Had a class yesterday entitled: Working Effectively with Difference. the facilitators, Dan Distelhorst and Gordon Watanabe, were entertaining and presented a full and 'different' look on diversity.Key points pointed out in handout from group performance (Scott Page's "The Difference" is referenced as the research source):
- 'Difference' primarily refers to a diversity of perspectives and ways of approaching a situation.
- Diverse teams tend to outperform homogenous teams- even if those homogenous teams have stronger individual performers.
- Not only does difference trump sameness, difference also trumps ability.
- Well facilitated teams, with lots of thinking and value differences, will outperform homogeneous teams but will have more conflict.
- There is a connection between difference of thinking and identitly difference (e.g. gender, ethnicity, national culture, etc.) so recruiting people with diverse identities enhances group performance.
It was a great class-all corperate enviroments should have this approuch to this topic.
2 comments:
It's cool to hear that they put this class on! It sounds like it was pretty neat and pretty informative.
It sounds really cool that they did that class. And I realize that as it takes me forever to leave a comment via just my google account I think I'm eventually going to have to break down and get a dang blogger >< LOL.
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