Diverse Teams: Three Key Advantages to Aim For

Why Build Diverse Teams?

Building diverse teams is no longer a box-ticking exercise to avoid expensive employment tribunals. Many years of promoting the benefits of diversity have seen organisations improve their profile by hiring people from different backgrounds.

But some organisations are going much further.

Beyond diversity as an employment strategy, there is a trend towards building diverse teams to strategically enhance operations. In other words, line managers are not only considering the best skills and professional experience for their teams but also a wide spread of backgrounds, life experiences and personalities.

Diverse teams offer three key advantages, so let’s explore how they bring benefit to your organisation. Keep these advantages in mind as you consider the best people to bring on board.

Diversity for Greater Creativity

At a fundamental level, the act of creation is bringing two or more elements into relationship to form something new. A painter brings shapes and colours together to create an artwork, while a sculptor combines shapes, colours and materials to create a sculpture.

Business innovation and disruption occur in much the same way. Organisations bring components or concepts into relationship to create new offerings that deliver value to people’s lives. For example, smartphones combined the portability of a telephone with the functionality of a computer. Spotify combined digital music with a subscription service.

There are a vast number of components and concepts in the world and an even vaster number of combinations of them. Yet even someone who spent a lifetime absorbing information will still only be aware of a fraction of these concepts. Unfortunately, that means a single human brain can be creatively limited by default.

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This is the origin of the phrase ‘two heads are better than one’. As soon as you add another person, you increase the capability to identify and combine elements in new ways. But only if the two people are different. If both think in roughly the same way, then the value of having the extra head is diminished. This is why diverse teams tend to do significantly better than those populated by similar people.

Diverse teams not only have immediate access to more knowledge, they can also be more effective at analysing information. This is because different perspectives enable people to raise a breadth of questions that drive them towards the most important facts.

Diversity also reduces ‘team bias’ towards similar approaches and solutions because people bring different ways of looking at challenges. This enables them to combine components and concepts in innovative and exciting ways and find the ideas that create disruption.

Diverse Teams for Broader Reach

The foundation commercial principle for every business is to create something everybody wants. In other words, organisations look to offer products or services that have the broadest possible reach, even within specialist sectors and industries. Unfortunately, this isn’t easy to do, particularly in saturated markets.

One of the key psychological barriers is that human beings cannot fully set aside their subjective perspective of life, no matter how objective we try to be. That means we cannot help but create with ourselves in mind. We tend to think about what we would like, which doesn’t necessarily mean that others want it too.

Naturally, diverse teams are more objective than teams of similar people because a broader array of needs and tastes are considered. This significantly increases the chances of reaching a much wider audience with your product or service.

More than that, it also helps you to tailor your offering to specific audience segments. You can consider how different aspects of the same product or service appeal to different audiences, or even have multiple versions aimed at different market segments. Either way, diverse teams give you a greater capability to achieve this.

Diversity Can Minimumise Aversion

Looking at the psychology of diversity from another perspective, diverse teams also reduce the risk of inadvertently creating something that turns people off. To understand how let’s consider the publishing industry.

There may only be one name on the front cover of a novel, but most published authors have an editor. They may also have a range of consultants who provide advice on characters and story, particularly when writing about highly technical roles such as detectives, forensics and doctors. All of this input makes a much better book than a single author could create on their own.

However, more commonly nowadays, an author’s novel may also be read by a number of ‘sensitivity readers.’

Let’s say someone is writing a novel about a group of young adults from different countries at the same international school. The author has a single identity, and their background and life experience won’t be as broad as the characters they wish to write about. Ideally, a number of sensitivity readers will check the authenticity of the areas that the author is less knowledgeable of.

More importantly, sensitivity readers greatly reduce the risk of publishing something that might be unintentionally offensive to a segment of the audience. If we consider the foundation commercial principle of ‘create something everybody wants’, then the last thing we want to do is limit sales because we cause offence. Again, having a diverse team gives you significantly greater capability to avoid this with your products and services.

Diverse teams have also become a cornerstone of modern marketing. Occasionally, we hear of an advertisement that causes a backlash or is banned by the Advertising Standards Authority. In some cases, the upset is caused by something so blatant that we wonder how the organisation missed it. The reason tends to be a limitation of perspective. The marketing team simply didn’t have the diversity to spot the error.

Capitalising on Diverse Teams

The power of diverse teams to create new product and service innovations, reach a broader audience and minimise consumer aversion brings a huge range of benefits to an organisation.

Aside from the ability to engineer disruptive ideas, it can improve problem-solving and decision-making, and create stronger team dynamics. It can even enhance employee engagement and morale. Team members feel like they work in an equal-opportunity environment that they are able to freely express themselves in.

That’s not to say diverse teams don’t experience challenges. Most commonly, diverse backgrounds and cultures can sometimes lead to issues around expectations and communication. However, an open approach to resolving conflicts goes a long way to minimising their impact on creativity and productivity.