Insights on Excellence | "Insights" Archive

When it comes to teamwork, diversity prevents myopia

by Stephen Hawley Martin
for Virginia Business
January 10, 2006

Cross-functional teams can be extremely effective, particularly in tackling a specific challenge or opportunity. The question is: What's the best way to set one up and to organize it to ensure the maximum chance of success?

It's usually best if team members are chosen by a leader appointed by management. Giving the leader the authority to choose the team will heighten his or her sense of accountability for getting the task done. But the leader should be cautioned to be sure the team has the diversity it needs. The following example demonstrates why.

A newspaper formed a team in response to a reader survey evaluating its entertainment section. The paper was one of several publications competing in a large metropolitan area. The team included representatives from editorial, production and distribution. No one from advertising sales was asked to participate.

The team decided to integrate national entertainment news with local arts events, plays and concerts. They created what looked to be a lively and dynamic new section. But after a few months the team was reconvened. The problem was minimal advertising support.

This time, the team pulled in a representative from ad sales. Prospective advertisers for the section were surveyed, and the problem was identified. The new section was in a tabloid format, which uses full newspaper pages turned on their sides and folded to make a dimensionally smaller section than the rest of the paper. Because more than newspaper served the area, the tabloid format required advertisers to design their ads to fit this section or to rescale existing ads that had been created to run on full-size pages. Many of the advertisers surveyed did not want to go to this trouble and expense.

The section's design was changed to a full-size format, and immediately it began attracting more advertising. If the team had included a representative from advertising sales in the first place, it might have avoided unnecessary rework and loss of revenue during the quarter the new section ran as a tabloid.

This example underscores the value of diversity on cross-functional teams. By diversity, we are not talking just about race, gender, age or sexual orientation. William T. Monahan, the former CEO of Imation and author of Billion Dollar Turnaround: The 3M Spinoff that Became Imation, says that in finding innovative solutions, diversity of thought is as important as other differences. He points out that the Myers-Briggs system for categorizing personalities contains 16 basic types. Imagine how myopic a team would be if all its leaders had the same personality type.

The old saying "birds of a feather flock together" is true. Unless cautioned to do otherwise, leaders will pick team members who resemble themselves. That's human nature.

Studies show that diversity engenders creativity. The more diverse the people on any given task, the better the final product will be, if differences are respected, authenticated and integrated; and communication remains open. Clearly, with many different points of view, projects may take longer to accomplish. But the end result will have more people committed to it because they had a chance to influence the process. They will take a greater sense of pride in the project. Also, a strong leader will have the opportunity to listen to all points of view, then to choose an option and move aggressively and quickly.

At one time or another most managers have been through a management training exercise in which they put in a crisis scenario: they are lost at sea (or in the desert or on the moon) as the result of a crash. All that's left are a handful of items, ranging from a case of scotch to a small mirror to a piece of cheese. Their task is to rank-order the items in terms of their importance to survival.

In this exercise each manager must independently come up with his or her rank order. Then groups of managers are assigned to arrive at some consensus of the ranking. This process parallels real-life group decision making: People arrive at the meeting with some opinions and a little knowledge, and they must react to others in the group to reach a decision.

The final scores in this training exercise are usually set against some "expert" criteria. Repeatedly, groups that have the widest diversity of knowledge, a group ranging, for example, from a former Marine who's an expert in desert survival to an accountant who's never spent a night under the stars, will come up with the list most closely aligned to the "correct" answers. But for such groups to triumph, they must respect the diversity of their members and communicate openly about differences of opinion.

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Stephen Hawley Martin is a former principal of The Martin Agency in Richmond and the author of more than half a dozen books including his newest, Lean Enterprise Leader: How to Get Things Done Without Doing It All Yourself. He is editor and publisher of The Oaklea Press, a book publishing business dedicated primarily to helping business executives increase productivity.