“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got,” goes the saying. If you think in the same way as you always have, you will find it difficult to come up with new solutions to problems. Add a few new people to the project team, and you’ll have a better chance of generating some new ideas.
Some management theorists have spent their lives working out the best mix of team roles. Meredith Belbin came up with a model of 9 team roles, including Shaper and Plant – terms that don’t mean much to people who haven’t studied his theory. The Strength Deployment Inventory looks at how you interact with others with the aim of helping people understand why conflict happens in teams.
However, sometimes you don’t have the choice of whom you work with on a project: the team is assigned to you, and you just have to make the most of it, whether you have a Shaper in the group or not. So what if you don’t have a diverse team and instead you’ve ended up with the usual suspects? Can you still be a success?
Diversity Is Everywhere
Diversity has a wide meaning, wider than most of us generally acknowledge. While we know, logically, that all Sales people can’t possibly be alike, there is still the temptation to conjure up that stereotype of ‘Sales’. And ‘IT’ and ‘Finance’. Part of creating a diverse team is understanding that you already have a diverse team.
There are different types of diversity: some types you can visually see. What’s the balance of men and women in the team? Where are they based? Geography also makes people diverse, even between towns. There are some types of diversity that you can have a guess at if you know the person a little, such as age (although you might not want to guess out loud), educational background and family situation. Then there are some that it might take you a while to uncover, such as appetite for risk or tolerance for ambiguity, and some lifestyle choices like whether they prefer dogs or cats.
OK, that last one may seem a little flippant, but the point is that however similar people may appear – especially if they have been operating in the same corporate culture for several years – people are different.
Encouraging Diversity
Sometimes it is easier to gloss over the differences and focus on the similarities. There is the perception that this approach helps avoid conflict and therefore contributes to smoother-running projects. But that can just push the differences further underground to rise up at an inopportune moment.
The first response to difference is often fear, and while that doesn’t manifest itself so much in the workplace, it can stimulate the caveman response of fight or flight. In turn, this means conflict on the project team. A slightly better team behaviour is where diversity is tolerated, and this is usually in response to legislation. An even better team behavior is acceptance that the team will not always agree about everything. You do not need to be completely in agreement with someone to accept that they have a different view of the problem or task in hand.
This response will, with any luck, evolve into valuing and celebrating the differences in the team, where each individual is appreciated for what they bring to the project.
More Stakeholders, More Views
Diversity in teams is important on all projects, but especially so on larger initiatives. Enterprise-wide projects tend to have a lot of different stakeholders, each having particular views on the project and how it should be done. A diverse team will have its own views on how things should be done. It would be great to hear, “Your way of thinking is a bit like our Marketing Director’s. Let me run this presentation by you so that you can tell me how she’s likely to respond.” Using the diversity in the team provides more options and more opinions, and while this can be difficult to manage at first, it can provide contribute to better project results.
Don’t know where to start? Think about your current or next project. If it is a project of strategic or operational significance you are likely to assign experienced resources. What about if you added a team member with less than 6 months’ experience? This would give the team a new, valuable perspective and the new team member learns in the process.
At Ten Six we work with diverse teams all the time. The best teams are the ones that know they are diverse, and value the contributions of each team member for what they can bring to the project to help achieve the greatest degree of project success.