Collaboration With Diverse Individuals Is Not Easy — Just Vital To reinforce your motivation to cultivate diverse colleagues and be adept at recruiting and leading teams of diverse people, be prepared with the bad and good news. “People in diverse groups are less happy. Their views are challenged, and they feel like the outcomes were manipulated. Based on their experiences, they will self-report that it was not better than when they were on a homogenous team,” The Difference author, Scott E. Page told angel investor, Steve Jurvetson, and others at a Santa Fee Institute meeting. Yet when diverse teams experience success they know wouldn’t have happened without each other, they tend to form strong bonds, so it’s well worth finding out how. The key to being smarter together than as individuals is that the group is sufficiently diverse so that they, “got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly,” according to Page. Reinforcing that research, a recent Deloitte study cited by Alison Griswold, found that “diversity of thought” spurs “innovation and creative problem solving” and reduces groupthink. An added benefit of being in the frequent company of those with different talents, temperament and beliefs is that you reinforce a flexible rather than fixed mindset, as Carol Dweck recommends. And do not inadvertently get increasingly extreme in your opinions as several authors warn including Cass Sunstein in Going to Extremes, Eli Pariser in Filterbubble and in Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing in The Big Sort. To attract more learning and opportunity, keep cultivating strangers as recommended by Melinda Blau in Consequential Strangers and Alan Gregerman in The Necessity of Strangers. Bottom Line: The most powerful leaders in a connected, complex world may well be the ones who can recruit the right team fastest to solve a problem or capture an opportunity. Why not be one of those sought-after leaders? forbes/sites/kareanderson/2013/09/29/be-influential-by-becoming-the-glue-that-holds-diverse-teams-together/2/
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 23:44:45 +0000
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