mix of people work together, their collective differences provide ingredients important to better decision making, greater innovation, higher performance, and improved bottom lines.
Research tells us that diverse teams perform better because:
They have access to a richer pallet of ideas: In How diversity makes us smarter, Dr. Katherine Phillips explained that diverse teams get better results because they collectively contribute a broader array of ideas and perspectives. Drawing on their different knowledge bases, they are better at seeing unmet customer needs, identifying new market opportunities, and combining a wider range of ideas to create innovations that lead to better solutions. (Also see research reported by Deloitte, McKinsey, Forbes, Forbes Technology Council, HBR)
They work harder: In addition to the expansive pallet of insights at their disposal, diverse teams tend to work harder to achieve shared goals, according to Dr. Phillips. Anticipating different perspectives, team members take time to explain their own position, focus more on facts, and process ideas more carefully. This diligence contributes to better decisions and outcomes.
Beyond innovation and performance, there are additional business and social justice benefits:
They help erode stereotypes: Diverse teams can help dismantle prejudicial assumptions as individuals work in close proximity with those different from them. This can contribute to a more inclusive culture important to growing empathy and respect to tackle bias. (More here).
Teammates directly experience diversity’s value: Members of diverse teams can tangibly see how diversity matters to meaning and performance in their day-to-day work. Such practical insights can elevate commitment and action supporting company DEI efforts and impacts.
Teams are where a mix of people can collaborate to disrupt groupthink and propel new solutions. That is why I’ve guided leading organizations to make three vital changes to advance team diversity and deliver results.
Change One: Expand focus
Diversity strategies tend to focus broadly on enhancing diversity in the organization as a whole, or across large groups such as all senior leadership roles, entire business units, or whole functions. Often informed by aggregate demographic data, this focus valuably highlights gaps and informs general efforts to source and attract a wider array of talent. Unfortunately, efforts to enhance diversity at the broad level do not automatically yield a balanced mix of differences on teams.
To understand whether diversity is having an impact on how people are working, organizations must complement big picture analytics and plans with a focus on team-level data and strategies. This allows organizations to examine whether diversity is dispersed in ways that can be put to work in day-to-day collaboration making a meaningful difference to workers, customers, and communities.
Change Two: Design with intention
Achieving team diversity requires a deliberate and strategic focus involving five essentials:
1) Clearly define team diversity. Diverse teams are working groups (e.g., intact teams as well as shorter-term task forces and committees) with a balanced combination of people with different:
Ways of thinking (e.g., Skills, backgrounds, experiences, ideas, thoughts, abilities, views) and
Demographics (e.g., Attributes, characteristics, and multi-faceted identities of individuals)
What is a balanced combination? While even one outlier on a team can boost performance (as long as others actually hear and act on their input), research indicates that real benefits tend to emerge when no more than 60-70% of teammates have the same characteristic. As a simple example, a team comprised entirely or mostly of men could emphasize hiring women or other genders. Similarly, a team made entirely or mostly of women could focus on hiring men or other genders.
2) Ensure everyone understands the value. Managers responsible for building teams and all those involved in related human resources processes must appreciate both the risks of homogenous teams and the value of diverse teams in propelling performance. More broadly, every worker must see themselves as included and important to team diversity. Each person needs to know they have benefits to gain and a role to play.
3) Know the current mix on every team. Examining demographic and cognitive data at the team level presents challenges, but there are prudent ways to understand and enhance team diversity. It’s important to prioritize which data to collect and how to analyze them, be thoughtful about how to care for data, and be savvy about sharing practical insights with those responsible for selecting team members. Watch out for traditional mindsets that can block this vital component. Creative, elegant solutions that mitigate risk while enabling informed progress are obtainable.
4) Establish a clear, fair selection process focused on high performance. As part of an equitable selection process including a diverse talent pool, building high-performing, diverse teams requires evaluating whether a candidate can both perform in the role and enhance team outcomes. Specifically - and this is paramount - hiring decisions must be based on two sets of performance criteria:
Skills and qualifications required for role performance
Characteristics adding diversity for team performance
Using this framework, it’s optimal to fill an opening with a person who has not only the capabilities required for the individual to excel in a specific role, but also the traits to enhance team diversity which enables the group to excel. (Notably, even when there are no current openings on a team, performance can be enhanced by inviting a wider mix of views and ideas from workers on other teams or from external stakeholders, such as customers.)
5) Hold leaders accountable for results. As with any key business driver, it’s critical to hold leaders accountable for results in building high-performing, diverse teams and making the most of them.
Change Three: Ensure inclusion
As Alison Maitland and I explain in INdivisible, diversity without inclusion is unfulfilled potential. Cultivating an environment where all can flourish as they collaborate to meet shared goals involves:
Leaders who are skilled at inclusion (more here).
Team members with high task interdependence focusing on complex, non-routine challenges while working in a setting that prioritizes the team over self, accords equal status to all members, and ensures that frictions are discussed. (more here and here).
An ecosystem of clear expectations, commitments, capabilities, behaviours, structures, processes, and metrics that come together holistically to advance inclusion and its positive business impacts (more in INdivisible).
Take action to drive innovation, performance, and bottom-line results with a strategic focus on diverse teams
Adding focus on diversity of teams might not be as simple as broadly-focused approaches. But by committing to strategically enhancing diversity on each and every team, bold organizations can truly activate the potent mix of ideas, perspectives, and experiences that lead to higher performance.