Diversity or Consensus: Building High Performance Teams Stanley Arumugam High performance teams thrive on diversity not consensus.

This is the view of Harold Schroder, retired professor of organizational behaviour at Princeton University. Prof Schroder argues that the strength of high performance teams is vested in its ability to understand and express the diversity of its teams. I remember my first powerful experience of team dynamics in a corporate context in the form of an assessment center. As an intern psychologist in training I had to participate in a senior management assessment centre as part of my learning. I havent quite gotten over the trauma of the assessment report which reduced any competence I thought I had to a raw score of 2.1 out of 10. I was assured that the norm was senior management, but you would appreciate that did not help much. What I did learn in that assessment center was that the loudest and most dominating won the day. Very quickly I learned that if I was going to make any contribution in the group exercises I would have to jump in first didnt matter what I had to say but getting first was important. The problem is I was a rather quite, shy young man at that stage who had a lot of good ideas but insufficient ego energy to dominate the discussion. So very early on I learned that the norm for team work is not so much valuing diversity as much as it was finding the winning argument that successfully steered the group to consensus. Since that assessment center fifteen years ago, I have been in many teams that operated pretty much in line with this model of consensus building. Another painful version of consensus building is the tactic of lobbying. In many of the senior teams I have worked in this tactic was prized as the winning formula, part of a holy checklist of must do. In many ways this notion of lobbying was passed off as an essential strategy of change management. The problem with lobbying as is very typical of American politics is that it pushes a partisan view. Guess who gets lobbied? Not the people that support the idea but those that have or may have a different perspective. Why is this such a problem? I was told and in some cases instructed to ensure that I lobby with certain executives before a proposal was tabled at a board meeting. The idea of lobbying is twofold. First to patronize certain senior managers with frail egos who want to know that they have been consulted on the matter. Second, is to deal in private with objections that could upset the agenda of an open forum. I find lobbying for these reasons fundamentally reproachable. Where lobbying is primarily driven by consensus building, the value for the team as a whole is lost. There is a place for lobbying on important issues that would otherwise not get an

organizational voice. The intent of this lobbying is to present a view with all the passion that goes into it but not to sway conformity to a particular perspective. Senior teams in their pursuit of consensus develop increasingly subversive strategies. Another classic one is going with the flow. Its easy to be a yes man. High performing teams need people with back bone not a yes vote. It becomes increasingly embarrassing that in the most senior of team interactions often evident in board meetings how senior executives acquiesce to the popular voices in the room. The festering corporate governance scandals is grown out of this fertile ground where group think develops as a survival mechanism. Many children are subject to devastatingly painful acts of child abuse in their very homes because of the conspiracy of silence. It appears that organizations over the centuries have not been immune to this. Corporate governance audits wont eradicate group think. The courage of teams to develop a contract of open and honest conversation will turn the tide. Surely there is a bigger imperative beyond ethical conformance to encouraging teams to raise the bar. High performing teams do not pretend that things are not working, neither are they shy to express celebration in their successes. The story of the Emperors new clothes best typifies this evil of populism. Remember the emperor was fooled into believing that his new garments were of such fine quality that he could not see that he was walking through the streets naked. His people dare not speak of his nakedness and folly and so they keep up the insane game. Many corporations have seen their demise in this game playing. Teams that do not have the courage to confront the reality are headed for disaster. As in all lies, teams can appear to be successful for only a certain time before the plot is unraveled. This begs the question of responsibility, is the team leader or collectively the team that must be courageous in confronting one another. There is an interesting new management concept called courageous conversations. This is a noble idea and must be encouraged in all organizations. The challenge though is that this notion is premised on organizations having and encouraging courageous behaviour instead of conformity behaviour. The second premise is that organizations are talking to one another and not engaged in oneway hierarchical or dysfunctional communication. Prof Michael Beer, head of organizational fitness at Havard asserts that one of the primary roles of leaders is to facilitate courageous conversations. The value of these conversations is realized threefold. First, it ensures strategic alignment, the team is focused on what is important for the organization both now and into the future. Secondly, courageous conversations have the effect of creating psychological alignment, where teams have a sense of shared purpose and connectedness that is authentic and not a form of false group affiliation. Third,

courageous conversations facilitate adaptability allowing employees at all levels to learn and grow through giving them a voice. Teams that truly value diversity recognize the collective worth of each contributing member. Each person in a high performing team comes with a unique skill set, values and worldview. The idea of growing teams is not to beat diversity into submission but to allow authentic expression which could often result in chaos. Chaos and management are antithetical. Most managers leading teams have been brainwashed into believing that conformity and control are measures of team effectiveness. High performing teams have the courage to challenge one another, innovate and grow. This requires a climate where each team member is encouraged to bring their best, where each team member has a voice and where the governing principle is not a winning idea that all team members agree to support. The bible speaks about the church as a body with different parts equally important, different in function and all working together to ensure a whole that is growing and sustainable. The ways teams are formed also requires some rethinking. Its easy to form military-style teams where conformity is requisite for survival where creativity could mean life or death. But surely this model could not work for high performance organizational teams. In a world where competitive intelligence could make or break organizations, teams become the repository of just intime knowledge that can be translated into business value. This requires a teams that comprise diverse thinking, not clones. Clones are good for commodity industries that have short life spans and still live in the Taylorist management world. In a world where access to knowledge and technology drives individual and team performance teams have to operate as a learning network. Everyone in the team has a critical role to play as they scan the environment, decode key messages and translate them into organizational value. For this to work, team roles cannot be based on hierarchical status roles but be a convergence of distinct and evolving roles as the business demands it. This assumes that power and control becomes subordinate to the good of the greater organization. It means also that teams do not operate as entities in their own right and in isolation of the larger organizational imperative. The notion of the boundaryless organization is premised on the valuing of diversity. Why do you want to create boundaryless behaviour if all you want is a bigger mass of group think? Teams need to be encouraged to equally value the diversity of other teams, to embrace the multifunctional nature of organizations. The classic silo mentaility is evidence of the drive for isolation and differentiation at the expense of integration.

High performance organizations are effectively differentiated in their various functional structures and capabilities. But the sum effectiveness of this differentiation must be expressed in the organizations ability to integrate the diversity of functions. This is the work of general managers and senior executives in effectively bringing together diverse functional entities into a synergistic work pattern that results in organizational effectivenss. Organizations that are not effective at senior level integration end up with fragmented organizations with distinct silos and fragmented cultures often driven the most dominant Alpha male. This is a great model for Darwinian survival of the fittest at the expense of the whole system. Surely managers are not as dumb as this. They do what works and what works is the implicit behavioural model that gets rewarded in most organizations, i.e. conformity. So at the end of the day the CEO has the first and final say in the type of organization that is created. Conforming organizations are great for the ego but may be short-lived. Organisations genuinely valuing diversity can both meet the needs of multiple stakeholders with integrity, gain competitive advantage and build capacity for sustainability. stanley.arumugam@actionaid.org International Director HROD&Governance