Harnessing The Power of Diversity in Your Organisation

Ernst and Young's quarterly business journal Performance recently featured an article ('Different is good: how diversity can benefit your organisation') which considered how challenging it can be to harness the power of diversity in teams and which referenced the research of Jeff Polzer (Harvard Business School Professor of Human Resource Management) and Scott E Page (Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science and Economics at the University of Michigan), on the topic

Diversity can be positive or can work against an organisation, improving group performance in some cases but hindering it in others. Performance depends on a range of factors, the most significant of which Polzer calls "interpersonal congruence", or the level of awareness that individual members of a group have of the differing approaches and outlooks of other members. His studies have found that diversity improves creative task performance in groups with high interpersonal congruence, but undermines performance in instances of low interpersonal congruence.

For diversity to pay off, it is therefore vital to validate, rather than suppress, the differences between groups or individuals. As Page explains: "People need to go into meetings recognising that there will be cultural differences but expecting to get better results. The lesson is that you can't just toss people together; that's not going to work."

The challenge, and the opportunity, then would appear to be how one helps diverse individuals and teams be aware of, and better deal with, the differing outlooks and approaches that exist amongst them. In this context, FranklinCovey's work in the area of interpersonal effectiveness over the past 20 years provides both insights and practical development supports, including

• drawing distinctions between 'abundance' vs 'scarcity' mindsets as the motivating factors people would have in the first instance to expend the time and energy on appreciating the differences between them
• communication skills which initially enable people to reach a better understanding of the different perspectives others bring but also allow them to deal effectively with the possible tensions that arise when these perspectives are potentially at odds with their own
• a structure for people to effectively leverage the diversity of opinion and experience that exists to achieve better outcomes