Embracing diversity within your team
Get the best out of every member of your team
Douglas Miller
Objectives
Specifically, the learning objectives are to understand:
- your attitude to diversity and to understand how you can, as a manager, climb into other people’s words
- the different roles that are played in an effective team and how to work best with the individuals who perform these roles
- how to manage and work best with team members displaying the differing cultural characteristics.
Context
In justifying diversity in organisations and, by extension, within teams, there are two core arguments that were historically presented as justification:
- The moral case for diversity and consequent inclusivity that integrates personal difference in terms of race, age, gender, length of service, education, attitudes, beliefs and personality. The catalyst for inclusivity has not always been the moral argument but the legislation that has compelled employers to act.
- The business case, that there are clear-cut financial benefits to doing this.
It is to be hoped that in the case of the first argument, you, the reader, believe in the absolute moral imperative, in which case you will have a powerful reason to read on. You also have a reason to read on because the extensive research tells us that a diverse workforce benefits us in a number of core ways, even if there are considerable challenges along the way.
It has to be said that the case for the second historical reason – the financial benefits – has not been as strong as the early adherents for this reasoning would have liked. However, as some of the researchers in this area have pointed out, it’s remarkably difficult to make the link, positive or negative, between increased diversity and financial rewards or loss.
Research has thrown up compelling reasons for team diversity:
- An increasingly diverse marketplace requires a diverse workforce to understand it. This also applies to the public sector where a diverse community requires a diverse workforce to understand its needs best.
- Innovation and fresh thinking are regularly signposted as critical factors in 21st-century organisational success. We know that a greater number of perspectives – avoiding a team of homogenous, like-minded thinkers – leads to greater effectiveness in problem-solving (when was the last time you had a team meeting when a problem-solving discussion wasn’t on the agenda?) and creativity. A sister module to this looks at problem-solving techniques that value and integrate the views of a group.
- Where the work of the team is concerned with the future (‘exploration’) rather than the past (‘exploitation’).
- Where the organisation, and by extension the team, are going through a period of significant change.
All four points are now permanent fixtures in working life, whether your team operates in the private or public sector or is part of a non-governmental organisation (NGO). Finally – and this returns to our point on morality – integration should seek to reduce discrimination and ensure equality of opportunity and fairness.
Overview and challenge
As we have already seen, there are considerable benefits in having a diverse team, but diversity means difference and those differences will be beneficial only if:
- you believe that difference is important
- you know how those differences benefit the work of the team
- you are prepared to manage those differences so that the team benefits.
Having a truly diverse team comes with considerable challenges. Bring together a team of people who have different ways of seeing the world, different attitudes, different beliefs and different views about what is ‘normal’ and you have a potential recipe for misunderstanding, disagreement and conflict. As a leader/manager you therefore play a critical role in ensuring that team diversity brings benefits. For that reason this module starts with you: looking at your attitudes to others, the potential that exists in all of us to ‘stereotype’, overcoming what’s known as ‘similarity attraction’, i.e. like attracts like, and tools to help you personally in having good relationships with those who are ‘not like me’. You set the example here.
The next two sections refer to diversity in two contexts:
- The way in which a group of people collectively takes opportunities, solves problems, makes decisions and acts on them – ‘doing-based’.
- The collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one group or category of people from another – ‘Being-based’.
In the ‘doing-based’ section we look at the team itself and the different roles that teams perform. These are non-functional roles, i.e. they do not relate to the specific technical aspects of the work that the team does but more to the way it does it. Using two studies of team roles by Meredith Belbin and Peter Honey, and combining the best of them, we present six team roles that should be performed by individuals within all but the smallest of teams.
In the ‘being-based’ section we look at seven different ‘dimensions of culture’ based on the work of Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. Each dimension has opposites, e.g. a tendency to display emotion or a tendency not to display emotion. We look at how to work best with each of them.
1. It starts with you
Respecting difference, whether it’s cultural or related to gender or age, starts with reflecting on ‘you’ and how you differ from the stereotypical ‘you’. As you start to think about this you should start to think that there is no one like you. Perfect. And just as there is no one like you, others are uniquely different too.
Managing a diverse team – and in one sense every team is a diverse team – means being open to difference and looking for the benefits. In this short section we look at how you can be open to difference by looking at:
- ‘you’ and the affirming actions you can take as an individual
- the affirming actions you can take as the team leader/manager.
For you
Avoid saying ‘our way is the best way’
You have your own mental model of your world and your place in it. That world has certainties that help you get through life. If you’re British, Nigerian, Australian or French, or you’re from the country or you had a strong family presence when young, you will have developed a cultural perspective that helps you to get by. That cultural perspective becomes so important when you start to think ‘our/my way is the best way’. The tendency some have is to argue for the superiority of their own cultural model because it’s the one they know, rather than say, ‘Well, I have a way of looking at the world, others have a different way of looking at it, and it will be interesting to explore the different perspectives.’
