Discover the 4 essential steps to unlock your team's full potential, from understanding cognitive diversity to enhancing collaboration and leadership skills with these practical strategies.
Managing a team is always a risk. You’ve often become a manager, not because you’re a great people person or even because you’ve demonstrated great leadership skills. You’ve probably become a manager because you were good at doing your previous job. When you take your first management role, suddenly a huge proportion of your credibility and reputation is based, not on your performance, but on the performance of your team.
As you gain seniority, the proportion of reliance on others to deliver to enhance your reputation only increases. The CEO of Unilever does not control the quality of ice cream sold, has no input to the flavors, the marketing or distribution. But if sales of ice cream drop, it is the CEO who will deal with awkward shareholder questions.
It’s not until you’re actually doing the job that any one talks about team motivation, employee development, or team collaboration!
Managing performance
This means that a leader’s most important job is to manage their team’s performance. Ideally, you inherit a team and year on year increase team performance. To do that, you need to understand the team’s potential and you need to find ways to motivate, encourage and develop the team.
Many large organizations will have a high potentials’ program of some kind. A way of identifying and developing key talent. And they’ll probably invest in leadership development. But it’s possible that these programs aren’t delivering quite as much as they promise.
In an experiment conducted in the early 2000’s, a researcher looked at the success rate of the top financial forecasters in a large organization. The most accurate forecaster was around 5% better than the average of the entire large group looked at. However, an amalgamated result of the next six most accurate forecasters was 15% more accurate.
‘Diversity dividend’?
This is the secret of diversity. And it’s really obvious, to the extent we even have a cliché that – two heads are better than one. And that’s the principle behind cognitive diversity.
But it begs a question – how do you know if you have a cognitively diverse team? After all, if you recruit the best graduates in engineering, it’s unlikely they will have had vastly different educations. Physics and math are the same wherever you grew up, after all.
Maybe surprisingly, one of the best indicators of cognitive diversity is one often associated with poor performance in a team – arguments and disagreements. If everyone agrees with each other, it’s either because they have discovered a previously unknown and immutable law of the universe, or because they are basing their opinion on the same data, processing it in the same way and analyzing with the same tools. A quote attributed (probably incorrectly) to General Patton says, ‘If everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking.’
If it’s hurting, it’s working!
So, if your team is disagreeing and yelling at each other, it may be because they hate each other. But more likely, it means that you have a team with the potential to be more innovative and creative and therefore it’s a team with the potential for higher performance.
It doesn’t need a genius to work out that a team of infighting and arguments is not sustainable in terms of delivering against performance. What we need is a way of harnessing the power of disagreement without sacrificing collaboration, cooperation and productivity.
These four steps will help:
- Attitude: Consciously resolve to build a high-performing team
- Awareness: Identify the difference
- Knowledge: Deduce the potential
- Skills: Create connections and shared interests
Coincidentally (maybe), they are also the four elements of cultural intelligence – attitude, awareness, knowledge and skills!
Attitude
This part is often overlooked. Frequently, managers assume that everyone wants the team to succeed and that they know what to do. And it’s fair to say that at some obscure depth of consciousness, few people would actively work against success. But that is very different from embracing an ambition to raise performance.
Human beings instinctively seek comfort. Comfort lies very firmly in the status quo and is a natural enemy of change or exertion. And it’s true for team leaders too. Unless we consciously state openly and clearly that we want to raise performance levels and grow a team’s potential, it may remain an unconscious and unrealized ambition.
Setting out a clear objective around potential and performance puts your team on notice. It tells them that you won’t accept ‘good enough’; it tells them that you recognize their uniqueness and it’s time to assert their value-add in the team context. Your attitude will set the tone for the team – they’ll take the lead from how you talk and act.
And convincing them that this is your number one priority is essential: because if they aren’t on board with your plan to raise performance and get somewhere near their potential, there is no chance it’s going to happen.
Awareness
If you don’t know what potential you have, not only can you not achieve it, but you also can’t plan on how to achieve it. You may have plenty of tools to help you identify the technical skills of individuals; you may even have tools to help you understand the interpersonal skills of your team – but do you know what the potential of cognitive diversity is?
Using a cultural team profiling tool is one way to go. A heavy industrial manufacturer is using Worldprism Teams in exactly this way. Each employee completes a short cultural survey, and the results are analyzed a team level. This shows the range of diversity according to nine cultural dimensions, but also identifies the total unique styles within the team – and this is the team’s cultural potential.
