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.
Diversity is beautiful! A diversify team is rich with skills, knowledge, experiences, professionalism, opinions, culture and many other values because of the people involved. A good P.M. bringing all of these their good values together will produce great performance than a
homogenous team. The benefit is that team members will have opportunity to learn new skills, improve ideas etc. However, when not properly organized and managed diversify team members could easily fall out, unhealthy competition,conflicts, oppositions, disagreement which could lead to delays or poor performance.
Homogenous team on the other hand, have the tendency to produce great performance because there’s greater synergy, self motivation, self determination, single focus, understanding and responsibility. Easy work flow and all hands on deck. But its disadvantage is that views and opinions are narrowed. No much excitement of new ideas, thereby making performance boring.
Nkechi PRAISE Okoloukwu
Cohort 7, team 7
As a project manager, embracing diversity, promoting inclusion, and leveraging the strengths of your diverse team members are key to maximizing the benefits of working with a diverse team.
As a project manager working with diverse teams, you may encounter a range of experiences related to diversity. Here are some common experiences you may encounter:
Diverse Skillsets and Expertise: Diverse teams often bring together individuals with different skillsets, backgrounds, and areas of expertise. This diversity can enrich your team’s capabilities and enable you to leverage a wide range of talents to tackle project challenges.
Cross-Cultural Communication: Managing a diverse team may involve navigating communication challenges arising from different cultural norms, language proficiency, and communication styles. It’s important to promote effective communication channels, encourage open dialogue, and foster an inclusive environment where everyone feels comfortable expressing their thoughts.
Multiple Perspectives and Ideas: Diversity in teams fosters a multitude of perspectives and ideas. As a project manager, you’ll have the opportunity to tap into these diverse viewpoints to generate innovative solutions, make well-informed decisions, and drive creative problem-solving.
Conflict Resolution: With diverse teams, there is a potential for varying opinions and conflicting viewpoints. As a project manager, you may need to facilitate constructive discussions, manage conflicts, and help team members find common ground to ensure smooth project progress.
Working in a diversify team has lots of added advantages, you’ll always have numerous ideas popping up from every team members. In a diversify team, there will always be divisions of labours.
This can really accelerate the productive within the team. Let’s takes for and example, where I was assigned a site Engineer on a village access road (VAR).
We had people who came from different localities to work on the project, we had almost 4 team. Namely; clearing team, grubbing, destorming, and excavations of side drain and road formation.
With the collective efforts of these groups, it helps us to speed the work on time.
Based on studies and research, it has been shown that the degree of inclusion within the company, effective communication and collaboration techniques, and the alignment of diverse perspectives toward shared goals are just a few examples of the many variables that can affect the relationship between diversity and performance. It is crucial to emphasize that this relationship is complex and can depend on a number of different circumstances. Improved performance is not always guaranteed by having a diverse team; to fully reap the rewards of diversity, an inclusive company culture and practices are needed.
According to research, diverse teams may be better at problem-solving, making decisions, and coming up with new ideas. It is crucial to remember that there is more to the relationship between diversity and team performance than a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship, and the results can change depending on a variety of factors.
To fully reap the rewards of diversity, working in extremely varied teams can present a number of problems that must be successfully overcome. Communication hurdles, Conflict and tension, Bias and Stereotypes, Inclusion and Psychological Safety, Collaboration and Coordination, and Decision-making Difficulties are a few prevalent problems. But team members and leadership must take initiative to overcome these problems. These barriers can be surmounted, and a collaborative and high-performing atmosphere can be established in different teams by raising awareness, encouraging inclusiveness, supporting open communication, and offering training on cultural competency.
Diverse teams allow individuals to actively participate and share their ideas which result to increased engagement and performance across a team. This is because each individual may feel more motivated to reach company goals.
Yes diversity breeds more successful project because everyone is here for a single purpose to achieve the reason why the project manager brought him to team but if is people who are familiar with each other they may be distracted
diversity is an advantage to the project on ground because it is comprised of people from different background and different experiences of which they will be able to contribute different workable ideas towards the success of the project. they are able to tuckle the problem with less time and effective communication.
There is a clear-cut relationship between diversity and performance.
In my opinion a more diverse team tend to perform better in a project delivery, in that the more diverse a team is gives you the benefit of working with people from different background, with different experiences and different level of exposure and all of that makes the team perform better. So there is a relationship between diversity and performance.
As for if a diverse team do better work? my answer would be a big YES because I believe a more diverse team if the aim of the project is well communicated and understood by every members of the team I believe that the team would deliver the project better than a non diverse team.
The challenges of working in a highly diverse team is that you see things like gender bias where a team member will tend to look down on the other gender and stuffs like that you may be a friction to the aim of the project.
Also things like discrimination in terms of ethnicity and minority of some ethnic group.
You may also begin to see and hear issues around things where the older team members condescend on the younger ones so that just the challenges faced by working with the team that is more diverse.
diversity has a connection with performance. Each team member brings a distinct attitude or character to the output. You see people who are highly self motivated, another can think ideas through an predict possible outcomes of any part in the project. A good PM will harness the various skill and personalities to deliver a unique and excellent product. It’s important to have diversity in the work as a project manager, your team members must have diverse skills and knowledge in their field to help achieve the a goal.
diversity is an advantage to the project on ground because it is comprised of people from different background and different experiences of which they will be able to contribute different workable ideas towards the success of the project. they are able to tuckle the problem with less time and effective communication which gain momentum
Diversity and performance in projects are actually beneficial. This is because due to team members differences; they can discuss different perspectives that will benefit the project. Any organisation that wants to grow will encourage diversity simply because monopoly is dull and stoic plus If the project is to succeed; team members indirectly represent a quota of how it will be received or welcomed.
Share your perspectives on motivating project team members in the discussion section. What risks and benefits can you see in assigning tasks to less experienced members of the team? What impact might this have on your own motivation and that of others?
Motivating teams members increase productivities, build trust and also increase confidence among the team.
Advantages
It gives them a sense of belonging
it gives room for self development
It increases boldness among team members especially the new members
Disadvantage
It could slow down the pace of work
It could generate fear if not well handled
It could lead to failure