“If you go woke, you go broke…”
The backlash against DEI is in full gear. And it is a shame.
Here is what the research says:
1. The closer you are to 50/50 gender balance on a team, the better that team performs.
2. The best ideas come from diverse teams with shared values willing to embrace creative abrasion and get to better answers faster.
3. Hiring a minority as a chief diversity officer has not produced results for companies. This is an uncomfortable truth.
4. Teams struggle to benefit from that diversity because they have no idea how to incorporate it into teams.
5. The best breakthroughs have diverse teams and diverse sprints of individual and team sessions.
6. To benefit from diversity you have to have what Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety. If you have that, you can have what Kim Scott calls radical candor. To do this you need a basis of trust. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss have articulated the tripod that leadership trust is built on (Logic, Authenticity, and Empathy). Natalie Doyle Oldfield has written the book on how you build trust. Her 8 principles are sheer gold for understanding how different personalities see and value inputs to trust.
And now we’re back to Patrick Lencioni incredible model on the dysfunctions of a team. You have to be able to build trust so you can meaningfully contend with conflict.
If you can productively navigate conflict, you can get to real commitment. Not Malicious Compliance. With that commitment, you can drive accountability to results.
There is no question that diversity around the table is a superpower.
The reason most organizations can’t benefit from it, is the way they lead and facilitate teams (and that is the base of your culture).
The world may be taking a decided step to the right, embracing populist rhetoric, and dismantling / discrediting the capitalist-democratic institutions that created an important counterbalance in the uneven march of progress.
But let’s not throw out the value of diversity because of an inability to productively build the culture to benefit from the immense value it can bring.
This is not a political post.
This is a post on high performance.
And building high-performing teams.
