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 can encourage productivity as each member of the team will bring in a variety of knowledge, experience, and ideas on how to complete the project.
Undoubtedly, a team with diversity performs seamlessly leading to better results. The level of diversity, expertise and experience is crucial to forming an exceptional high-performing team. The project management field is highly diversified. Diversity helps skill transfer, which produces results faster, cheaper and to standards.
Based on my experience, there is a connection between diversity and performance. Do teams with greater diversity produce superior work? Absolutely YES. Diversity enhances synergy and team cohesion. However, a major challenge of diversity is the difficulty in communication which if well managed can improve the learning of individuals in a team.
For example, I started my career as an office architect and was later transferred to a site on an outpost as a resident architect. Being a resident architect deepens my understanding of design and form, not to remain a paper architect. It helps to build leadership capacity to lead a team to achieve design objectives and resolve issues while learning from other allied professionals. During my outpost as a resident architect, I had an opportunity to lead teams with diverse professional backgrounds on different types of projects.
Rita Anaba
In my experience, diversity in teams brings both significant benefits and unique challenges. I’ve observed that diverse teams—whether in terms of background, culture, or skill sets—often lead to better performance, as they tend to approach problems from multiple perspectives. This diversity of thought allows for more creative solutions and innovative problem-solving, which can be crucial in fields like project management, public health, and business.
Benefits of Diversity:
• Improved problem-solving: Diverse teams bring together different viewpoints, which can lead to more comprehensive solutions.
• Innovation: The combination of varied experiences and ideas often fosters innovation, as team members challenge one another’s assumptions and push boundaries.
• Better decision-making: Diversity encourages discussion and debate, which usually leads to better, well-rounded decisions.
Challenges of Diversity:
However, managing highly diverse teams can also pose challenges. Differences in communication styles, cultural expectations, and work practices can lead to misunderstandings or conflict if not properly managed. It requires active effort to build a cohesive team culture where differences are embraced, not seen as obstacles. Additionally, decision-making may take longer in diverse teams because of the need to reconcile varying opinions.
Relationship Between Diversity and Performance:
In my experience, there is a clear relationship between diversity and team performance. While more diverse teams tend to perform better, they require effective leadership to overcome challenges like potential conflicts or miscommunication. Leaders need to create environments where everyone feels included and valued. Ultimately, when diversity is managed well, the benefits far outweigh the challenges, leading to better work and higher performance in both the short and long term.
Challenges encountered with highly diverse teams I have witnessed is
1. Language: I don’t mean the indigenous language, I mean work language. Since they are coming from varying background they may not understand each other. The project manager is the common language of understanding. They have to act like a buffer system to counter language barrier.
2. Work ethics: some persons have different approach on how they handle things and finding a direct opposite to your work ethic can spark irritation. I think a temporary policy or guidelines can solve this
3. Relevance struggle: some stakeholders like to throw their weight around and struggle for power… however what a PM can do is maintain discipline and educate team members on stakeholders with autonomy.
I had my first experience leading a team in June this year for a project on war against malaria and it was an iterative project. The only thing homogeneous about the team was the fact that they were all corp members other than that, I had graphic designer, a content writer, finance student, a business manager, a photographer, email manager, logistics personnel this people studied different things in school, their skill sets are somewhat different, however the outcome was an award winning project because, they understood the visions and goals stated in the project proposal , and their diversity was the spice the project needed. The graphics gave a good flyer for the content writer to leverage on…the content writer set a good template for the email manager, the logistics made sure the banners and mosquito nets were available for the photographer to take shots off. So yes diversity produce tremendous results when properly managed
Otuokpokpo oghene-elo
Team 9
It is widely agreed upon that team diversity is always of advantage to the project. This
is because diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones as is the case in the organization where I work. Therefore, I believe that diversity and performance are interconnected. Teams with greater diversity perform and produce superior work compared to homogeneous ones. However, we cannot deny that team diversity has few challenges such as misunderstanding due to language or identity differences, and lack of cohesion at the beginning of the project.
But these challenges can be overcomed with the right techniques and strategies.
Diverse teams can bring or lead to differences in language, cultural norms, and communication styles and can lead misunderstandings and conflicts which can hamper with collaboration and efficiency.
However, diverse teams bring variety of perspectives, experiences and ideas, which leads to innovative solutions and improved problem-solving.
A Diversity team, definitely will have an edge to perform differently. bearing in mind they’re from different backgrounds of experiences which from basis for providing adequate skills for solutions to challenges. Diversity is not just a moral or social is a strategic advantage for organizations/project.
In a complex situation diverse teams are in abetter position to changing situations quickly.
Challenges could quickly arise due to communication issues. Little Mis understanding can escalate to dangerous level but with proper supervision social, cultural backgrounds will be in check.
Team diversity will always be advantageous for any group. The differences in individual performance history, differences in opinion and contribution will strengthen any team that can use those differences well.
What comes to the minds of most people when it comes to diversity is conflict, be it of opinions or personal preferences, but the pros outweigh the cons hence the need to adopt diversity when building/forming teams.
It is important to note that the difference in views will mean that an option has been considered multiple ways which translates to proper time management in dealing with blind spots that may have been missed if the team is homogeneous
A Diversity team indeed brings different experiences, problem-solving skills, and wide range of Perspective which lead to creativity, innovation, better decision-making and rapid productivity. diversity to me is not just a moral or social imperative but also a strategic advantage for organizations/project.
In my own work, I’ve seen how diverse teams are better at addressing blind spots that more uniform teams might miss, and they are often more adaptable in uncertain or rapidly changing situations.
diversity also comes with it’s own challenges let us not forget that as well. the major issues is communication. When people have different cultural backgrounds or varying experiences, misunderstandings or ideas if not properly guided miscommunications can occur more frequently, that is one of the areas the project manager comes in to play his role.