Finding the right people for your team
What makes a team successful?
Effective teams are a result of cognitive diversity rather than of homogeneity.
When teams or organisations try to recruit people similar to their existing employees, they run the risk of only hiring people who think and act in a similar way to their existing employees. But the success of a team is not based on everyone thinking the same way, it’s the result of everyone thinking differently.
Everyone brings something different. Some people are intuitive; others analytical, and everyone sees problems — and the solutions to those problems — in different ways.
Effectiveness comes from bringing different approaches together. Cognitively diverse teams are effective because they come up with more new approaches — there’s more discussion, debate, and argument.
For example, a recent study from London Business School and Ashridge Business School found that the more cognitively diverse the team, the more likely and quicker they were to solve a demanding problem.
Companies should focus on hiring people who think differently from their existing employees; people who can bring new ideas and an interesting take on problems.
By using ViewsHub for example, organisations of all sizes can begin to understand enabling individuals and teams to understand their own behavioural traits.
Founder and CEO Ab Banerjee explains:
“Starting with their own self-assessment along 23 key traits, their “behavioural genome”, and then crowdsourcing how they are assessed on the same traits by anyone else they’ve worked with.
This creates a crowd-sourced map of the individual’s behavioural traits in areas, such as creativity, curiosity, drive, resilience, risk appetite, and ambition.
By plotting your own traits on a map alongside those of your team members, you can get an instant awareness of where there are clusters of cognitive traits (increasing the risk of groupthink), and where there are gaps (highlighting the need to hire team members with these traits). Areas of clusters or gaps are going to be more or less important depending upon the purpose of the team, and once recognised and visible to all, it can, in turn, be used to inform future hiring strategies.
Ultimately, if you want to ensure that you are not just appointing the same kind of people, that your organisation is truly invested in diversity and its long-term performance, then it is important you employ strategies at the recruitment level that help widen the pool.”
— —
ViewsHub is a team-to-team ratings and feedback platform, to help companies improve cooperation among co-workers and between clients through the delivery of ongoing feedback. The platform empowers teams to track their effectiveness using TeamScore, a dynamic, real time metric to measure performance effectiveness and improve it through feedback from stakeholders.
