THE 5 DISCIPLINES OF INCLUSIVE TEAMS: How they optimize innovation, performance, and psychological safety

written with Michel Buffet

The correlation between greater innovation and more diverse and inclusive teams has been well-researched and proven. But how does it happen? And if we could figure that out, could we accelerate these outcomes by codifying and coaching the practices that work?

At 光辉国际 we gathered an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, interculturalists, process consultants, leadership and team coaches, and deep field and technical specialists in DE&I to answer these questions.

What we found is that the diverse and inclusive teams outperforming other teams have the will and the skills to create trusting, psychologically safe environments for all which allow them to take the greater risks innovation requires. This more trusting environment also lowers barriers to learning key interpersonal and work-relevant characteristics about each other which accelerates their effectiveness in harnessing the team's collective intelligence. These teams achieve the paradoxical ability to simultaneously synchronize their thinking as well as foster divergent thinking--all while dodging zero-sum power dynamics.

We codified these insights into The Five Disciplines of Inclusive Teams—a collection of both mindsets and practices intended to become habits where inclusive team behaviors become the norm for inclusive teams. We call them “disciplines” because creating, nurturing, and activating inclusion doesn’t happen just through concepts and rhetoric. It happens through practices applied consciously and consistently. Inclusive leaders, teams, and organizations develop habits that shape who they are and guide their impact in consistent and sustainable ways.

Here's an explanation of each of the inclusive team disciplines.

Discipline 1 — CONNECTING with who people are

Teams don’t exist if they are just a collection of people working independently. In the workplace, they exist because team members Connect with one another through the practices of curiosity about people’s capabilities, trust in those capabilities, and shared purpose.

Inclusive workplace teams begin their connections through curiosity in each other’s skills, formal and informal credentials, and unique skill-building and mindset-shaping experiences. Our research discovered that teams generally do not spend enough intentional time connecting with the fullness of team members’ skillsets. People are seen significantly too narrowly through the lens of their hierarchical title (“manager”), job title (“programmer,” “instructional designer,” “engineer”), functional or practice area (“logistics,” “marketing,” “human resources”) that limits not only how they are seen but how much they are encouraged or allowed to bring forth a broader set of skills and perspectives that sit outside the organizational parameters placed around each person.

Connecting has to do with discovering who people are, not just what they do. This has to do with the classics of personality, identity, background, and experiences. Think of the innovation consultant who is a degreed drummer, the AI designer who served in the Peace Corps, the safety coordinator who volunteers at their local hospital, the root cause decipherer with a linguistics master's. Discovering these hidden talents does not happen automatically and the classic, “What do you do?” question – which contextually is usually asked and answered narrowly—is not enough to reveal the depths of what teammates may contribute for the team to achieve its purpose.

Curiosity is what unlocks and opens the doors to a fuller view of what each member brings to the team both through what they know what to do and by who they are.

Connecting then is strengthened by the trust we gain in these unearthed or better-understood capabilities and identities. We can more easily defer to a team member to take the lead or take on a task most suitable to their unique qualifications or relevant experiences. This serves as an accelerant to moving the team’s project work forward.

If this sounds utilitarian and transactional, it’s because it is. But without it, the deeper relational and transformational inclusive relationships in the next discipline of Caring cannot be built.

Discipline 2 — CARING to nurture psychological safety

While connecting with what people do requires curiosity about capabilities, Caring for who people are requires emotional curiosity. With caring—the ability of team members to know not only the personal side of their teammates but also the ability to empathize with them—the connections made through the first discipline of Connecting will run deeper.

When teams practice the discipline of Caring, they have a greater chance of gaining a sense of contentment and well-being that is contingent on the contentment and well-being of others. Therefore inclusive teams create the right conditions for their members to show situational awareness (“I recognize what is happening here and now”), different forms of empathy—cognitive empathy (”I understand what you feel”) and emotional empathy (“I feel what you feel”)—and advocacy (“I take action on your behalf, in your interests”).

When teams practice the discipline of Caring all have a greater chance of ending up with a sense that their contentment and well-being are contingent on the contentment and well-being of others.

In work organizations, Caring practices are not primarily serving a purely social purpose but rather are meant to help achieve optimal results aligned with the team’s purpose. When team members feel that they belong and are valued by others who want to connect with them on the basis of who they are and care for their well-being, a team is more likely to feel cohesive, collaborative, and therefore effective.

How to get to a more heartfelt state? Inclusive team members show genuine curiosity about who people are. Their personal biography, how they identify in terms of the characteristics of what makes them them. For different team members, the most important basis of their identity may be their nationality, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, personality, faith, politics, thinking and communication style, etc., and most likely in an intersectional combination of identities. Caring also seeks—in permission-based, consensual ways—to find out more about people’s aspirations, motivations, and concerns.

As people practice Connecting and Caring trust deepens and, with that, they nurture an environment where team members can feel psychologically safe. This in turn is key for team members to be able to take more risks with one another.

While creating this feeling in all team members is good in itself, it's foundational for practicing the disciplines that follow: Synchronizing, Cultural Dexterity, and Power Sharing. These three disciplines require a higher level of risk-taking, which demands deeper levels of trust among team members. In our inclusive teams model this is why Connecting and Caring are on the outer circle, creating necessary conditions for the other three. Connecting and Caring, however, should be ever-present in nourishing an inclusive environment and not just be seen as something only done on the front end of a team coming together. Members being present with, and for each other, enables the team to do things better together.

