What Is an Effective Team?

The Power of Diversity

The rationale for putting together a team is to combine different people, personalities, and perspectives to solve a problem. Difference is the whole point. Diverse teams are more effective than homogenous teams because they are better at processing information and using it to come up with new ideas. According to David Rock and Heidi Grant, diverse teams tend to focus more on facts, process those facts more carefully, and are more innovative. What's more, researchers investigating creativity and innovation have consistently demonstrated "the value of exposing individuals to experiences with multiple perspectives and worldviews. It is the combination of these various perspectives in novel ways that results in new ideas 'popping up'. Creative 'aha' moments do not happen by themselves". In his book: The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Scott Page puts it like this:

As individuals we can accomplish only so much. We're limited in our abilities. Our heads contain only so many neurons and axons. Collectively, we face no such constraint. We possess incredible capacity to think differently. These differences can provide the seeds of innovation, progress, and understanding.

Despite these widely documented advantages of diverse teams, people often approach a diverse team with trepidation. Indeed, bridging differences can be a challenge, especially if some team members feel threatened by ideas and perspectives that feel foreign to them. But diversity can result in conflict, even when everyone on the team only wants the best for others. This is especially true on teams made up of people from different countries. Such teams are vulnerable to cultural misunderstandings that can transform minor differences of opinion into major conflicts. Cultural differences can also make it hard for team members to trust each other, because different cultures have different ways of demonstrating respect and trust.

In her book The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, Erin Meyer describes negotiations between people from two companies, one American and one Brazilian. The first round of negotiations took place in Jacksonville, Mississippi, with the American hosts taking care stick to the agenda, so as to avoid wasting any time:

At the end of the two days, the American team felt great about all they had accomplished. The discussions, they believed, were efficient and productive. The short lunches and tight scheduling signified respect for the time the Brazilians invested in preparing for the negotiations and traveling to an out-of-the-way location. The Brazilians, on the other hand, were less upbeat and felt the meetings had not gone as well as hoped.

As it turned out, the Brazilians felt that the efficient, organized American approach left them no time to get to know their potential new business partners. During the next round of negotiations, in Brazil, the South American hosts left time for long lunches and dinners that "stretched into the late evening," lots of good food and conversation. But this "socializing marathon" made the Americans uncomfortable because they thought the Brazilians weren't taking the negotiations seriously. In fact the opposite was true - the Brazilians were attempting to show respect for the Americans by attempting to get to know them so as to develop "personal connection and trust".

Decades of psychology research has established that the best way to convince someone to adopt a new behavior is to convince him that other people have already adopted that behavior. So if you want individual team members to start showing up on time for meetings, for example, you can start by pointing out that the majority of team members do show up on time. As Leon Neyfakh writes in an article about how to change the way people do things: "a culture of respect and kindness isn't necessarily made up of angels - just people who have come to believe that that's what everyone else thinks is the right way to act".

When they go unrecognized, cross-cultural misunderstandings like this can cause a host of ill-feelings. The first step toward preventing these misunderstandings is self-knowledge. What are your cultural biases, and how do they affect what you expect of other people?

When thinking about culture, keep in mind that different generations have different cultures, too. Behavior that might feel perfectly acceptable to a twenty-four-year-old (texting during a meeting, wearing casual clothes to work) are often frowned on by older workers. Like cross-cultural differences, generational traits can cause unexpected conflicts on a team. This can be exacerbated if older team members feel threatened by younger workers, perhaps because younger workers are better at mastering new technology. Meanwhile, because of their lack of experience, younger workers might lack the ability to synthesize new information about a project. Your attempts to manage a multi-generational team can really go off the rails if you make the mistake of confusing "character issues like immaturity, laziness, or intractability with generational traits" (Wall Street Journal n.d.).

Teams also have their own cultures, and sometimes you'll have to navigate widely-diverging cultures on multiple teams. Take the time to get to know your team's set of norms and expectations, especially if you're joining a well-established group. After a little bit of observation, you might conclude that your team's culture is preventing it from achieving its goals, in which case, if you happen to be the team leader, you'll need to lead the team in a new direction.

Personality Power

Even among people from similar backgrounds, differences in personality can invigorate a team, injecting fresh perspectives and new ideas. A team of diverse personality types can be a challenge to manage, but such a team generates richer input on the project's progress, increasing the odds of project success.