Founder of ICQ Global, global experts in measuring and optimising psychological safety, motivational drive and cognitive diversity.
Luis Alvarez
A German Baby Boomer engineer, a Brazilian Millennial designer and an Indonesian Gen-Z programmer walk into a bar. What happens next?
It sounds like a beginning of a bad joke, and I have no idea what they would do there. But I have seen the painful disconnect between what companies hoped would happen at work when they hired a similarly diverse workforce for a significant amount of money and what actually happened when the diverse combination of expertise, beliefs and values clashed despite their best intention and common sense.
The objective is to create a diverse, high-performing team that excels at innovation, collaboration and tackling complex, multifaceted problems even if they lack project-specific knowledge, shared norms and even a possible path to success.
What happens most of the time in real life is the opposite. Achieving synergy requires integrating and leveraging team members’ expertise and perspectives, though those are also the barriers to doing so.
There is a lot of research about established teams who have the luxury of going through the forming, storming, norming and performing stages. However, in the increasingly more rapid and complex environment, an extreme type of teaming called fast-teaming is required to quickly assemble a group of experts who can create swift trust and perform well.
Having worked with several Fortune 200 companies and global organizations over the past 10 years, I’ve found three common reasons for failure among diverse teams and two approaches that lead to success.
Three Common Reasons For Failure
These actions by organizations resulted in failure among teams.
1. Using Last-Century Solutions For Current Challenges
Companies spend a fortune on popular solutions to measure employees' supposed strengths, behavior and personality traits in order to create synergy and boost morale. Yet according to a 2022 Gallup report, stress among the world's workers has reached an all-time high, and globally only 21% of employees are engaged at work. It is like trying to fix the latest smart TV with tools designed for a black-and-white TV.
Trying the same approach harder or giving an outdated tool a new name won't change the outcome, at least not for the better. The reason is that "most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War," according to influential business thinker Gary Hamel.
2. Solving Problems That Are Not The Real Issues
Finding the right candidate is crucial, and profiling them can be efficient if used properly. In reality, it can lead to psychometric discrimination when it is assumed that a person needs to be a certain profile in order to get the job or that their personal traits equal their skills and competency.
Many also believe it is possible to create a high-performing international team based on scientifically stereotypical, cultural models. As more than 80% of cultural differences exist within countries and “country of origin explains on average only 2-12% of inter-individual variance,” it is surprising that many still believe that people from different countries hold different values.
3. Believing That Having A Growth Mindset And Celebrating Diversity Are Enough
According to Carol Dweck, who coined the term “growth mindset,” everybody is a mixture of fixed and growth mindset and we can have a different makeup of it in different areas of our life. Often, what is seen as the outcome of some growth mindset interventions is the effect of more psychological safety, which is the factor that most impacts team effectiveness.
The more diverse a group is, the more challenging that task becomes as the brain is not designed to love or celebrate diversity due to its unpredictable nature. The brain wants familiarity, predictability and energy savings. Getting to know ourselves and people who think and behave differently enables an inclusive environment where team members feel psychologically safe, mistakes are tolerated, ideas are appreciated and constructive conflicts are encouraged.
Two Approaches To Success
The approaches that delivered tangible, measurable results were the following.
1. Focusing On Onboarding And Fast-Teaming Using State-Of-The-Art Solutions
Organizations employ smart people, and they have access to a great variety of knowledge, though integrating highly specialized and diverse expertise is challenging. Due to the ever-changing nature of the world, they often need to get important and urgent things done but without the luxury of stable membership to the group and time to build trust in the traditional way; this requires fast-teaming, which is teamwork on the fly.
In these situations, people might have to work with people they may not have worked with before and that they may not ever work with again. Creating shared mental models, a clear social identity, an engaging vision and efficient ways of communicating with each other unlocks the team’s potential by removing the barriers of interaction and building common ground.
2. Using Data To Facilitate Team Development
Modern technology can reveal team members’ own personal preferences and cultural orientations, among other things. Data will not solve problems, but it gives people a common frame of reference and vocabulary as teams create and facilitate meaningful and precise conversations.
However, no matter how good a solution is, if it is too complicated, most people won’t use it. When that happens, the technology will not deliver the results the buyer is hoping for and that the seller is promising.
The world has changed. New challenges require new ways of working. Future-proofing organizations is about attracting, retaining and engaging the best candidates who are able and willing to collaborate, contribute and innovate.
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