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.
There’s less distraction when it comes to diversity. Everyone is focused on the goal rather than bringing in sentiments. So it holds a great deal in building a team.
From past experience, I would say diversity in Project Management yields more productivity and desired results, as everyone on the team come up with different sound ideas on getting the work done on time. These team consist of people from different ethnicity and with of different level of experience and area of specialization and skills. The only challenge is that the team slowly come to a compromise since everyone’s point of view has to be observed before reaching a concrete decision.
Effective project management benefits from diversity when handled appropriately, as it fosters efficiency and effectiveness in project execution.
In my experience, teams with similar backgrounds often unite to impede a project if they disagree with certain aspects of it. They tend to adopt a “son of the soil” mentality. A more effective approach is to blend teams, ensuring a shared understanding through a common language, minimizing room for procrastination and delays.
Homogeneous teams tend to become complacent, relying on their perceptions of team members’ personalities. For instance, at my workplace, three senior staff members frequently resist new ideas that don’t align with their opinions. I’ve found it more productive to collaborate with entirely new individuals who bring fresh perspectives to the table.
Diversity enhances overall performance, thereby increasing productivity. It also nurtures a positive work environment that fosters employee satisfaction.
However, diversity can present challenges, including communication issues and slower decision-making processes due to the variety of ideas from team members.
Indeed, there is a connection between diversity and perfomance. Diversity in team leads to greater performance due to the fact that the differences in cultural, ethnicity and even professional background enables the people contribute different ideas. They may see things from different perspectives, offer different solutions from which the best alternatives can be chosen.
A major set back to this is that decision making might be slow due to multiplicity if ideas
Past experience has shown the advantage of diverse team members, whether it be cognitive, social or otherwise. Everyone was able to “pull their weight” in accordance to their strengths. At the end of the day, everyone had the same goal : the overall success of the project.
Diversity in Project Management yields better results when managed properly as it encourages efficient and effectiveness of work to be done
In my woe, homogeneous team members tend to band together to frustrate a project if they don’t like something in the project. They like to claim “son of the soil” mentality. The best way was to have a mixture of the two teams, make adequately sure that there is a common language on set, that everyone understands. No room or less room for slothfulness and untimeliness.
Homogeneous teams tend to be complacent and work according to their expectations of the personalities of team members. For instance, at my place of work, there are three old members of staff who band together to frustrate new ideas if it doesn’t align with their opinions. I found it easier to work with entirely new people who bring in a fresh outlook to issues.
Diversity enhances performance thereby increasing productivity.
Diversity promotes a healthy work environment that makes employees feel valuable.
Some of the challenges in diversity are communication issues, slow decision-making due to the various ideas coming from team members.
Well, sincerely this particular topic hit me different: the fact that diverse team members-who might not have worked together before, would be put together in such a short time and they are expected to deliver,is really “something”.
However, thinking about it, it can only be because each individual team member is highly skilled and so, they already know the general drill. The bulk of the work is really with the coxwain (project manager) to select his team members from available pool.
Challenges i see with working with diverse team members may be multiple:
1. Initial drag (owing from the fact that these are total strangers)
2. Different views-hence, conflict (owing from the fact that people have different orientation and worldviews, style and background)
3. Communication challenge (particularly, at the early stage) and others. However,
In a regimented system such as the military, it is easier to blend these different people and make them a team,as each member is expected to have already gone through certain trainings (which is pretty much the same regime)and hence is equipped with the right skills for the job.
Like i mentioned earlier, the captain has a huge task in team selection.
Just to add that team selection can also be an exciting experience.
Then the meetings/briefings after the team’s been pur together will afford members the opportunity to get to know themselves.
Friday Uwhubetine. Cohort 10. Team 5.
No there is know relation between diverse and homogeneous team selection process; diverse team selection process include individuals with a variety of skills, knowledge, experience and perspectives relevant to completing the project. while homogenous includes individuals with similar background or of same social value. Diverse method is good incase of emergency team selection. how ever homogenous give room for individual team members development aside that it some time to see results.