The Challenge of Managing Diverse Team

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” (Henry Ford, 2016).

To elaborate the above quote, in the words of Henry Ford, when different people from different cultures come together in a team, and work together for common goals and values, then it is the first step for the organization towards its success.

In a broader sense diversity can be defined as “any dimension that can be used to differentiate groups and people from one another is known as diversity”’ (Giovannini, 2004, p. 22).

In today’s competitive world, organizations rely on different work groups and teams to achieve the organizational goals, it has been identified that diverse teams and different work groups are the building blocks of success for an organization. When a company expands itself in the global market, then the biggest challenge faced by the company is to form a team with culturally diverse employees (Cooper et al., 2007).

It has been researched by Harvard Business Review in the year 2013, that organizations get benefited from the diverse workforce, there are two kinds of diversity: inherent and acquired. Inherent diversity relates to traits a person is born with, like gender, ethnicity etc. whereas acquired diversity involves traits you learn or, gain from experience (Harvard Business Review, 2013).

It has been reported that, organizations which adopts 2-D diversity brings innovation and resulted in the better performance of the company. There are some companies reported that adopting 2-D diversity resulted that their market share grew over the previous year, and few companies reported that their firm captured new market (Harvard Business Review, 2013).

The advantage of adopting 2-D Diversity  in the organization is that, it not only unlocks innovation, but it also creates an environment where an organization gets innovative ideas which are “outside the box”. Leaders need to adopt diversity in the workplace which establishes an environment where the employees of the organization feel free to express their ideas (Harvard Business Review, 2013).

There are several behaviors resulted by Harvard Business Review which are:

• Unlock innovation: this behavior ensures that everyone is being heard, everyone should get a chance to express their ideas.
• The second behavior is giving decision making authority to team members.
• A leader should always share credit when it leads to success.
• Giving effective feedback to team members and implementing those feedbacks in an effective manner.

How to manage diverse teams?

 There are different ways in which a leader can manage diverse teams, which are as follows:

• A leader should always give effective feedback to its team members, so that they can understand how they are performing. Giving feedback is one of the most effective way to bring improvements in the team.
• A leader should always use social tools to communicate better, and should always find new ways to improve communication barriers in the team.

• A leader should always treat others as the way he liked to treated by others, the reason behind this factor is that employees working in an organization expect courtesy, respect and honesty as the important factor. Team members should always be appreciated for their work when it leads to organizational success (Interactive, 2016).

One of the examples of the company promoting diversity in the workplace is IBM, in the history of IBM it can be analyzed that “IBM has consistently led in workplace diversity”, in 1943 IBM opened a training center for more than 600 people with disabilities which is the first company providing jobs to bisexual and transgender employees, the company also adopted a global genetic nondiscrimination policy in 2005 (Ibm.com, 2016).

The company believes that promoting diversity is not only the right thing but also results in competitive advantage as well, the company aims at providing a diversified environment in the company where its employees feel free to express their opinions and also gives the opportunity to the team members the authority of decision making (Ibm.com, 2016).

Conclusion: –At the end, it is difficult for a leader and a manger to handle the diversified team, the challenge faced by a leader while managing a diverse team is that a manger has to come up with a strong working plan which should be based on reality and facts. It is the duty of the leader to allot roles to different team members based on their strengths and weaknesses. A leader while managing a diversified team should be good in communication skills, and he should also have good problem solving skills and conflict resolution skills as well.

References: –

 Brighthub Project Management. (2016). 10 Top Quotes on Team Building To Inspire Your Team. [online] Available at: http://www.brighthubpm.com/resource-management/103342-ten-great-quotes-on-team-building/[Accessed12Mar. 2016].

Developing diverse teams to improve performance in the organizational setting: European Journal of Training and Development: Vol 36, No 4. (2016). European Journal of Training and Development. [online] Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/03090591211220320[Accessed 12 Mar. 2016].

Harvard Business Review. (2013). How Diversity Can Drive Innovation. [online] Available at: https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation [Accessed 12 Mar. 2016].

Interactive, H. (2016). Top Ten Tips: How to manage diverse teams – Management Today. [online] Managementtoday.co.uk. Available at:  http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1181428/top-ten-tips-manage-diverse-teams/  [Accessed 12 Mar. 2016].

Ibm.com. (2016). Diversity: IBM 2010 Corporate Responsibility Report. [online] Available at http://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/report/2010/the-ibmer/employee-diversity.html [Accessed 12 Mar. 2016].