Cultural commentator Fons Trompenaars says that the need to prove the inferiority of other cultural models in comparison with our own comes in part from our insecurities and doubts about the strength of our own model.
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We have already looked at the showing/not showing of emotion as one aspect of cultural difference. Decide which one of these you have a tendency to be in the workplace. Now think of the benefits of being the opposite of what you normally are, i.e. what are the benefits of showing emotion in a team meeting if you are the sort of person who doesn’t normally do this? This will help open your mind to the benefits of other ways of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ and move beyond being an endless defender of your own ways of ‘being’ and ‘doing’.
How many worlds?
You have probably done some form of personality profile at one time or another. You answer a series of questions and at the end of it you receive an analysis of your personality in the form of a personality ‘indicator’ that tells you about yourself by categorising you into a series of personality ‘boxes’, such as extrovert, perfectionist, idealist and so on. The merits/accuracy of these profiles can be debated elsewhere (and very few are validated by psychological societies around the world), but this issue of categorisation is the one that interests us here. As we have seen, this categorising is an innate part of us – it helps us to understand people more easily by putting them in boxes. But it assumes that we can easily reduce the wonderful diversity of humankind into a few convenient boxes.
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Categorising can be helpful, but for it to be truly accurate we would need 7 billion categories to reflect the unique worlds of each of us. You, of course, believe you are unique and, one hopes, uniquely interesting! However, so does everyone else. By exploring the uniqueness of every team member you also discover what makes them different (and interesting) and what they can uniquely and collectively offer.
Hardening of the categories
There are further dangers with categorisation. It’s a human trait that we tend to put people in boxes according to a few initial observations: age, race, gender, what you are wearing, etc. – even things like the wearing of glasses (suggesting ‘intelligence’) quickly build up a picture in our minds of what someone else is like. So, here’s the danger. Once this initial image has been taken we have a tendency to then look for all the signs and signals that confirm the initial image, ignoring – or not even seeing – those that don’t.
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Try changing your perspective. Actively seek to disprove your newly hatched theories about others – look out for the signs and signals that contradict your theory instead of looking for those that support it.
You, the leader and the team
Being different yet feeling similar
One way of binding a group, particularly when the group is diverse, is to shift the emphasis of the group away from ways in which they are different to something they all share. Although different in so many ways, individuals can bond as a coherent team where, for example, they have a tightly defined shared purpose, a big goal or a close connection with the values or goals of the organisation they work for (this assumes a shared appreciation of the organisation itself!).
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Shared values form a great bridge across the team. However, some managers make the mistake of assuming what those values should be. In the end the establishment of values becomes counter-productive. Establishing shared values should be truly collaborative. There will be disagreement, of course, but the very act of collaboration will bring the group closer together.
Out with the old, in with the new
It was mentioned in the ‘Context’ section that team diversity has particular benefits where there is a future focus to the team’s efforts – exploring the opportunities of the future when the team/organisation is going through change and when problem-solving. This isn’t just about valuing the diversity that already exists within the team, it also means proactively building a team that is more diverse through recruitment and through inviting others working outside the day-to-day functioning of the team to join.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Over time a group’s thinking, no matter how initially divergent it was, starts to come together, i.e. people start to think alike the more closely they work together. The diverse perspectives that created the initial effectiveness are softened. Diversity is not an end. If you believe it matters you should always believe it matters, i.e. it’s not a one-off.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
In some instances teams lack diversity because of the way candidates are interviewed for roles in the team. This is often the fault of the team leader/manager who recruits a series of ‘mini-me’ types – rapport is often established in interviews because interviewer and interviewee have a similar world-view, or are of similar age, gender, background, etc. We decide the person will ‘fit in’ and therefore recruit him or her. Not surprisingly we end up with a like-thinking group of people.
ASSESS YOURSELF
This assessment will be largely subjective. There is an old saying that ‘behaviour breeds behaviour’. Over time you will find that if you are willing to climb into other people’s worlds, to understand them without judgement and to get a feel for what they think, need, feel and believe, those very people, for the most part, will be more willing to climb into your world.
How do you feel about your relationships at work? Are they improving? Are people more interested in you as a manager and a leader because you are more interested in them? What Fons Trompenaars says is that when we find ourselves moving towards an understanding of someone else’s culture/difference/personality, they automatically move towards ours.
2. Team roles
Teams are not created in laboratories but neither should they be thrown together by chance. Think of a football manager assembling a team. Naturally there are the technical, positional roles to be fulfilled – goal-keeper, defence, midfield and attack. But the successful team will also have a balance of highly creative players, leaders, ‘holding’ players, those with strategic awareness, ultra-competitive ‘physical’ types and those who keep the team together as a unit. The purpose of this module is to look at the second group – the non-technical roles that need to be fulfilled to make a successful team.
