We know that research shows diversity on teams has a real impact on financial performance. But is your team taking advantage of its cognitive diversity?
Cognitive diversity is a new perspective on a familiar topic. It’s an often overlooked aspect of diversity. Cognitive diversity is about cultivating and embracing a team with a difference in perspectives and information processing styles. Team members that are cognitively diverse have a unique advantage when working through problems, approaching change, processing information, and performing in complex situations.
A cognitively diverse team responds to change, challenges, or opportunities with disparate solutions, instead of homogeneous ones. Instead of approaching a task with the mindset of “how we always do things”, the team has an eye toward innovation and challenging processes because their unique viewpoints enable them to approach problems with the benefit of multiple angles.
To illustrate the benefits of a team that thinks differently, Harvard Business Review researchers ran studies based off of earlier research showing how higher cognitive diversity correlates with better performance.
They looked at how the twin factors of Knowledge Processing – whether individuals deployed existing knowledge or generated new knowledge – and Perspective – the extent to which people relied on their own expertise or encouraged the ideas of others – impacted the time taken to solve a challenge.
The result? The more similar a team was in their knowledge processing or perspective, the higher the rate of failure.
It’s important to realize that the recruiting process may lead to a functional bias toward uniform thinking styles. It is common to hire those who we observe thinking and expressing themselves similarly, or someone you think will thrive in your organizational culture. Even if your team members are diverse culturally, their thinking styles may not be. Think of it as a type of “invisible diversity.”
It takes hard work to mine for differences in how people react to change and it can be tempting to treat someone’s discomfort or misgivings as problematic, or to not question the status quo when seeking a swift resolution to a business challenge or operation.
Here are a few ways I’ve been experimenting with encouraging and discovering my team’s cognitive diversity. These have also given us an idea of where we need to look outside of our own perspective to innovate. I’ve also found that using a tool like Everything DiSC® gives me great insight on my team’s preferences and style of how we like to be approached and communicated with.
Understanding and benefiting from cognitive diversity on your team starts by examining difference without judgement and being self-aware. Whether cognitively diverse or not, teams are made up of individuals who react differently during conflict. The Everything DiSC® Productive Conflict assessment can be used with everyone in your organization, but is optimal for teams, and is designed to help curb destructive reactions that can get in the way of productive relationships, and help team members become less reactive and more effective.