Is Your Team as Diverse as it Should Be?
The success of a team no longer relies solely on the team members’ combined skill set. Recent studies have shown that teams with diverse cultures are more successful than teams without diversity.
Diversity does not only mean culture. Diversity can pertain to age, gender, thinking ability, skill-sets, and life experience. Having one or more team members from each category can create a more successful team because these individuals will approach problems with a different lens. To improve the performance of a team, teams must pay attention and respect its members’ individual personalities. Though it may take longer for psychologically diverse teams to achieve good cooperation, once they cultivate an openness to opposing opinions, there is no limit on what they can do.
3 Keys To Cohesive Diverse Teams
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Understand Diverse Teams Will Also Have Diverse Opinions
When a group of people with diverse opinions, attitudes and ways of thinking get together, sometimes things can get messy. Understanding that diverse teams won’t always get along helps plan for conflict and ways to resolve it. The best thing to do is to take a step back and let your team work it out. Let your team work on their team building skills and learn to work out their creative differences. Diverse teams help members explore problems from various angles. One member’s experience may help cultivate new ideas and new approaches to a problem. Seeing a problem from another member’s point of view will keep members respecting each other and working as a team.
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Push Your Team Out of Their Comfort Zone
It is human nature to seek validity from our peers. Team members will gravitate towards people who share their views and opinions, as well as their cultures and backgrounds. However, to truly see the benefits of a diverse teams, sometimes you have to shake things up a bit. Creating cross-disciplinary teams can help extinguish cliques across cultures, gender and departments within a company. Creating this kind of environment helps teams flourish and succeed.
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Cultivate a Team With Open Minds
Team members are less likely to interject with suggestions or creative ideas if they feel their opinions will be shut down by others. Younger or newer members may not feel comfortable sharing their opinions or skills if the company has a traditional, hierarchical structure and culture. To help members feel more at ease about sharing their creative problem-solving skills, praise and respect the member’s suggestions, input and feedback. This will help boost employee motivation and create a more successful team.
Fun Team Building wants help you create a successful, diverse team
Fun Team Building with Larry Lipman is an Atlanta based company and can help you get the most out of your workplace diversity and make your teams successful! Give Larry a call today at (770) 333-3303 to see how he can help!