Lots of research has been conducted into what it takes to build a brilliant team. You may have come across Meredith Belbin’s nine ‘team roles’. If you haven’t it is likely that you will in your professional career. One of the best simple attempts to assess team roles came from business thinker and writer Peter Honey. He devised five universal roles that he felt needed to be performed in a successful team. Naturally some of Belbin’s and Honey’s team roles overlap, so this section combines their work to recommend seven team roles:
- Leaders/coordinators – Direction.
- Doers – Action.
- Creators – Ideas.
- Carers – Harmony.
- Achievers – Results.
- Challengers – Caution.
- Networkers – Resources.
Other roles will need to be performed that relate to the specific nature of the work your team does. For each role we will look at what the role involves and the benefits the role brings to the team. There will also be tips and things to look out for (the ‘pitfalls’) with each of the roles. A word about you before we start, however. It is assumed that you are the team leader or coordinator. Leaders create vision, direction and purpose and are decisive when they need to be. You have a choice of styles you can use as the leader and these can be broadly summarised as being ‘supportive’ or ‘directive’. A sister module to this, ‘Motivating the team’, talks you through six different styles of leadership/management available to you.
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A number of other roles need to be performed by the team that will depend on the nature of the work being done by the team – the specialists. Be sure what those roles are in your team and who is performing them. These will be based on the skills of each team member. These additional roles should be built around the specific goals that the team has.
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You are not just a leader. Just as one or two other members of the team (or more) will have the capacity for leadership, you will also have the capacity to perform other roles. Take the chance as we look through the specifics about these roles below to decide which ones sit more comfortably with you. You are likely to have a preference for one or two of them.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
A big mistake among team leaders is to believe that the leader has to be good at performing all of those roles themselves. Leaders don’t. What they must do, however, is value the complementary skills that others bring to the team. For example, a common assumption leaders make – particularly those with large egos – is to think they have to have all of the ideas. There may well be far better ‘creators’ in the team.
Team roles – an explanation
‘Doer’
The doers are committed to action. They see the ways to do things first before considering the pitfalls (if they consider the pitfalls at all). This positive spirit can be infectious. When the team see someone in the team getting stuff done, team members become inspired to follow, although for some it has the opposite effect (reminding them, so they erroneously believe, of their own inadequacies).
The ‘can do, will do’ people are essential if the team is going to achieve anything. The team relies on them to run with the team’s ideas. They are good at getting the practical stuff done.
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The doers are great when a team is initiating new projects and ideas. As the leader/manager they are great for delegating to if the team needs a kick-start.
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Festina lente or ‘make haste slowly’ was the old mantra of the Fabian Society in the 19th century. Sometimes we need to slow down to let people or events catch up with us. The doers can be fast-moving and as the leader/manager you need to monitor (with subtlety) what the doers are up to.
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Doers are active people and may create activity where none exists. This includes starting fires so that they can be busy putting them out. Doers need action to keep them interested. Keep the doers active, keep their horizons broad, keep their goals challenging. Doers like to be stretched. But be sure that the doer’s actions are in line with the goals of the team. Are the doers clear about where they have freedom to act and where they need to act in a more controlled manner?
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Make the connection between what you are doing and what the team is trying to do. Random actions can be damaging. Action that directly connects to the goals of the team gets the results the team desires. Getting stuff done is not the same as getting the right stuff done.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Because ‘doers’ are associated with action and activity they may not admit they are struggling. There is no prize for heroic failure when the help others could have given was not asked for or utilised. Sometimes doers need to suppress ego if it means that the job is going to get done.
Creator
The creators are the idea generators and the potential problem solvers in the team. They may be voluble but it is more likely that they are quiet and contemplative. The creators can act like a ‘team helicopter’, hovering above a situation, making an assessment of that situation and considering a range of possible alternatives to deal with the situation. They often also act as a valuable counterweight to the energetic doers.
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As well as having ideas, the creators are good at building on the ideas of others. Many teams satisfy themselves with a limited number of new ideas or allow good initial ideas to remain under-developed. The creator’s role here can be amplified by you and used for positive benefit.
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Creators may ‘live in their head’ and therefore may not be as forthcoming with their views as others in the team. Sometimes quieter team members do not get heard. Their quietness is assumed to mean they have nothing to offer. Encourage the quiet – they may have insights that others have not considered. It is tempting to say that the creators are not being held back in your team. How do you know?
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Creators are often good at seeing ‘the bigger picture’. They can take a helicopter view of what is really going on – something they share with good leaders. However, to add a bit of healthy contradiction here, some creators can get locked too far into the opposite of this – the minutiae – and as a consequence struggle to break out of a limited perspective.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
The opportunity to have ideas is seen as playtime by the creators. This is great. But it may be a game with no end. At some point ideas and options need to be moved on into action.
