How to Encourage Diverse Perspectives Without Firing Anyone

Source: Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

You lead a team and you are good at it. The spirits are high, productivity is constantly up, you all laugh at the same jokes and enjoy spending time together. People are even happy to come to the office.

However, last week, disaster struck: you made a strategic error with an important client, and nobody said anything, despite the fact that the error would have been easy to spot. Then, when you assembled the team for emergency brainstorming to find a creative way out of the blunder, only two or three ideas emerged. The obvious ones, the ones that also popped into your mind immediately after the mishap occurred.

These are the classic symptoms of a team that is not cognitively diverse: high productivity on routine tasks, high spirits (but only within the comfort zone), low capacity for dissent, low innovation, and rarely manifested critical thinking.

Team diversity is a hot topic, with a plethora of studies vying to demonstrate the benefits of a racially or gender-diverse team and many workshops held periodically in companies to promote a diverse team structure. Unfortunately, cognitive diversity is often overlooked. And, because it doesn't necessarily correlate with other types of diversity, we end up with teams in which everybody thinks alike, despite being different. This isn't good.

A team is cognitively diverse when its members have different decision-making and problem-solving styles, hold diverse perspectives on important workplace issues, and have no problem speaking up. Cognitive diversity usually emerges when a team's members come from different professional, educational, and cultural backgrounds.

The opposite of cognitive diversity is groupthink—the tendency of groups to make and perpetuate uniform, unimaginative, and often plainly bad decisions when the need for harmony within the in-group and with the boss outweighs the exploration of alternatives or the desire to consider opposing views.

Source: Kira Atanasiu / Used with permission

Consensus—whether natural, simulated, or forced—is, for many people, more comfortable than a debate. It’s often easier to keep silent. But comfort is a trap. Though it might be uncomfortable, a certain degree of constructive disagreement comes with benefits.

Juliet Bourke, a cognitive diversity expert, writes that teams with thought diversity are more creative and innovative. Studies cited in Harvard Business Review show that cognitive diversity in a team accelerates the problem-solving process, and a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that, in group problem-solving, a team's cognitive diversity matters more than the individual abilities of its members.

Is, then, the manifestation of cognitive diversity always desirable? Not necessarily. Cognitive diversity helps innovation and problem-solving, but, unmanaged, it may become an obstacle during implementation, if everybody stops and wonders whether their own idea wouldn’t have worked better. Disagreement works well for finding solutions, but constant disagreement without commitment seriously hinders execution.

So, what's the solution? Should you create two teams, one for deciding and one for implementing? Certainly not! Amir Goldberg, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, discovered through a study of 800,000 Slack messages that mature teams can modulate their cognitive diversity, becoming cognitively divergent during ideation and cognitively convergent during coordination and implementation. In other words, smart and well-managed teams do debate when deciding their course of action and, once decided, get to work.

But what if everyone in your team thinks alike and there's nothing to modulate? What if you have created this team by selecting people similar to yourself and, although routine work flows smoothly, when it's time for creative thinking, they all say the same things? Can you stimulate cognitive diversity without firing anyone or bringing in new people? Absolutely! Here are some ideas:

1. Encourage different opinions. You, as a leader, can counteract groupthink by structuring strategic discussions differently. For instance, you can ask someone to play devil's advocate. You can guide the discussion so that people speak in a hierarchical order, so no one contradicts their boss. You can ask everyone to write down their perspective before a meeting, when they are not anchored by the discussion. Then, after reaching a consensus, you can ask your colleagues to read what they wrote and, thus, look for divergent opinions that were not aired. All in all, you should be more like the legendary CEO of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, who once said, “If we are all in agreement on the decision, then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
2. Have team members explore new environments. The more than 300 managers I see in class every year come in contact, during my courses, with different (and often opposite) perspectives, which forces them to examine the shortcomings of their own ideas and mentalities. This is not comfortable. They often later consider this discomfort the primary benefit of the program and bring newly acquired open-mindedness back to the office. A good method for increasing your team’s cognitive diversity is, therefore, to expose your teammates, individually, to divergent perspectives by offering them to attend external courses. Another option would be to rotate your teammates through one-day internships in other departments. The benefits of refreshing their environment are surprisingly significant. Make sure, though, to prepare a fertile soil for them to implement new ideas when they come back.
3. Borrow fresh perspectives. People who think differently don't need to join your team permanently. You can bring them in for short periods when needed. For instance, you can offer a group of business students a strategic challenge, a real case where they can apply their theoretical knowledge. And, thus, harvest fresh perspectives on a problem that bothers your team. We do this, successfully, with our MBA students. Alternatively, smart organizations have instituted, alongside their classic board, a junior board composed of passionate young people who are thrilled to bring in their fresh ideas.
4. Change your own thinking. Sometimes, a solution to increase your team's cognitive diversity is to change your own cognitive patterns. A tech entrepreneur whom I interviewed for our research on simple rules told me that he tries to purposefully add instinct and intuition to his too analytical decision-making. He made this uncomfortable decision after being puzzled that his business partner’s shoot-from-the-hip decisions often yield better results than his well-thought ones. And this increased the cognitive diversity of their team.

If you have successfully applied one of these strategies, please don't keep it to yourself. Fresh ideas deserve to be shared, for cognitive diversity's sake.

A different version of this article appeared in Romanian in Biz magazine.