Experts have a clear understanding of the potential advantages that diversity brings to teams and organizations.
APM acknowledges that diverse teams generally outperform homogeneous ones. This correlation is increasingly evident in the performance and financial outcomes of organizations.
Does this align with your personal experience?
In a previous section, you explored exceptional and high-performing teams. Based on your own observations, do you see a connection between diversity and performance? Do teams with greater diversity produce superior work? Additionally, what challenges arise when working in highly diverse teams?
We are genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences and thoughts regarding these questions in the discussion section.
In a team where there is great diversity, external challenges from the environment are easily solved. The Volatile, Uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment helps to create awareness of the organization’s situation and develop suitable responses to the challenges been faced.
The experience of the teams are positive because the see the effect of their work and get feedbacks.
One major challenge is inconsistency as a result of internal or external driven adversity.
Chukwu Favour
As a PM, working in the technical field, were high skills are required to perform great task within a given duration in a project, having a diverse team members becomes a very important aspect of your success as diverse team comes with multiple skills and experiences. So I will boldly say that diversity and performance becomes vital tool to succeed since team members are SME’s (subject matter experts).
Initially diversify offer great advantages to a project. Diversified team produces different skills in it members. This offers ample of chooses to the problem solving of the project. Using VUCA approaches Were the project is face with ambiguity, Volatility, complexity and uncertainty. The team will need a heterogeneous team to counter the unforseen circumstances. But as say goes too many cooks spoil the soup.so, many ideas and skills can also result in time wasting counter unproductive.
Diversity of team helps the team to bring in their opinion and skills on the project and also helps them see things in different ways
Team diversity produces better results in most cases because the individuals can put together their different ideas and experiences to achieve a great outcome for the project. Although language might be a challenge in a diverse team
In my experience, it is very useful to have diversity in projects. Diversity helps to have a more broader knowledge on the project in hand. It allows the team to have various ideas which can aid in their project performance.
The challenges that can arise in working with highly diverse teams can be language barriers, disagreements of opinions which could lead to wastage of time in decision making etc.
Team diversity helps because its makes the team to see things in different ways
A team’s Diversity helps it produce superior work, especially in multicultural environments where the individuals’ different skills, language, and perspectives aid the team’s alignment to the project values and sharpen its delivery of expected outcomes. While some challenges may ensue like language and social differences, these can be propellants for even better work delivery especially where the PM is proactive in aligning the team to the project’s Purpose and Situation, these seemingly challenges help the individuals deliver the expected results for their sub-teams and overall team success.
Diversity gives you an opportunity to see things from a different perspective, it enables the team to explore other possibilities.
Diversity allows everyone to bring in their skills and opinion on the particular project.
Before going through these lessons I’d have been unequivocal that the more homogeneous a group the better they’d perform. As I reflect on diversity and performance, I realize that as long as goals, vision and deliverables are clear; and each member knows exactly what to do, how to do it and his/her place in the larger scheme of things the project is very likely to produce expected outcomes.
Highly diverse teams will more often than not be faced with challenges, which when anticipated and proactively handled will pose no serious threat to the continuity and sustainability of the project. Some of these challenges include losing focus, misunderstanding of individual and collective roles and inadequate supervision. When most of these are anticipated measure will be put in place to prevent and/or address them as the case may be.