Carer
The carers generate team cohesion through growing strong relationships within the team. The carer’s role is often a subtle, less obvious one. But it is a critical one. Teams need emotional glue – a bind that keeps them together through the challenges, the conflicts, the disagreements and the stresses of day-to-day working. Because ‘carers’ are multi-sensory they are a good conduit to the outside world.
Human beings are complex. Teams rightly identify the need to have ideas and put those ideas into action. But when human beings are involved things are not as straightforward as this. The ‘carers’ are able to understand the complexity of interpersonal relationships and get to the core of what makes a harmonious working environment. If you need convincing about the value of the carers, think about the carers in your team or in teams you have worked in previously. What might the team have looked like if they weren’t there? What would relationships have been like? Would it have been as enjoyable? Would team productivity have suffered?
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Of all the roles this is the one that is the most under estimated (being seen by some as a bit ‘soft and fluffy’). This role has the same value as the others, but it is tempting to say that ‘ideas’ (creators) and ‘action’ (achievers, doers) are more important because they are more tangible. The carer’s role is tough to perform but essential to the wellbeing of the team, so send a signal to the team members who are less inclined to be ‘people people’ that you, as a leader/manager, prize this role.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Carers have a disposition to ease conflict. However, managed conflict and disagreement is a necessary instrument of deeper insight, and ultimately change, and as a leader a little creative, constructive tension in the team is a good thing.
Achiever
As we saw, for all of the infectious energy of the ‘doer’ there is no guarantee that they achieve. The achievers do just that. They help the team meet its goals because they focus on deadlines and end results. They check detail, often have a direct, no-nonsense style and use failure as a spur to future success. Some achievers nag others because they are particularly keen to meet deadlines.
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Achievers are often confused with doers, sometimes sharing some characteristics. However, if you look at teams outside the workplace, e.g. sports teams, political groupings, the achiever is sometimes the ‘quiet achiever’, not the one with the loudest mouth. They quietly get on with the job of turning out quality work. Have a look at your own team and other teams where you work. Are there quiet achievers around? Recognise the value they bring. Don’t make assumptions that they don’t need praise and recognition like everyone else.
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One of the key things that differentiates the achievers from the doers is that the achievers, because of their attention to detail, recognise the need for systems and procedures and are willing to pick up the administrative shortfall. We can be over-reliant on the achievers for this because the detail stuff isn’t much fun for most. As a leader/manager you need to make sure that the achievers aren’t a safety net for others who aren’t doing the detail bits of their jobs properly.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Achievers, aware of their value, may not be great at sharing or delegating. This may come from the need for control. This need for control can cause stress when the achiever doesn’t feel they have control and the stress can easily permeate the team if it’s not managed.
Challenger
Challengers are analytical, weighing up the options and sounding warnings when potential action has been ill thought through. They have high standards, searching for continuous improvement, and therefore act as the natural quality controller in a team. Challengers bring the benefit of strategic thinking, planning ahead and thinking through the consequences of actions beyond the short term. Of course some, particularly the doers, find this frustrating, and as a consequence the challengers might not be the most popular members of the team, sometimes being seen as cold and even aloof.
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Challengers can be good at playing the devil’s advocate role. They can look at problems in different ways, asking: ‘How would X see this?’ or ‘Can we look at this a different way?’ This can be very useful in problem-solving, but you must, as the leader/manager, use this devil’s advocacy for positive means, i.e. to stretch the team’s thinking rather than the opposite.
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Challengers can be prone to ‘Yes…but’ statements, which kill off open thinking. This is a pitfall. A good suggestion from Dan Pink in his book A Whole New Mind is to adopt ‘Yes…and’ language instead of ‘Yes…but’. Pink uses an example: ‘I’d like to eat more healthily but there are always sugary snacks around the office which tempt me when I am hungry.’ Instead try: ‘I’d like to eat more healthily and so I need to make sure I bring a good supply of healthy snacks from home when I come into work.’ ‘Yes…and’ creates a problem-solving rather than an intractable problem mentality.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Does everything need to be perfect? Are there times when ‘good enough is good enough’? There are times when the pursuit of perfection isn’t necessary – Facebook, for example, uses the motto ‘done is better than perfect’. Perfectionism takes time and the team leader/manager will need to consider when ‘done is best’ and when ‘perfect is essential’. Too much challenging can create stasis.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Analysis can lead to paralysis and team momentum can be lost. At some point analysis has to stop and action needs to begin. In the final analysis, action of any kind – within reason – will usually be better than team inertia. Analysis can often mean that we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing as well as the wrong thing.
Networker
Although networkers are valuable members of the team, a lot of their work is done beyond the team. They work around traditional hierarchies, building relationships with people throughout your organisation. They are in touch with the ‘political’ climate, in tune with gossip and trends. They bring resources, contacts and new thinking. Their work extends beyond the organisation into customers, suppliers and even competitors. They are good communicators, more inclined to extraversion (though certainly not always – contacts are often built up in more subtle ways) and lively.
