Tom Peters has recently reminded me about the importance of team diversity. While there are many kinds of team diversity that are important, today my topic is cognitive and gender diversity.

Team Cognitive Diversity

Cognitive diversity in a team is reflected by team membership having a balance of preferences in their approach to work. Kathy Kolbe speaks to having a balance of cognitive skills to insure that all requirements of a project are met.

The major cognitive styles that are the basis of her work are: Fact Finder, Follow Through, Quick Start, and Implementer. Her point is that any person will have a preferred style that falls into one of these categories and any team must have a balance of members that reflect all of these styles for that team to be most effective.

In her books, Kathy writes about the issues encountered in teams not having this diversity and her stories ring true. This link is to an overview of some of her concepts.

An overview of Kolbe's approach

Team Gender Diversity

Based on my personal observations of dozens of teams, I believe that project (and most other) teams that contain both male and female participants perform better than teams that are predominately composed of males. My partner in Global Team Alliance, Stefanie Heiter of HeiterConnect Inc, speaks that in some all-female teams “…the tendency is to make the primary focus how we are doing with each other, rather than how we are doing on achieving our task.”

My experience is that in many all-male teams focus too much on task and not enough on each other. The best results are clearly with balance of ‘each other’ and ‘task’; a balance most reliably achieved with a team that is gender-diverse.

My awareness of this concept was awakened decades ago when Honeywell was educating and acting on diversity as both a business and social imperative. The rightness of that position stays with me today.

The following link is to an interesting article from Clark University that provides some thoughts on team diversity. The four attributes about two-thirds through the article are especially relevant.

More about team diversity

Tom Peters and Diversity

Tom doesn’t speak directly to diversity in his new book “Re-imagine!”, but the book certainly reminds me of the importance of diversity and the growing roles of women in business. I have "Re-imagine!" and it reads more like a 350 page ad-free Wired magazine than a book.

His new material was presented in a web conference last month. It is well worth your hour to listen. Follow this link to a PlaceWare replay of his 15 predictions for the future economy, including his predictions for the expanding and strengthening role of women. I don’t know how long PlaceWare keeps these presentations online, so you might want to look at this in the next couple of days.

Tom Peters replay at PlaceWare

Links

Both Tom Peters and Kathy Kolbe’s books are linked from my resources page.

Survey Results

In November of 2003 we asked you “How important is diversity of team membership to the success of your projects and teams?” The results were that 43% said it is very important, 43% said it is somewhat important, and 14% said it made no difference. No one ventured that diversity is not important. Interesting data, and a higher level of ‘very important’ than I might have expected. However, the people who don’t believe in project diversity probably saw the title and didn’t read the column.

One respondent commented that he or she had never thought about this before; I hope he’ll think about it now. Another said that diversity is good depending on the project, as sometimes diversity “disrupts the ability to achieve consensus.” I agree that diversity sometimes makes consensus more difficult; however, two of the benefits of diversity are hearing those alternative ideas and insuring clarity around the consensus.

One person said that “No one at my current company pays much attention to that aspect of teams” and compared that to a previous employer where “we formed the teams and then shared our Kolbe indices to figure out how best to work with each other, and where the weaknesses were.” Hooray for their previous employer.

And the comment that bothered me most: “Our privately held company talks constantly about teams and teamwork--but the reality of the culture is command-and-control and constant surveillance, in which an atmosphere of fear is deliberately propagated to keep people in line as well as to get the most work out of underlings and middle managers.” I worked at a place like that for three months; seemed like years. Can we help this person find a new company?

So if project diversity is so important, what are you doing to improve it? If you have some good-news stories about how diversity has helped your project, please send me an email. There is good news out there - please share it!

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