That's important and I think that's true, although when we talk about diversity,
we're not really just talking about differences between people,
kind of on the surface.
Right, so certainly we think about differences in gender and race,
as I mentioned before, my own sort of background.
But we think about differences in where someone went to school,
what their education was, right?
What was their major?
It might have differences in which department they're a part of,
so if you're in a team with someone from sales and someone from marketing,
we think about cross functional differences.
So there are lots of differences that we can and
should think about when we talk about diversity.
And often times, our go to is when we bring these differences together, there
are inherently different perspectives that are underlying those differences
that we kind of see on the surface or the differences that we're aware of.
That's good and I think of that as sort of the traditional value of diversity and
that's something I think more managers are starting to think about, or
maybe even thinking about a little bit now for maybe the last 10, 15 years.
Something that I think is really important for them to recognize and
some of the work that I've done on diversity really emphasizes this.
Is that there's more than just that value of diversity.
And if we take that value that people who are different from each other are expected
to have different perspectives that can also be quite limiting.
Because we know that people who are different from each other may not
have different perspectives, and we know that people who have looked the same,
may actually have different information, or different expertise, or different
knowledge, that's important for the group and that the group can benefit from.
But it won't benefit from that if we don't
make an effort to bring those different perspectives out.
What I think of is the unexpected value of diversity, which you could see here.
Which is the idea that people who are the same on the surface may have different
perspectives.
And people who are different on the surface may have similar perspectives,
is that we found that the presence of diversity, so
the presence of some difference that's salient to people that
are working together, actually helps facilitate
sharing a different perspectives from everybody that's present.
So the good thing about that is having this salient differences
on the surface can actually help managers get the value that
they want out of the diversity that they have in their organizations.
And the value that they want is this value of different perspectives and different
information that their employees can bring to solve important and difficult problems.
>> So, surface diversity may queue people to think hard about underlying diversity,
even if the underlying diversity doesn't necessarily correlate with
the surface diversity?
>> Absolutely, and not just think about it, but
we found that the presence of service diversity actually makes it easier for
people to bring up these different perspectives.
One of the challenges of bringing up different perspective is that,
most of us don't really want to be you know, the different one, right?
The one that's saying something, that's not what everybody else thinks.
Even though the best value really comes from that, right?
As I said, if everybody thinks the same thing,
then what's the point of having a group of people together?
So even though managers desire innovation and they desire creativity and
those things come about from sharing different perspectives.
Often times it's difficult for people to bring up those different perspectives.
And so this signal of surface level diversity not only
helps remind people that there may be underlying opinion differences or
perspective differences, it actually helps the people who have those different
perspectives feel more comfortable sharing those different perspectives.
>> So differences at the surface level actually legitimate differences in ideas,
differences in perspective and make it easier for people to raise those issues
for their group so that they can become an informational resource for the group.
>> So I really appreciate that you used the word legitimate.
Because the presence of different perspectives doesn't
necessarily translate into better interactions, more innovation,
more creativity without a role of an effective leader, right?
A role of an effective leader in that process can help make those different
perspectives seem legitimate to the different team members.