Some teams are made up of a hugely diverse group of people. You might have a project manager, working with designers, IT experts and end-user champions. In my experience, you are likley to be managing a group of people with very different cognitive strengths and preferences...conflict can be pre-programmed.
BUT
If the team starts off, during it's forming phase, with an understanding and deep appreciation of these differences, there is huge benefits to be harvested.
Where does diversity in a team have the biggest impact?
-> INNOVATION: It's not suprising that teams which include different thinkers, people from different background, experiences, members with different skills and angles of insight will produce better and more implementable innovations. Many, many reasearch studies have confirmed this over the past years.
-> PROBLEM SOLVING: Many studies have show that diverse teams outperform in detecting and solving risks and issues.I love Albert Einstein's reflections on this. He said: ' We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them'. In other words: we NEED a diverse team to find new answers to old problems!
-> CHANGE: A more diverse group of people is less likely to fall into -'group-thinking'-mode. Staying edgy, pushing the edge out and being brave to re-evaluate and re-imagine as well as communicating into all those different ways of thinking is what will make teams successful in approaching change and the commuincation and management it.
So, if you would like to build a strong team, understanding each others cognitive preferences and making them work for you (instead of causing conflict), I'd be very happy to talk to you about the process of facilitating this. Just contact me, and I'd be very happy to show you how that is done, and how you could then use this for yourself and your team.
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