Diversity and inclusion build high-performance teams

High-performance teams that advocate diversity and inclusive behaviors will help scale digital initiatives, and through 2022, 75 percent of organizations with frontline decision-making teams that reflect a diverse and inclusive culture will exceed their financial targets. The impact of diversity and inclusion is highly positive. Gender-diverse and inclusive teams outperformed gender-homogeneous, less inclusive teams by 50 percent, on average.

Differences of age, ethnicity, gender and other dimensions foster team performance

There are certain attributes that build high-performance teams and make them stand out, and two in particular, diversity and inclusion, can improve success. Bringing diversity into the workforce is effective at a business level. The difference in employee performance between non-diverse and diverse organizations is 12 percent, with similar improvements in intent to stay factors.

Having a diversity of age, gender, race and ethnicity, or geographic and national culture in teams reflects the very broad user base that companies have. This in turn allows the organization to better serve its consumers. We know that innovation and diversity are correlated; more diversity of thought is fuel for innovation. In additional to a mixture of age, gender, and cultural backgrounds, CIOs need to also look for “cognitive” diversity, which is mixing people together with different thinking styles, habits and perspectives. Having everyone on a team be the same style will hinder performance. Different people think in different ways, and that diversity can be what saves the team from group think and allows them to achieve better outcomes. Furthermore, as organizations increasingly focus their teams on business product delivery, so they are becoming much more multidisciplinary.

As multidisciplinary teams include business roles, not just IT, a diversity of expertise and experience enables faster decision making. Everyone who needs to make decisions is already on the same team, there is no handing off a project to IT for delivery. Instead, the same team carries the work from design to delivery, and the high level of performance achieved is measured in faster delivery with greater quality.

Create a sense of inclusion to foster involvement and engagement

To build and sustain an increasingly diverse teams, an organization needs to adopt more inclusive behaviors. A meaningful, inspiring purpose matters for any team, because it fosters engagement and a sense of shared investment. Inspired by a common purpose, everyone feels that it is “their” mission, not someone else’s.

Build an inclusive team — “we-dentity”— by building purpose into a team manifesto. A team manifesto creates more engagement with the mission.
Trust plays a critical role in creating a cohesive and inclusive team. Fostering the psychological safety — a shared belief that any team’s member will feel comfortable about taking interpersonal risks — can improve discretionary effort among employees by up to 24 percent. “In this
environment, you are human, you discuss things together, and employees feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question or offering a new idea,” says Robertson.

(The author is distinguished vice president analyst, Gartner)