When we talk about diversity in teams, your mind probably goes straight to thinking about gender diversity or perhaps age or ethnicity. When you picture a diverse team, does your brain conjure an image of people of all backgrounds, abilities and ages?
It’s so easy to do this, especially since diversity is typically framed around cultural heritage and gender. However, in the coaching and leadership world, the focus and work are around behavioural diversity and inclusion.
Diversity isn’t just about surface-level characteristics. When you’re looking at diversity from a different perspective, we all have preferred behavioural styles, preferred ways of doing things, default decision-making patterns, values, and communication styles regardless of our culture, education, history, and so on.
As you will know, there are numerous, well-documented benefits of having a diverse and inclusive team. A team that can work with one another effectively is essential for high performing teams. In inclusive teams, every team member feels able to bring their true selves to work. They are encouraged to work with one another to tap into the skills and behaviours of all members. Whatever the role of the team, everyone is needed to make this work. For example, the goal could be to make to impact the future, to inspire the organisation, to deliver a successful marketing strategy, or to engage and develop people.
What is the goal of diversity?
Ultimately, having a diverse team, when everyone is respected and included, needs to be the goal. Problems can surface when you’ve achieved only one of these steps. Having a diverse team is great, but without inclusion, it creates a problem. As an example, you could have a team meeting with diverse surface-level characteristics, but on a deeper level, not everyone is included. If you have extraverted colleagues who are talkers in meetings, the introverts can leave the room feeling unheard. If everyone is not included, then you are not tapping into the strengths of all members. Your colleagues could become disengaged, feel devalued, stop performing well and ultimately start looking for opportunities elsewhere. On the other hand, when meetings and teams are truly inclusive, and people are working well together, the value of teamwork comes to life. It feels tangible, and you can actually see results.
Why is diversity important?
You know diversity is important. It’s most likely (and hopefully) on your business agenda. Even if you think you have a diverse team, our unconscious biases mean that, as humans, we are pre-programmed to gravitate towards people like ourselves. In busy times, it’s even more likely that we default to our ‘norm,’ i.e. people who seem like us.
Making a conscious choice to address diversity in your team leads to increased performance. It’s hard to ignore the research. For example, teams perform up to 30% better in high-diversity environments, according to this article in CIO magazine. The same article also picks out that 76% of job seekers say a diverse and inclusive workforce is essential.
Even a small step towards improving diversity, such as hiring more women into the leadership team, will have a huge impact on your company performance. This report from McKinsey highlights that “companies with more than 30 percent women executives were more likely to outperform companies where this percentage ranged from 10 to 30, and in turn, these companies were more likely to outperform those with even fewer women executives or none at all”
Why do diverse personalities matter?
We all have different preferences and tendencies. If we didn’t, it would be a very bland ‘vanilla’ society (not that there is anything wrong with vanilla, of course, but it helps illustrate the point!) If we all behaved the same way and liked or disliked the same things, there would be no innovation, no creativity, no collaborative group thinking and no progress.
This is where understanding personalities, preferences and behaviours comes into its own. The Everything DiSC model is a tool to help better understand an individual’s preferences and tendencies. We all have a dominant trait characteristic or two that steers the way we think, act, feel, make decisions, behave under pressure and so on.
DiSC helps you to understand people at a deeper level. To add context, think of a time when a colleague reacted in a way that was alien to you. Rather than dismissing this or thinking your colleague is wrong, it helps people realise that their way isn’t the only way, or it might not be the best way to approach the situation.
On team development days, we encourage attendees to get curious not only about their behaviour and preferences but also about their colleagues.
As Abraham Lincoln once said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”
What would it do for your team if you got to know each other a little better? Contact us today to find out more about team behaviours, team performance and Everything DiSC
