How to Build a Team that Creates Better Business Outcomes
Apr 21, 2021You may be tempted to build a homogeneous team – meaning hire a lot of the same type people. Let’s face it, sometimes you like to be around people that you have things in common with. However, I encourage you to resist this because when you have the exact same type of person on your team, you can build a homogeneous viewpoint. This contributes to a tendency towards maintaining the status quo.
Not only is diversity important from a cultural perspective, it benefits you greatly from a business perspective. When you build a diverse team, you include people with differing ideas, differing personalities and different experiences. This actually results in a challenge to the status quo and often accelerate into new ideas that you may not have come up with and also accomplish more things.
Sometimes I call these people polarizing instigators and instigators may have a negative connotation but it’s also somebody who will challenge what’s going on in a meeting or what the groupthink might be. So, I have a number of polarizing instigators on my team. You might think its conflict that occur but it is most often a great deal of mutual respect among us for our ideas. These discussions end up advancing us to consider new and different ideas that we wouldn’t have thought of as a similar homogeneous group. I absolutely love it!
I have team meeting most Monday mornings with my managers. I have a retail & sales manager, a fitness & education manager and my office manager. Like you, I’m right in the trenches and we meet on Monday mornings to review what was accomplished the previous week, what are our goals for this week and then also, what we might need help with. It’s interesting because everyone has a different personality and everyone has a different viewpoint. We have such mutual respect for each other that it’s easy to share our opinions and then piggyback on everyone’s ideas to come up with something really fabulous.
I believe, this has contributed to the success we experience today as well as including the entire team when it comes to implementation of new ideas and mapping out the ‘nitty gritty’.
Thus, when I have a goal that I want to accomplish, I will typically bring up the goal to my managers. As a group we talk about it and share ideas (or decide it is not something worth pursuing). If the idea is a ‘go’, we come up with synergistic ideas. In fact, if you were a fly on the wall during one of these discussions, you might think, ‘Oh gosh, is this a little bit of a conflict?’, but it’s really not. It’s our way of challenging each other, challenging our viewpoint and accepting that we all have different viewpoints. Then we take the best of the best to determine a plan of action. Even if something doesn’t go as great as we might have thought it would, then this discussion generally provides us with a plethora of backup ideas we can use as we get together to regroup. You see, like you, we are always looking for ways to improve.
I encourage you as you’re hiring, as you’re developing your staff, as you’re putting people together in different planning groups, make sure that you don’t have one homogeneous group. Make sure that you’ve got some polarizing instigators in the group to shake things up and get you to a higher level. This is far better than experiencing groupthink or simply doing things the way they have always been done before because that is easier and more comfortable.
I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone. I wish greater heights of success for you and your team and this is a great way to accomplish just that! If you want to schedule a complementary, no pressure, just focus on YOU call, reach out to me at [email protected] and I look forward to talking with you soon!
Stay connected with news and updates!
Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.
We hate SPAM. We will never sell your information, for any reason.
