Thursday, January 6, 2011

Working Effectively with Difference

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:

dds said...

It's cool to hear that they put this class on! It sounds like it was pretty neat and pretty informative.

dds said...

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.