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Teams often slip into silo mentality – separating the work they do from other teams and the organisation as a whole. The networkers are valuable in connecting the team to the outside world and reminding team members that they cannot operate in isolation. Use networkers as a touchstone into the real world.
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Other team members may need to pick up where the networker left off – running with their initial contribution. Although this can be a pitfall (see below), opportunities may be missed because no one is running with the opportunities presented, e.g. sales leads.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Networkers can be random in outlook and may lack the ability to filter out what isn’t useful from what is. You and other team members may need to do this – the challengers being particularly useful here. The randomness means that networkers can move from one thing to the next quickly, leaving others to pick up the pieces.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Networkers can be terrific team ambassadors because they are high profile – they are your tendrils out into the world beyond the team. But be sure that what the networkers are saying and doing are the things that the team wants the networkers to be saying and doing.
You – the leader/manager – and the roles
Understanding these roles requires more than just assuming that the roles are pieces of a jigsaw that need fitting together. Although they provide a solid base from which to look at your team, there are additional considerations.
Assumption challenging
You cannot always make assumptions that certain people will take up certain roles because they normally do. For example, there are plenty of doers who get on with the job but who seem to become paralysed when there is high pressure or a crisis situation develops. It may well be that in a crisis other members of the team emerge who seem to be able to get stuff done when the crisis situation demands it. Therefore don’t underestimate the capacity for others in the team to perform in ways that pleasantly surprise you.
‘Role dumping’
Saying ‘Ed is always great in a crisis’ is not particularly fair on Ed if all Ed gets to deal with are serious problems. Ed may quite like this flattery for a while but may begin to wonder why he is only seen as a crisis problem solver. Just as Ed needs to grow into other areas of the team’s work, other people in the team need to be able to operate in Ed’s traditional territory too. Remember the gruesome ‘London Bus’ scenario: ‘What would we do if Ed fell under a London bus tomorrow?’
Team roles and team growth
The roles of the team should be based on the skills and capabilities of team members. But capabilities in this case can also refer to ‘capabilities yet to be developed’. You can learn to think better just as you can learn to lead and learn to develop stronger relationships. So even though individuals have a preference for one or two roles, they won’t develop into other roles if their initial preferences are the ones they are confined to.
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To help you think about how these roles apply, take a team with which you are familiar but not a part of – a sports team you support, a society perhaps or a team at work in another section or department. Who performs the roles in those teams? We haven’t covered the leadership role here but you should consider this also. Don’t make the assumption that the designated team leader/manager performs the leadership role all of the time. Great teams have people who assume leadership roles at different times.
ASSESS YOURSELF
If your team isn’t working as it should be the reasons may extend beyond the performing of certain behavioural roles. The functional roles related to the specifics of the team’s work also need to be performed. However, they do provide a strong basis on which to measure effectiveness and in particular assess where the problems might exist in a moderate or poorly functioning team. Perhaps team harmony is not as it should be because no one is assuming that caring role. Maybe the team is stagnating because not enough new ideas are coming out. Maybe your meetings are great talking shops but no one really does anything afterwards (very common). With those common problems comes a solution – serious consideration of the ‘balance’ of the team and the roles that need to be performed to create that balance. Do not underestimate them.
3. Dimensions of culture
Every team is diverse. Some teams are more obviously diverse, however. They may contain people from visibly different age groups, races and cultural backgrounds. In those circumstances we are all prone to making judgements about people based on these superficial characteristics. Of course, such judgements can be very wrong unless you spend your life only looking out for the signals that confirm these – in which case you will always prove yourself ‘right’. These superficial judgements are not particularly helpful in the workplace.
So, what is helpful? A visual metaphor might be useful. Imagine you have an onion and the obviously visual/auditory characteristics such as race, language and age make the outer layers. What we need as managers of a diverse team is a tool to help us with a diverse team on a deeper level – peeling back the layers of the onion. In the previous section we looked at the more obvious ‘doing-based’ characteristics through the prism of non-technical team roles. In this section we look at the ‘being-based’ characteristics of cultural difference.
Perhaps the best practical study over the last 20 years of cultural difference has been developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. This section is based on their work. Their research is interesting because it reveals seven ‘dimensions of culture’ that live within each of us. Our concern here is not to explain what culture is or to play with the idea that different groups display different combinations of the seven dimensions. Rather, our interest is to explain each dimension and then to offer advice on how you manage people displaying each of the characteristics of the dimension. Finally, do not be put off by the language (as I must admit this author initially was) the originators use. At the heart of what they say is a really practical tool for understanding and managing diversity in the team, in the workplace and across the world.
