Did you hear about the other ‘D’ in “DEI”?
When you hear the word “diversity”, it may conjure up a company-wide initiative relating to demographic diversity of race, gender and ethnicity. In fact, diversity is defined in one way as: the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc. Efforts around diversity have been growing for years and are helping to shape our current businesses and society for the better.
Let’s review another type of diversity - experiential diversity – where the range of skills and talents of team members are leveraged to improve team and business performance. Imagine a team where everyone thinks the same way because they have similar experiences, skills, and talents. Would they be able to anticipate the needs of a wide range of customers? Would they be able to overcome obstacles creatively? Or would the team members be hampered by having the same assumption set?
Consider a simple example: you need to remodel your kitchen. Would you prefer to have three carpenters do the job, or have one carpenter, an electrician, and a plumber updating your kitchen together? I guess it depends on how good the carpenters are at electrical work and plumbing! But you get the point: each individual brings a unique set of skills, perspectives, history, and experiences - diversity! Businesses need to leverage this diversity to accelerate progress and achieve results.
Now imagine a team of people from diverse educational backgrounds, diverse methods of thought, and diverse skills gained from previous experiences. Some of the team members might be good at organization, others at individual technical work, and still others at leadership. Combining the experiential diversity of team members to optimize the team’s performance requires an awareness of each person’s skills, background, likes and dislikes, strengths, and previous project experiences. In other words, it is not always obvious how to organize your team for success. Don’t assume that people’s current assignments are optimal.
Scan your current team, what experiential diversity do you see? Did you ever take note of it before? Do you know the skills, strengths, and likes/dislikes of your team members? Are you assigning projects based on their skills and where they could make the biggest impact? Or are you assigning projects to whoever’s available (even if their skills do not align well with the project needs)? Have you talked to each team member to assess their desired focus areas? Hiring the best employees into your team is critical, but if you do not recognize and utilize their experiential diversity, you may be sacrificing business results. Always work to leverage and support diversity, whether demographic diversity or experiential diversity. The outcomes will be incredible.
For more guidance on setting up your team for success, reach out to CAEDENCE. Our team development program, emerging leaders coaching, and “hands-on” work with client teams are all options to help accelerate your results.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
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