After all, the experiment we mentioned earlier showed that the more difference you have within the team the higher the potential for productivity and performance – and this comes from having a wide range of perspectives and approaches. If you know how many perspectives you have, you can infer what the potential is.
In one panel event last year, an anonymous attendee posted this question in chat to the panel: ‘How many women or black people in my team do I need to achieve a performance boost?’ And while I suspect the question was deliberately provocative, behind it lies a challenge to accepted notions of diversity and the focus on the ‘diversity dividend.’
Awareness of difference at a cognitive level puts the emphasis on inclusion, not on ‘diversity picks.’ And you’ll find that representation increases naturally when you focus on building a team for performance rather than cultural fit.
Knowledge
The Worldprism Teams report gives you the range of styles in nine dimensions, covering three general areas: relating (how we interact with others), regulating (how we organize our work and processes) and reasoning (how we approach our tasks and challenges). That range shows you the impact of difference.
In one of the teams from the manufacturing company mentioned above, we discovered that in a team of 13 people, 12 of them scored very high on the risk-avoiding dimension, and one of them extremely high in risk-taking; the same team has a very even spread across the tight/loose time dimension, meaning that everyone in the team had a slightly different view of time.
When a coach probed into the impact a bit more, the team leader discovered that the risk avoiding tendency was drowning out a more ambitious innovative agenda proposed by one person. The team was content mitigating every risk, aiming for ‘OK’ and missing the opportunity to push the boundary a little bit by giving voice to dissent in their decision making.
The team also started to recognize why deadlines where so complex to agree – with such a vast array of time approaches. But they also saw the strength of this approach. Those on the tight side of the dimension provided impetus and drive to keep moving forward according to plan. But those on the loose side ensured that there was always flexibility to accommodate the unexpected or to build in extra time to prioritize quality over deadlines when appropriate.
This knowledge, when made explicit, is invaluable in raising the potential horizon of the team. If, as Plato argued, a team is greater than the sum of its parts, when each of those parts is working in harmony the value add from team collaboration is even greater.
Skills
Diversity, by itself has zero potential. If you have 10 people with nothing in common, no shared goals, no overlap in ambition nothing will ever get done. Any conversation will dissolve into a mass of self-interest and personal ambition.
To achieve the team’s full cognitive potential, the leader has one duty – to build connections. They must enable and empower the flow of information, push and shape collaboration and provide the unifying thread that gives the common sense of purpose.
And a culturally intelligent leader will recognize that just as a group of individuals has different approaches to time and risk, motivation and responsibility require an individualized approach.
Some of that will come as you work through the awareness and knowledge we mentioned above. Some will be inspired by the team as you create the psychological safety and empowerment for them to propose alternative ways of working. And some of it will require conscious, consistent and collaborative effort.
It is the intentional part that is hardest. Recognizing when disagreement is constructive before it descends into ranting and insults. Putting forward your perspective, but still supporting the decision when your idea is not included. As a team leader, you may feel like a mediator at times – and as a mediator does, you will need to ensure that no one sees discussions as a win/loss scenario, but as a team win – whatever the outcome.
You’ll need to stock up on empathy, refresh your listening skills and perfect your facilitator’s approach.
Orchestrating performance
A team is like a concert orchestra. If you only have violins, playing the top line of notes, it may be pleasant, but it’s not much different to having one person play one violin. And with that set up, there’s not much room to improve.
If you have a full orchestra of instruments, playing different notes, or playing a different tempo or key, the chances are it’s going to sound horrible – but there is potential.
But when you introduce a skilled conductor, who knows the strengths of each instrument, who can set the tempo and key and can get everyone to start at the right time… that’s when the magic happens.
The orchestra relies on each musician practicing and developing their own individual skills, but it’s only when the conductor brings them together that people are prepared to pay to listen!
Team performance doesn’t happen by itself; but with a little help, you can power up your team with culturally intelligent cognitive diversity – why not check out Country Navigator’s Worldprism Teams tool - email us to learn more.
With more than 30 years of experience supporting over one million people globally, we are committed to driving meaningful change. Start your free trial today to access Worldprism and more training programmes.
Alternatively, fill in our form below and we'll be in touch:
Comments