4i Leadership Learning Forum follow-up; Diversity for High Performance Teams

Following up on the first in our series of events on Diversity, I thought I might be of interest to you to give an overview of the key features of the vibrant discussion which followed the presentation by keynote Barbara Meister and 4i Founder Penny Litras.

Whilst the presentation took the perspective of diversity benefiting high performance teams in the domain of formation skydiving, as well as highlighting the main areas of diversity in both a societal and organisational context, the in the discussion that followed we talked specifically about how diversity can benefit organisations in broad commercial terms, especially in terms of customer engagement, and also in regard to innovation, organisational resilience and leadership.

The key out-takes of the discussion were as follows;

• Respect is the underpinning ‘value’ that diversity relies on to succeed. Without the prevalence of respect as a key feature of the organisational culture, bringing additional diversity to a business can be unsettling or even disruptive and cause as much damage to an organisational culture, and therefore it’s performance, as it brings benefits. This is especially true if diversity is brought in a ‘wave’ as me see in many organisations currently who recognise the benefit, or perceive the need, for diversity and seek to provide a remedy swiftly and seek a new talent solution to add more varied ethnicity, age, gender or cognitive and skills diversity to their business. Respectfulness as a value must be well established and firmly entrenched within the fabric of the organisation, so that the new ideas, counterpoints and broadly different perspectives that a diverse workforce and leadership group brings can be embraced, given due consideration and appropriately adopted to commercial benefit.

• Leadership behaviours must be in place for an organisation to most benefit from a diverse workforce and culture. With respect being one, we also spoke about the need for leadership behaviours conducive to diversity to be developed ideally before an organisation shifts to a more diverse landscape.  This can come with time having first cultivated the diversity of the group, however you may face a high rate of cultural conflict and talent attrition if leadership behaviours (if not already present) do not quickly develop to embrace the respect for diverse perspectives, origins, ideas and interests.

• Cognitive diversity, as well as skills based diversity, are hugely beneficial and can come from a less culturally diverse group, but require the same leadership behaviours, respect and cultural bedrock in order to succeed and deliver maximal organisational benefit.

In a nutshell it seemed clear from the group that diversity cannot work, and in fact can be more damaging than beneficial if applied as a bandaid measure, overlaid onto a culture that does not perceive the benefit of changing perspectives, different views on both the organisation’s capability and customer demands, and seeks only to maintain status quo whilst paying lip-service to the requirement to mirror our increasingly diverse market, society and national perspective.