It's time to rethink diversity. With courage.

There comes a point in every enterprise when what got you here won't take you there - and you have to hire bigger, foreign different-thinking and different-looking leaders to get you to the next level. If you're looking beyond the skills and culture of your core team to get to the next level, you're not just looking to diversify your mix of competencies, backgrounds and demographics. You're looking for a diversity dividend - so the new hire who thinks differently takes your team's A-game to a whole new level.

New research (from the WSJ) suggests that it's harder to get a diversity dividend than even the big strategy firms like McKinsey thought it should be. And if it's hard for corporate giants with big budgets and lots of expert resources to get the mix right, what's that mean for a small venture like yours - who's about to hire someone different from the friends, family and core team who got you this far? Or for the innovation skunkworks inside the corporation, who's championing something new that can make a real difference?

When you bring diverse talent to a team, you've got to make sure everyone has courage to handle the abrasion that will happen - if new players with new perspectives ask challenging questions, rethink old decisions and assert hegemony in their respective areas of expertise. If you don't build the courage that's needed to handle diversity, the new mix of talent will be windowdressing - or will result in stalemates, political struggles and risk-averse compromises, rather than robust data-driven forward-looking value-optimizing business decisions.

When we read the WSJ's critique of conventional diversity thinking, two key things jumped out for us:

One, it's about competencies and skills - not skin color, gender and nationality. It takes courage to add to your meritocracy - and say, "We need better than what we have now." Fortunately, there's no shortage of Black Excellence or women (like my grandmother) with razor-sharp business instincts - who are looking for the right opportunity to show their stuff, be the lynchpin and make things happen. There's also no shortage of pretenders, some of whom have fancy Ivy degrees, corporate pedigrees and pretend to know the American market. The best way to diversify and get what you need is to be clear about the competencies that will take you further. And then focus on psychographics, not demographics, to assess talent who looks promising, so your gut feeling about what's intriguing and attractive doesn't lead you astray.

Second, it's about challenge, stretch, learning, growth, ingenuity and reinvention - not comfort or culture-fit. If you're evolving from an engineering-and-launch culture to an adoption culture, the adoption experts you recruit should shake up your thinking. There should be some abrasion. You should walk out of a key meeting saying, "Bring it on!" not "Quiet it down." And use your influence to get people who are threatened and insecure to be excited, when someone shows you what's missing and takes your team's planning and execution to a higher level.

If you're an all-Israeli engineering startup who all came through 8200 together or flew helicopter missions in the North, it's not about finding an American, German, Indian or Latina thought-leader who can fit in. If you've been part of a white male country club in-group, your rising African-American or Indian immigrant star may push the limits of what you thought grit and triumph looked like from a position of wealth and privilege. If you get them to fit in, you'll lose a big part of what made them special. Instead, wouldn't you want to tap their spirit of Kobe Bryant and take yourself up a level?

Getting a diversity dividend from your next hire takes courage. It doesn't "just happen" because you widen your search criteria and look beyond your inner-circle network for referrals. Or because you know, intellectually, that you'll need a mix of new professions, native languages, genders, melanin levels and other diversity dimensions to get from engineering and science to regulatory clearance and launch, from launch to adoption, and then to dominance.

As the WSJ report stated, the McKinsey research on diversity never looked at the impact of courage when they asked, "Do diverse executive teams and boards outperform monolithic ones?" They assumed - if you recruit diverse talent into your board or executive team, you must have courage. Or that it was everyone's job to make people comfortable with diversity, rather than say, "Bring it on! Let's use the new mix of perspectives - and our discomfort with them - to get to another level." In your small growing enterprise - or your innovation intrapreneurial venture inside a corporation - you can't afford anything less. We invite you to see how.

Dr Louise Yochee Klein and Dr Merom Klein are business psychologists who equip executive leadership teams, boards, innovation, innovation and account teams to build the courage that earns diversity dividends. They understand that diversity dividends are possible with the right mix of talent - who can deepen and broaden your perspective, to profit with an adoption-culture, not settle for a launch culture. And that just because it's possible, that doesn't mean it automatically happens without courage to uplift, ennoble, challenge and champion what's optimal, not settle for what's risk-averse. Check out their FREE online courage leadership quest to see if you're ready to profit from diversity - with courage.