How to Coach a Diverse Team
The evolution of organizational models toward higher flexibility and quickness of response to market needs has made teamwork crucial, the veritable organizational solution when objectives to be attained are complex.
Research on teams and corporate practice has shown how a well-structured group can achieve a more effective and efficient use of available resources and value the skills of team members, increasing quality and customer satisfaction, and product/process innovation.
The main driver explaining a team's success is its heterogeneity, that is, the co-presence of people who differ by experience, function, age, culture. Diversity means higher creativity and readiness to look at issues from multiple points of view, so that more high-quality alternatives can be generated with respect to the single individual. The heterogeneous team has a tremendous potential to develop output quality, as well as learning and motivation of the people that are part of it. A caveat is in order, though. The same reasons that make heterogeneous teams intensely effective, also give them a high potential of failure. Mistrust, internal conflicts, disengagement, and cynicism often spread, and thus failing teams are prevalent with respect to good teams that manage to churn out high-value-added solutions. Average failure rate of diverse teams stands at 70%!
It's thus essential to find out what enables heterogeneous teams to translate their potential into high-value performance, as well as develop themselves and their members. The experience of team coaching made by this article's author shows how a structured approach to teamwork from its early steps, without waiting for negative elements such as conflict, mistrust, cynicism to emerge, can drastically cut the likelihood of failure.
Summing up, three are the steps to be made in order to provide teamwork with strong foundations: 1) mapping various points of view and approaches of team members, understanding how they affect individual and relational behavior and attitudes; 2) sharing and practicing ways of communicating that minimize misunderstandings; 3) integrating knowledge and experience of various teams in more effective diagnoses and solutions, by progressively building a sense of the team's own level of effectiveness.
The mapping of differences enables to read them and manage them in the light of increased awareness of their importance. The possibility of showing effective ways of communication based on mutual listening underscores the importance of starting with the interlocutor if you want to understand and make yourself understood, with a consequent increase in mutual trust.
The integration of various members' skill assets increases overall team intelligence, and thus the quality of internal learning and of the solutions proposed. The above three steps are based on the following essential preconditions: a level of trust that is born out of the confidence of working together and finding your co-worker there when you need it; sponsorship by top management which must be the first believer in the team and practitioner of its virtuous practices, the actual sharing of rules and values and openness to emotions being expressed within the team, especially negative emotions which must be expressed in a language considered acceptable by the team, so that they can be accepted ad dealt with.