Team diversity
People tend to employ people who are like them. This could look like the same personality style, work gearing, leadership style, soft skills, or a combination of the above.
In spite of multiple rounds of interviews, profiling, independent perspectives, etc., we’ve often found ourselves working in teams where people have very similar wiring.
This doesn’t seem like a bad idea in the beginning – people seem to find common ground more quickly and feel more at home working with people they experience as being like them. But it often quickly becomes problematic for several reasons:
1) Echo chamber
When people are similar, they tend to see the world from the same perspective and then they end up hearing back, from their teammates, the very things they’ve said or would say themselves.
This can create an unhelpful reinforcement loop which may not actually be right or helpful.
2) Double-downs
It’s a term we use when people have wiring that intensifies a certain kind of behaviour. For example, Brad as a self-preservation quiet observer is already withdrawn as a self-preservation person, but when combined with his personality type, he can have the tendency to be particularly reserved.
Now imagine a whole team of people like Brad. And let’s say they’re software developers who like to work from home and don’t like talking. These kinds of patterns can quickly get in people’s way.
3) Projection
Projection is a psychological term. It happens when people call out things in others because they’re actually like that themselves, but they hate it in themselves. So when they see it in others, they tend to get prickled by it and may even call it out.
And when people get called out for something the other person also does, it looks like hypocrisy – which it is.
The list can go on – a lot of withdrawn people in one space or a lot of assertive people in one space can have knock-on effects.
A better way
When we have diversity in a team, it creates difference: different intelligence centres (head, heart, gut), different social instincts, work gearing and leaderhsip styles.
At first this is really tricky. People will naturally pull away from each other in the beginning and differ on approach. This often leads to conflict.
But as they learn the skill of stepping forwards and stepping backwards, things start to change. We’ll cover more on this here.
A team that understands the skill sets around the table defers to the people who are best positioned to take the lead on something.
As teams learn that the sum of the parts is better than the individual contribution, they start to think about how they can work together and progress together.
You can’t profile for it
Having said that, it doesn’t mean you can simply profile people in an attempt to get the “right person” into the company or onto the team.
It’s important to understand that people are not robots. The way people tend to show up is along the lines of their default behaviours. But when they choose, with conscious thought, to show up differently, they can behave differently.
The process of working with people in this way is more an art than it is a science. It’s about taking the time to understand the nuances.
