Building and Valuing a Diverse Team

In my most recent leadership role, I was proud of the small but highly effective team we created.?In addition to being a group of highly talented individuals, we were also incredibly diverse and this diversity could be clearly linked to our strongest innovation efforts. ?(Diversity-driven innovation was seen in team discussions that led to both exciting new programs/services, as well as insightful feedback to stop doing less effective activities.) ?Small teams may be perceived as harder to create diversity, but my experience is the smaller the team, the more important diversity is.?

We represented many of the traditional diversity elements (gender, religious beliefs, race, marital status, ethnicity, parental status, age, education, physical and mental ability, income, sexual orientation, geographic location), and the team members brought incredibly different perspectives.?At least partially this was the result of their demographic uniqueness, but I can honestly say my final hiring decisions that brought them into the team was not based on the need to increase our diversity metrics. ?

So how did this group come together??First, we did make our best effort to recruit and interview a diverse group of talented people.?This is required today, but there is a lot of research that indicates final hiring decisions are still heavily influenced into selecting candidates with similar personalities and behaviors as the leader and/or other team members.?We inaccurately use the term ‘fit’ for this behavior, and fail to recognize the error of hiring people ‘like us’ or who we consciously or unconsciously hope will not add challenge or disruption to our existing team.

Knowing that our growth would be dependent on adding new insights and to avoid creating a team lacking diversity, my hiring decision came down to one critical question: ‘will this person offer a different perspective to the team’??Answering that question is not simple, though we sought to achieve this with a few simple activities. ?Do you use these? ?Can you share other approaches you use to ensure you hire a diverse team? ?Here were some of our techniques:

1.??????Assessing candidates’ unique perspectives - During the interview process we discussed an effective and relatively simple tool called IOPT that offers one take on how people behave in teams.??IOPT has an easy assessment process, but many of the outcomes can also be achieved live with a few simple questions.?And with the outcomes, we could answer ‘is this person likely to offer different perspectives’?

2.??????Valuing As, not focusing on Cs – like a school transcript, we evaluated the candidates primarily on their unique strengths rather than on any shortcomings or development needs

3.??????Importance of listening skills - above the other soft skills, I learned strong ‘listening’ skills predicted our strongest performers.?We created opportunities before and during the interview for candidate questions that helped identify individuals who were stronger at inquiry than focused on delivering their own message

4.??????Creating a large, diverse interview team – we invited team members from different units, external partners and others that would interpret candidates from different perspectives.?I was always surprised at the unique ways the same conversation was heard differently.

5.??????Emphasize qualitative over quantitative measures – we used scoring tools to ensure specific technical and soft skills were being assessed in the interview, but the decision-making process focused on qualitative feedback from the team members that offered greater insights than the similar/different scores

6.??????Use scenario questions – before the interview, candidates were presented with a realistic job challenge/opportunity and asked to prepare either a formal or informal response, depending on the role.?The response validated the candidates understanding of the business, but also offered insight on their unique perspectives.

Develop yourself. In addition to managing the recruiting process to ensure team diversity (and encouraging team members to seek the same goal), I had to improve my leadership skills to ensure all members were inclusive in our discussions and decision process, and made our diversity a team strength. ?First, to hire people with different skills and perspectives, leaders must have a strong self-awareness (something I constantly work at), and the confidence to add team members who bring a strong, alternative point-of-view and challenge the status quo.?Diversity inherently can bring disagreement or disruption and take people out of their known comfort zones.?Healthy conflict is reflected in lively discussions driven by different perspectives, and offering exciting new directions.?Effective leaders encourage healthy conflict, and avoid/manage personal conflicts that can arise.??All of this requires leaders who stretch themselves, and develop even stronger communication and conflict-management skills (an on-going learning process).?

Develop Others Uniquely. Second, I’ve found that diverse teams succeed best when team members are developed as individuals with unique goals.?Organizations and their leaders often hire and develop people focused on the job requirements.?But strong diverse teams and their members grow when the members are feeling themselves grow personally, not limited to their job skillsets.?This can result in some turnover, but positive turnover where team members are leaving because of exciting new directions, not to competitors, and was something that for me was a metric of a successful team.?

Stay committed. Finally, teams need leaders who understand the value of and are firmly committed to building team diversity. ?I’ve had enough ‘never-would-have-thought-of-that’ moments, and decision failures from a lack of diversity, to make it a priority.?But less experienced managers may fear the short-term issues while the diverse team learns to work effectively together, or can use failure to overcome differences to scapegoat performance delays. ?If you believe in the value of a diverse team, leaders must emphasize diversity as driving the team’s greatest potential to maintain everyone’s, including your own team members’, commitment to that goal (and you).?As a leader there were many times I fell short with the skills needed to manage a diverse team, but team diversity must always be seen as a positive value.?I hope my team will say I never failed to do so.

During a time of high turnover and difficulty recruiting strong performers in the market, I hope these personal experiences will help you find and manage a diverse team!

by Dan McGurrin, PhD

Dr. Daniel (Dan) McGurrin recently completed a 25-year university-based career working with HR and Business Leaders to develop learning activities aligned with strategic initiatives.?Today, Dan is continuing this work as a consultant and trainer. ?