The seven dimensions
Below is an initial description of the seven dimensions. Each dimension is then developed further. It’s important not to cast judgement on preferences in others. Just because, for example, you prefer to follow rules regardless of the preservation of the relationship (see dimension 1 below) doesn’t mean that you are in some way superior to the person who prefers to preserve the relationship even if the rules are bent a little. There is no ‘best way’. We are all creatures of culture and these dimensions are deeply ingrained. We need to work with them, not fight battles with them. The seven dimensions are as follows:
- Universalism vs. Particularism: do I have a preference for following rules or preserving relationships?
- Individualism vs. Communitarianism: am I more focused on ‘me’ or ‘we’?
- Neutral vs. Affective: do I seek to control my emotions or express them?
- Specific vs. Diffuse: is work kept apart from my personal life or are they connected?
- Achievement vs. Ascription: is status based on what I do or on who I am?
- Sequential Time vs. Synchronous Time: do I plan and keep to a schedule or do I have many overlapping activities?
- Inner Direction vs. Outer Direction: do I control my world/environment or does my world/environment control me?
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Each dimension is comprised of a straight line with the extreme characteristics of each, e.g. universalism/particularism, placed at each end. In reality we sit somewhere on the line but are unlikely to be at the end of it. The tips below therefore are guidance rather than gospel. Use them as useful indicators.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
The language of versus (vs.) implies that these dimensions ‘compete’. An outcome of this competition is that we then make a judgement about the winner – usually the ones that equate most closely with ourselves. In fact, they should be seen as complementary. If you prefer rules as team leader you won’t get a lot of job engagement from a team comprising people who want to get to know you in order to work for you.
Universalism vs. particularism
If you have a preference for following rules you are likely to want clear direction as to the ‘right’ way to do something. It doesn’t mean that friendship isn’t important but that rules, laws and defined obligations come first. A defined ‘truth’. This means you have a preference for universalism – a set of universal rules that makes life easy to follow and less ambiguous. A particularist will value the relationship as a priority. Friendship means special obligation to the person or people concerned comes first. Here’s an example. You need some petty cash at work and you head to accounts to get it. The company rule says you need to give accounts 48 hours’ notice. But you need the money in a hurry. You approach the accounts person concerned. If they are a stickler for the rules they will say ‘no’ even if you have a good working relationship. However, if the relationship between you takes a priority, you get your money! The rules are amended.
If, as a team leader, you chair the weekly team meeting and you have a tendency for universalism, you believe that meetings should be run according to meeting protocol: clear agenda, defined time allotted for each agenda point, minutes taken and circulated within 24 hours, finish on time. Sounds good? Well, it might be. But it might also mean that people feel frustrated with the process when they didn’t get the chance to express what they thought, for instance, because time ran out or an issue arose that should have been discussed in more detail but wasn’t. Every dimension has pros and cons.
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Working with universalism: be consistent, objective, fair and as leader/manager recognise that you will be seen as trustworthy if you follow protocol and procedure. Decision making that affects those with a preference for universalism should be based on facts rather than intuition.
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Working with particularism: allow for particularists to get to know you through small talk and conversation that extends beyond conventional work-related discussion. As a leader/manager you will be seen as trustworthy if you are able to adapt flexibly to situations that affect both of you. However, some rules do need to be followed and you should emphasise what is critical and where there is room for manoeuvre.
Individualism vs. communitarianism
Think about yourself and ask if you have more of an orientation to yourself – I have clear needs, goals, purpose and the control I exert over my life comes clearly from me. This orientation displays the characteristics of individualism. You take care of yourself. Or perhaps you believe that safety, security and success come from the group – you define and pursue common goals and objectives. Britain, the USA and North European countries are seen as more individualistic – pursuing ‘the American Dream’ is one manifestation of this and it’s seen as a characteristic of the most modern societies. But think of Japan and South Korea – strongly group orientated (communitarian) and yet with the highest standards of living in the world.
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These are extreme positions so don’t assume that individualistic people don’t care about the group. Some of the most individualistic societies have more clubs and associations than those with a group orientation. But individualists may well be answering the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question as they join these groups.
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Working with individualism: individualists will value personal incentives rather than group ones. They will need to be given special projects, praise and opportunities to initiate/create. However, this isn’t a free-for-all. Demonstrate how individual needs can be served through the team, department and organisation.
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Working with communitarianism: if you have a highly cohesive group, working well, avoid giving special treatment and work on keeping morale high. Communitarians respond well to big goals as a motivating force and share praise for success collectively. Great teams can of course contain those with a preference for individualism and the two happily co-exist. Communitarians will want to share decision-making processes with others.
Neutral vs. affective
Do you express yourself more at home than you do at work? Do you park your emotions at the office door in the morning and collect them on the way home? Does expression of emotion confuse the issue – throwing ‘fog’ into what should be an objective, rational-thinking environment? Or perhaps the workplace is better served by allowing people to openly express what they think and feel in the ways that come most naturally to them (thus being ‘affective’)? Although we associate certain cultures with the showing of emotion in the workplace as an innate part of working life, the truth is that even in working environments where emotions are usually controlled there are plenty who do ‘open up’. Think about your own team – who is more inclined to show overtly what’s going on inside?
