RESEARCH REPEATEDLY SHOWS THAT GREATER DIVERSITY YIELDS MORE INNOVATION AND HIGHER-QUALITY WORK.
That’s why each individual on your team should bring some unique combination of expertise and skills.
Imagine that your company has experienced a dramatic increase in products returned from customers. If you pull together a team of six engineers to analyze the problem, chances are they’ll make a recommendation consistent with their backgrounds: It’s an engineering issue, and the solution is to rework the design.
As the old cliché goes, when everyone on your team is a “hammer,” then every problem will look like a nail, and every solution will be to pound it. Outcomes will be quick, consistent, and harmonious – but not innovative.
Now suppose you add people from customer service and marketing to your team. Team members will look at the problem from different viewpoints. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, maybe customers don’t understand how to use the product correctly, or maybe they’re buying the wrong model for their purposes.
A variety of perspectives expands the possible solutions. But the team still must work together to come up with a single creative solution. The decision- making takes much longer, and relationships might get strained as members hash out conflicting ideas.
So what’s the right amount of diversity? Here are some principles for assembling an effective team:
MAKE IT SMALL
The larger the team, the more difficult it is to find meeting times, the longer it takes to make decisions, and the tougher it is to manage information and workflow. So bring together the smallest number of people necessary to provide the skills and perspectives you need. That’s usually somewhere between three and seven members.
If you are assuming leadership of an existing team, you’ll need to decide whom to keep and whom to cut loose. If the numbers feel bloated, consider defining a core team of a few essential people and moving others onto a “support” team that you enlist on an ad hoc basis.
INCORPORATE SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE
List the skills and types of expertise you’ll need to tackle the team’s responsibilities. Then identify the fewest number of people who can cover most of those requirements.
INCLUDE DIVERSE APPROACHES TO WORK
The best teams offer a mix of work styles: people who carefully address one task at a time and those who can multitask, folks who excel at contingency planning and those who nimbly adjust when problems strike. When assembling your team, consider how people differ in their outlooks, priorities, and attitudes. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to include every conceivable work style on your team. It’s just not possible.
CONSIDER HOW THEY ARE WIRED
When selecting team members, think about how they’re naturally inclined to act. Though work quality will benefit from a mix of personalities and approaches, relationships might suffer. The big-picture thinkers might regard the detail-oriented people as data geeks crippled by”analysis paralysis.” And the detail people might dismiss the big-picture folks as unrealistic or people who “shoot from the hip.”
Why would you want both types on your team? Imagine how much work would get done with only big-picture thinkers to execute ideas. Probably very little. And you wouldn’t be any better off with an entire team of detail-oriented colleagues. They’d provide clarity, structure, and solid documentation but wouldn’t break new ground. The differences are worth the potential headaches.
So take a good hard look at what your teams are currently like. And maybe, just maybe, mixing things up a bit more might make your workplace work better.
Source: Harvard Business Review