Team Diversity

In spite of multiple rounds of interviews, profiling and independent perspectives, we have often found ourselves working in teams where people have very similar wiring. Early on this does not seem like a bad idea. People find common ground more quickly and feel more at home working with people they experience as being like them. But it quickly becomes a problem, for several reasons.

Why sameness becomes a problem

Reinforcement loop. When people are similar, they tend to see the world from the same perspective, and then they hear back from their teammates the very things they would have said themselves. That can create an unhelpful loop that is not necessarily right or helpful.

Intensification. When wiring stacks, behaviour intensifies. Brad, a self-preservation quiet observer, is already withdrawn, and combined with his personality type he can be particularly reserved. Now imagine a whole team of people like Brad, software developers who like to work from home and do not enjoy talking. That pattern quickly gets in everyone's way.

Projection. A psychological term: people call out in others the very things they dislike in themselves, get prickled by it, and may even name it. When someone is called out for something the caller also does, it reads as hypocrisy, because it is.

The list goes on. A lot of withdrawn people in one space, or a lot of assertive people in one space, both have knock-on effects.

What diversity unlocks

When a team has real diversity, it creates difference: different intelligence centres of head, heart and gut, different social instincts, different work gearing and leadership styles. At first this is genuinely tricky. People naturally pull away from each other and differ on approach, which often leads to conflict.

But as a team learns the skill of stepping forward and stepping back, things start to change. A team that understands the skill sets around the table defers to whoever is best placed to lead a given thing. As it learns that the sum of the parts is greater than the individual contribution, it starts to think about how it can work and progress together. This is where a high-performance team is built, and it draws on the personality lenses of intelligence centres, stance and instincts.

You cannot profile for it

None of this means you can simply profile people and slot the “right person” into a team. People are not robots. They tend to show up along their default behaviours, but when they consciously choose to, they can show up differently. Working with people this way is more art than science. It is about taking the time to understand the nuances.