Discipline 3 — SYNCHRONIZING to optimize collective intelligence

Picture a peloton of three dozen cyclists pedaling in sync up and down rolling hills and sharp curves. A flock of ten thousand flying starlings doing hairpin turns in unison in the sky. An emergency room with an array of specialists seamlessly keeping an accident victim alive. A soccer team on a roll. These diverse and inclusive teams find a way to communicate and coordinate their actions in pursuit of a common goal in ways that are so much greater than the sum of their parts where physical movements, heart rates, breathing rhythms, and emotions end up in alignment.

Call it chemistry, flow, intangibles, secret sauce, or Flamenco's mystical “duende." Neuroscientists call it Synchrony. It’s what taps and harnesses the collective intelligence of teams. Think of synchrony as the state of a team being synchronized or in harmony. This can manifest through coordinated behaviors or mental states of all members of a team. “High levels of team synchrony can improve the quality of performance, result in fewer mistakes, and fast completion of the task,” says Korn Ferry neuroscientist Amelia Haynes. In baseball, statisticians estimate that synchrony accounts for up to 40% of unexplained variance in team performance.*

Call it chemistry, flow, intangibles, secret sauce, or flamenco's mystical “duende." Neuroscientists call it synchrony.

While there can be something transcendent and organic about it, we now know enough about neuroscience that inclusive teams can knowingly activate synchrony more rapidly and more deeply with interactions that tap into people’s sense of identity with respect and dignity as they create safe spaces for all team members. They can also use techniques such as making eye contact, breathing exercises, and even music and percussion to accelerate the process.

Synchrony, however, has its downsides. No surprise, we tend to synchronize better with people like us – biologically it’s so much easier to find a common groove. So, we must work harder to establish synchrony within a team with many differences. Conversely, if teams are too successful at this, too much synchrony can remove the edge and friction innovation requires and that diversity offers. Inclusive teams know how to skillfully navigate through these paradoxes by activating the Connecting and Caring disciplines.

Discipline 4 — CULTURAL DEXTERITY to integrate perspectives

Even before there was the string of terms of “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging” there has been the concept of “crosscultural competence” also referred to as “intercultural dexterity” as a way to research and establish constructive behaviors around managing differences effectively.

We define Cultural Dexterity as “the ability to discern and take into account one’s own and others’ worldviews, to be able to solve problems, make decisions, and resolve conflicts in ways that optimize cultural differences for better, longer-lasting, and more creative solutions.”

The original cultural competence work by researchers such as Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars revolved around national cultural differences: how the Germans, the Japanese, the Peruvians, the Nigerians, etc. differed even as they discovered commonalities. But over time this work, and the emerging work primarily in the corporate world around diversity, began to intersect as vanguard practitioners applied the concept to all forms of differences such as regional and racial/ethnic differences within countries.

As that integrative work was beginning to peak about a decade ago, the work of unconscious bias came into the D&I scene and took nearly all the attention away from intercultural dexterity in the D&I field. Its no-blame approach that led to OMG epiphanies of how our inadvertent assumptions about one another turn into everyday micro ways in which we misunderstand and judge one another was received by many as a non-accusatory way to challenge bias.

Today, however, unconscious bias training has proven to have left many feeling adrift about how to best manage differences once one has become aware of how they tend to trigger unconscious biases. Hence, a growing renewed interest in cultural dexterity which is precisely about teams skillfully managing both the downsides and upsides differences within the team bring forth.

Cultural dexterity is what inclusive teams need to navigate their differences. They do so by mastering self-awareness practices and valuing what makes them who they are—and therefore as peculiar and idiosyncratic to others as others are to them. Leaning into discovering what makes their teammates unique, and then--and here's the key differentiation--leveraging those differences is what helps inclusive teams develop innovative ways of making the most of their differences in this most disruptive era.

Discipline 5 — POWER SHARING to achieve equitable contributions

In the domain of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the concept of power is treated with deep suspicion and even avoidance as a topic to engage in. It’s understandable given that when groups of people who have been discriminated against, marginalized, and treated with unconscious bias hear the word power many see ghost words appear alongside and they see abuse of power, power against, power over, power-hungry, power trip. Power then is often seen as the antithesis of inclusion especially in a team.

But inclusive teams have a more nuanced view of power. They understand power as being synonymous with energy. For all its inherent force, energy is neutral—but at the extremes, it can either destroy or create. It all depends on how it's used by those who have it. They reframe power as being about Power Sharing.

Inclusive teams have a more nuanced view of power. They understand power as synonymous with energy. For all its inherent force, energy is neutral—but at the extremes, it can either destroy or create. It all depends on how it's used by those who have it.

In inclusive teams, power does not reside in one individual. Rather power is shared across all team members. Power—the ability to move things forward, to influence, to inform, to create—flows as a surge of electricity in the neural network of the team’s collective intelligence in a way that ensures equitable contribution by all. Who manages the power ebbs and flows among the team members based on the topic, task, or mood given who has the contextually relevant expertise and knowledge.

Conclusion

Current legal challenges have slowed down or even frozen explicit programs to increase specific types of diverse representation. But as the research and stories here show, diversity of all forms is necessary for organizations to innovate, grow, engage, retain, and thrive. Companies and organizations that do not reflect the viable labor pool in the fullest broadest definition of diversity will wither.

The lever to pull is not to make specific forms of presentation the goal. Rather it’s to make the organizational imperatives the goal. And then like all successful organizations determine what is necessary to achieve them.

It’s a diverse workforce led by inclusive leaders and driven by inclusive teams that will create inclusive organizations that, in turn, will help transform the world.

?2024 Korn Ferry

References:

• Brave, S. A., Butters, R. A., & Roberts, K. (2017). In search of the holy grail: Team chemistry and where to find it. Presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, 2017.