“Diversity” is a word frequently heard in corporate circles, yet, like many business buzzwords, its meaning can be diluted, diminishing its true power. Often, it’s narrowly associated with primary factors like race, gender, or ethnicity. While these are undeniably important considerations, I believe that to build truly innovative and high-performing teams, especially in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs), leaders must also consciously cultivate secondary dimensions of diversity. As David Hackett Fischer noted about American liberty, its strength lies in “different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another.” This “creative tension” is what true diversity can bring to your organization.

Building Powerful Teams: Focusing on Secondary Dimensions of Diversity

When building or adding to your team, focusing on these secondary dimensions can naturally lead to a rich tapestry of primary diversity as well:

1. Experience and Background:
   • Does your team share a homogenous industry background, or do you have a cross-section of experiences? A team with members from banking, manufacturing, tech startups, and even seemingly unrelated fields brings a wealth of varied problem-solving approaches. So often, a challenge appearing new in one industry has already been tackled in another. As a fractional CIO, my experience across diverse industries allows me to bring these cross-pollinated insights to your SMB’s unique IT challenges.
2. Perspective and Approach:
   • Does your team always attack problems from the same angle? Are they all detail-oriented, or all conceptual “big picture” thinkers? Every challenge has multiple facets (recall the “Six Blind Men and the Elephant“). A team with varied problem-solving perspectives is far more likely to see the whole “elephant” and devise robust solutions.
3. Work Styles:
   • Do team members operate identically? Similar office hours, communication preferences (verbal vs. visual, written vs. spoken), approaches to documentation? While differences can create some friction, this “healthy tension” is often beneficial. It forces us to be more conscious communicators and can prevent the complacency of groupthink. Leveraging technology to support diverse work styles is a key aspect of modern IT strategy.
4. Personality Type:
   • Is your team skewed towards extroversion or introversion, “thinking” or “feeling” orientations (as per frameworks like Myers-Briggs)? While some roles might seem to favor certain types, a diversity of personalities creates a more balanced and resilient team. As a leader, understanding your own type and consciously surrounding yourself with complementary personalities is crucial.

The goal is to create healthy creative tension by assembling a team that can “think independently, together.”

Balancing the Dimensions & Leveraging the Power

Focusing on these secondary dimensions doesn’t diminish the importance of primary diversity; often, it inherently helps achieve it. The key is to be conscious: map your team, identify concentrations and gaps, and recruit to augment what you have.

Once you have a diverse team, leveraging its power requires what I call “Human Leadership” (as discussed in “Leading to Outcomes“). It means putting aside your own predispositions. As leaders, our past successes have shaped our approaches. But as we grow, and as our teams become more diverse, we must “unlearn” the idea that our way is the only way. Senior leaders who try to build teams entirely in their own image often lose valuable perspectives and crucial organizational memory.

True effectiveness comes from adjusting our own work styles and expectations to retain and empower valuable team members who may be different from us but deliver outstanding results. This conscious effort to build and lead diverse teams isn’t about a social agenda; it’s about unleashing incredible business power. It allows you to:

• See challenges from multiple angles you wouldn’t have considered.
• Access solutions learned in entirely different contexts.
• Build more resilient and adaptive strategies.

What’s Next

All of us are only smarter than any one of us if each of us brings different experiences, approaches, perspectives, and work styles. If we’re all the same, the value of being a team is greatly diminished. To build true, long-term competitive advantage for your SMB, commit to building true, multi-dimensional diversity.

Is your SMB consciously cultivating multi-dimensional diversity to drive innovation and strategic success? If you’re looking for a partner to help you build high-performing teams and leverage diverse perspectives in your IT strategy and operations, let’s connect with Succeed Sooner Consulting.