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Working with neutrals: control your emotions and in particular watch out for your body language and voice tone, as well as the words you use. Keep these controlled. Avoid over-familiarity and keep to the point in discussions. There may be similarities in the way you work with universalists here. A small display of pleasure or annoyance is as much as you might get and you can safely amplify this in your mind.
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Working with affectives: first, challenge the assumption (if you have it) that emotional means unprofessional. On the contrary, displays of emotion often come out because people care deeply. Try to be a bit more open yourself, establishing rapport and expressing what you ‘feel’ as well as what you ‘think’.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Although we have said that opening up a little with affectives will serve you well, this isn’t always the case. The extreme showing of emotion at work, e.g. tears, may be a manipulative tool where the particular person may want the team/you to feel sorry for them. In this case an emotionally neutral position is best. Don’t be intimidated.
4. Specific vs. diffuse
This fourth dimension is about compartmentalisation – how different aspects of your life permeate each other. Ask yourself a question: how much do you know about the lives of team members beyond the workplace, e.g. home life, hobbies/interests and relationships? Then ask yourself a second question: how much do you think you need to know to meet workplace objectives? This dimension asks how much the personal permeates the professional.
As a leader/manager you might say that your role is to work with the team to meet objectives regardless of the personal relationships you have with team members – keep to the contract. In this case you have a preference for the specific. However, you might believe that the way to get the best out of a person is to get to know the ‘whole’ person to meet objectives (‘diffuse’). You consider it important, for example, to meet that person’s partner or even meet up on Saturday for a game of tennis.
Of course, ultimately it’s not so much about what you think/are, it’s about what the other person ‘is’. If they want to bring the personal into the professional environment and a simple question like ‘What did you get up to at the weekend?’ or ‘How’s the family?’ establishes a connection, then do it. I am sure you, the reader, can think of many people you have worked with whom you wouldn’t dream of asking any questions beyond the confines of work.
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Working with specific-orientated: inevitably you focus on work – clear instructions, conversations about work and objectives only and a clear expression of standards and objectives. Avoid intrusion into personal lives unless invited to do so.
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Working with diffuse-orientated: look at the personal whole life and judge them on that basis. Allow time for chit-chat about life beyond work – be interested. Ambiguity about life itself spreads into ambiguity about working life, and instructions and discussions are seen as a start point rather than ends in themselves.
5. Achievement vs. ascription
So, you’re the leader/manager. When you moved into that role, team members will have been discussing you and assessing your credibility and suitability for the job. We all have slightly different criteria for doing this – with many areas of overlap – and therefore confer status on you based on whether you meet these criteria. Those who confer status according to ascription will do so based on a number of factors such as age, social class, gender, education and professional qualifications. So, if you were promoted young and you have team members who value age and experience (particularly if they are older and more experienced than you), you will need to work hard to achieve credibility.
However, your credibility and status might be obtained through the achievements you have had and in particular those that relate to the job you have now. There is overlap between achievement and ascription status. Your education may or may not relate to the job you do now (it’s surprising how often it doesn’t) – if it does, those who confer status because of achievement will consider this important; if it doesn’t, they will notice but might attach no significance to it.
Your very status as a manager is central to this. Some people make no connection between the successes you have had previously in a specific job, e.g. a successful salesperson, and your ability to manage effectively now – the successful salesperson being promoted to become sales manager for the first time.
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Working with achievement-orientated: those who challenge you will do so on technical, task-specific grounds. You should do the same. Work hard at being a good role model because your credibility and status come from what you do, not what you have done historically.
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Working with ascription-orientated: if you have status through ascription you may find that you are unchallenged because of your status. If the opposite occurs, you will need to invest time to build credibility and show you are worthy of the job.
Note: We have looked at status here in relation to you and your credibility within the team. Remember that team members will be conferring credibility and status on each other based on the same criteria and these will affect working relationships. Where there is a dominant cultural orientation within the group in terms of the way they view you, their leader/manager, it is worth remembering that you can really only be the type of leader/manager that culturally your team want you to be.
6. Sequential time vs. synchronous time
So, how does your work day go? Do you plan a day as a sequence of activities to be performed one after the other (‘sequential’) – time has to be ‘managed’? Or do you have lots of things on the go at once and view plans as a flexible start point from which you will veer (‘synchronous’)? The sequential see things as a series of passing events. They refer to the inter-connectedness between past, present and future.
Even though we live in the present we think all the time about the past (experiences, nostalgia) and the future (vision, goals, achievement). A good way to think about the difference in your organisation is this: do your success/failure conversations revolve around quarterly reports or are you thinking about the long term, say 10–20 years (future), or referring to precedents that have been set in the past? This author’s father worked for UPS and even in the year 2000 UPS employees were required to read a book by the UPS founder, Jim Casey, written in the 1940s.
