Diversify me

 

One of my ‘friends read my post Earn What You’re Worth and she said that she agreed with some and disagree with other parts.  That’s exciting!!

Hey, not everyone is going to agree with me, and that’s OK!  I embrace others’ opinions because they’ve had different experiences than I have.

I love love love that she’s comfortable enough in our friendship to share her honest opinions.  Actually, this is a MintROI Tool #8 – Embrace thought diversity. 

Thought diversity is not new to the workforce, it’s been around for several years.  A 2013 study published by Deloitte “Diversity’s new frontier: Diversity of thought and the future of the workforce”  outlines the benefits of thought diversity and how to achieve it.  Among the benefits, it lists guarding against group think and expert overconfidence as well as increasing insights.  The study also suggests that to create diverse thought in an organization, you should hire differently, manage differently, and promote differently.  What this study, and others like it, asked us to do was effectively move away from a “more like me” mentality, towards a “complement me” mentality.

When I took over my current team, one of the first things I did was create an environment where it was safe for each team member to have their own opinion.  And why wouldn’t I?  I’m not always going to be the smartest person in the group.  Neither is Jainey, neither is Sam, neither is Manish.  We’re all going to take turns being the smartest one, because of the various experiences we’ve had.  So why wouldn’t I want to benefit from someone else’s wisdom?  I can’t do that if my team members don’t feel like they are allowed to have a voice.  If I shut them down every time they disagree with me, they will quickly learn never to speak up.

Have you ever heard a boss or person of authority in business say, “this is not a democracy”?  I have, and it urked me to the core.  First off, I thought a democracy was a good thing.  The leaders who used that term wanted to shut down team conflict quickly and lead by a strong arm.  That taught the team it was not ok to disagree with the boss, regardless of what you really thought about their direction.  That ultimately caused a dis-empowered team and led to a lot of internal negative talk among the staff outside of team meetings.  Leaders need to understand that the same logic we apply to companies about their employment brand, also applies to leaders about their own brand.  The conversation is going to happen with or without them.

I’ve been in teams where people think they are supporting open conversation, but they aren’t.  This happens when the manager doesn’t acknowledge the value of an idea, and instead jumps straight to why it won’t work.  The intent is to be collaborative, oh sure, the manager will ask for ideas and opinions, but they will inadvertently shoot them down.  Because of the manager’s experience, insights, exposure to the broader picture, they foresee immediately whether an idea might not work out.  Instead of valuing the idea, they want to show the team why they are in the lead role.  They may even explain why it won’t work in great detail, which I’ll admit, is better than some managers, but they forget to validate and reward the courage of the individual who shared the idea.  There’s a simple way to combat this.  It takes two steps.

Step 1: Acknowledge the value of the contribution.  Something like “great idea” or “thanks for sharing your idea”.

Step 2: Decide whether there’s more harm in letting the idea play out, or more harm in stopping it.  The way I see it, if I refute the idea right away, the employee doesn’t feel appreciated, and may not be so keen to speak up next time.  But if I let them try it, then they may learn on their own a different lesson.  Or I could use the team’s feedback to help steer by saying “great idea.  Does anyone have anything to add to it?”  Or I could decide that allowing the idea to play out will hurt us (lose time, lose resources, create a detriment to credibility).  If that’s the case, I’ll explain the why.  I am the boss (love that!) so I get to decide, but I’m not so authoritarian that I believe people should follow me just because I said so.  You know what kind of boss works that way?  A boss of “yes men” (and women).  You know what yes men are?  Unempowered, unthinking, and unremarkable.

I kind of think of the Star Wars Clones as yes men.

Individually, they are pretty unremarkable.  Together, they are very powerful, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are fighting for the wrong cause.

 

 

 

 

My team is empowered, brilliant, and beyond remarkable.  We do remarkable things.  But that’s not because I’m particularly remarkable.  It’s because they are, and I’ve created an environment where they have room to shine.

Recently, my team and I were discussing some new assessments that were being offered by my place of employment.  It was an offering we were selling to our clients, so we had to understand how it worked.  So I suggested we all take a training on it.  One of my team members suggested that we take it a step further and all take the assessment ourselves and then receive our own results.  I’ll admit, I was not excited.  I had taken numerous assessments that I thought provided the same analytics that this one did, so I was not personally keen on taking another one.  I also didn’t see how taking the assessment was going to help us bring value to our clients.  However, instead of dismissing it right away, I applied the two steps above.  Step one, I told her it was a great idea.  I valued that my employee gave a suggestion that they thought would benefit the team.  Step two, I decided that it would not hurt to let the team spend an hour on it and it wouldn’t take much effort from my side to figure out how to get it initiated for us.  So I let it play out.  You know what?  I was glad I did.  First off, I had a whole new experience in taking the assessment.  By having my employees take the assessment, they could give our clients a first hand account of what it was like.  And when the results came in, the results taught me something about my team.  It showed tons of diversity in drivers and motivators, as well as diversity in traits. Does this mean the assessment is wrong?  No.  The assessment was dead on.  I agreed with all of the insights it provided me about each individual, and what was beautiful about it was how we complement each other.  We naturally are drawn to certain people on our team to create visually appealing presentations, and others to provide engaging training, and others ferret out the right level of details to put in process maps.

Now, when I look at our assessments for new hires, I look for someone who’s going to fill in a gap on my team.

So coming back to my friend disagreeing with some things in “Earn What You’re Worth”, she’s absolutely right!  She said that some companies are not growing, they’re shrinking.  In companies like these, there truly is limited promotional opportunities.  I 100% agree.  There are some cases where no matter what you do, you won’t get a promotion because there’s no room for advancement.  For those people, I’m sad that they feel stuck in that environment, for whatever reason they are staying there.  Fortunately, that’s not the audience I was writing to.  I made a mistake of not clarifying my audience in my article.  And so now she’s taught me a valuable lesson, to give more thought to my own limitations in thought, and to address those when I can.

When I think about how to read this article for my own limitations, I see it’s very hard.  While I can see that you don’t want to spin into oblivion not making a decision because people don’t agree (for those situations, I feel strongly there is a point where the boss should step in and lead), and I also see a potential for people to think I’m embracing conflict, I’m not.

I love this cartoon from Dilbert because it shows that thought diversity is not easy.  To embrace it, you’re giving up your right to be right all the time.

But still, I’m not sure I’ve exhausted the ways others will disagree. You see, I’m writing using my experiences and the books and articles I’ve read.  But I don’t yet have an editor or beta test audience sharing their opinion or experiences for feedback before I publish this.  (It’s the power of Yet, Baby!)

I’m looking forward to the day when I can get more thought diversity into the MintROI Toolkit.  If you’re interested in helping, let me know!!