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Working with those with a sequential preference: refer to the most recent performance for evaluation and the near future for goal setting. Although sequential thinkers can see long term, they need short-term goals to keep them moving. The preference for the sequential works well when things are fairly stable and predictable. Relationships need to be worked on because they might take second place to the schedule.
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Working with those with a synchronic preference: evaluate performance based on the whole history with the organisation and not just the immediate past. The synchronous are valuable when working in more challenging and changing environments because they work through the uncertainty. The synchronic do find it difficult to manage time, so emphasise when time keeping really is critical.
7. Inner direction vs. outer direction
Do you happen to the world or does the world happen to you? Do you believe that you are internally empowered to take control over your life (inner-directed) by imposing your will on it? Or do you believe that you are part of something bigger – the environment around you – and to an extent that ‘something bigger’ has a degree of control over you (outer-directed)?
Through history, from the earliest hominids (human-like people) to the evolution of Homo sapiens, we have been primed to understand that natural elements such as fire, flood, wind, etc. have had control over us but that we are able to mitigate against the worst effects of these through creativity and invention. Thus inner-directed and outer-directed can be seen to be both ‘right’. We need both – an awareness of external events (risk analysis, for example) and a need for internal ‘drive’ to make things happen (the energy to kick-start new initiatives). The outer-directed recognise the value in managing relationships beyond the team.
At their extremes however, both can be damaging. Those who are highly ‘inner-directed’ may be aggressive and self-seeking and fail to establish strong relationships. Those who are ‘outer-directed’ might say, ‘Why bother?’ if ‘X’ is going to happen anyway or if someone has a high degree of power over them. Both have a strong degree of self-fulfilling prophecy about them. Do nothing and of course nature will take its course, just as the ‘outer-directed’ predicted.
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In some cultures the power of the natural order exerting control over us is pervasive (‘Inshallah’ or ‘God willing’, is one example). But don’t just think about it in these terms. Within your own team there are likely to be people who ‘bend with the wind’ rather than initiate objectives themselves.
ASSESS YOURSELF
This final ‘assess yourself’ acts as a suitable conclusion for both the previous section on team roles and this section looking at cultural difference. Here we look at some of the things you might say to yourself on your journey to understanding that there are many ways to see the world and there are many ways to ‘be’ in that world. And that as a step on from this, that the different ways in which we think and behave can bring immeasurable benefit to the workplace if they are embraced.
Success
In this last section we have looked at culture and the ways in which you can work with and manage those who are different to you. We all come to the subject of culture from different entry points: ‘My way is the right way’, ‘Why on earth do they do it that way?’ or ‘Imagine having to live like that’ are natural responses for many of us who are culturally conditioned from the moment of birth. However, we do also have the ability to simultaneously understand our own conditioning without endlessly feeling the need to defend it.
You can see you are heading in the right direction when you find yourself:
- noticing the differences in others without feeling the need to instantly criticise
- looking at other people’s worlds and understanding those worlds from their perspective
- taking pleasure (possibly even being ‘entertained’) from the unexpected rather than feeling threatened by it
- not having to justify your mental model of the world to yourself
- open to the idea that there may be better ways to do something than the solutions in your own mental model
- able to see the ways in which you are different from the cultural stereotype that might be applied to you
- willing to experiment with new approaches.
And finally you notice the very act of appreciating that others are different to you is reciprocated by others reflecting that you are uniquely different too. A unique world among seven billion of them!
Checklist
- Do you understand the benefits of showing, and not showing, emotion in the workplace as a key aspect of cultural difference? Click here to review.
- Are you comfortable with exploring the uniqueness of every team member and discovering what makes them different, and through this, what they can uniquely and collectively offer? Click here to review.
- Do you understand the importance of establishing shared values through a truly collaborative process as a process that will bring the group closer together? Click here to review.
- Do you understand why it is important to proactively build a team that is more diverse through recruitment? Click here to review.
- Why is inviting others working outside the day-to-day functioning of the team to join your team a key aspect in building an effective team? Click here to review.
- Are people more interested in you as a manager and a leader because you are more interested in them? Click here to review.
- Do you accept that by moving towards an understanding of someone else’s culture/difference/personality they automatically move towards yours, and why this is desirable? Click here to review.
- Do you understand the different roles you might need to perform within your team and which sit most comfortably with you? Click here to review.
- Can you remember the five universal team roles and the most important aspects of each? Click here to review.
- Are you able to confidently assess and consider the ‘balance’ of your team and the roles that need to be performed to create that balance? Click here to review.
- Can you recall the seven dimensions of culture and how to manage people displaying each of the characteristics of the dimension? Click here to review.