Building the peloton
organization, the most senior member of the team will lead it, parceling out tasks according to each team members’ position in the team’s hierarchy. In a modern workplace, however, team roles are rarely dictated by position titles. Instead, they are dynamically divided and assigned based on the skills and capabilities each person brings to the team and their fit with the team’s needs at the moment. A cycling team’s “team leader” role—as distinct from “team captain”—gives an example of the different types of leadership roles required within a cycling team. (These two roles are often merged in a traditional business team, a team anchored in a firm’s organization chart via a manager.) Team captains provide guidance to the team while on the road, using experience and local knowledge to adjust the strategy, and liaising with the directeurs sportifs. The role of the team leader, while generally held by the strongest all-rounder, might be fulfilled by whoever is best positioned to win a particular race or race stage. A team’s best climber may lead a hilly stage, but would not be as qualified to lead during flat stages where the team’s best sprinter would take the lead. A second, deeper level of diversity (in business) is based on identity (or demographics), such as gender, age, ethnicity, or socioeconomic factors. This is analogous to the need for local knowledge in a cycling race, where our cycling team might benefit from having members with a deep knowledge of the different roads that the race will pass along. For business, diversity of identity gives a team the ability to tap into different viewpoints and lived experiences—tacit knowledge that can greatly enhance effectiveness in working with the diverse set of stakeholders (both internal and external) that a team must typically deal with.
TO BE MOST EFFECTIVE, A TEAM’S DIRECTION SHOULD BE: • Clear
• Challenging • Achievable • Consequential • Engaging
individuals can approach and think about problems. 23 In business, cognitive diversity is often tied to the business area or discipline in which a person has the most experience. A team of accountants, for example, is likely to frame all problems as accounting problems and assume accounting solutions. 24 A cognitively diverse team of accountants, engineers, anthropologists, and skilled tradespeople will be forced to develop a multidisciplinary understanding of what the problem is, and will likely come up with a superior, and multidisciplinary, solution. A diverse team should ideally draw on a broad range of stakeholder groups, including a mix of capabilities, disciplines, personalities, risk appetites, and cognitive styles; that is, it should have role, identity, and cognitive diversity. There are a few caveats about greater diversity supporting higher performance. First, diversity will only be beneficial if it is enabled and reinforced by effective practices throughout a team’s life cycle, uniting the diverse team rather than allowing the team’s differences to tear it apart. Second, a team’s role diversity must also be complementary: Consider the problems likely to arise on a cycling team consisting of only climbers, a soccer team composed of eleven goalies, a ship crewed only by captains, or an executive board consisting only of financial experts. Third, it goes without saying that adding a skill set completely divorced from the team’s purpose will have limited value. Finally, the
There is also a third level of diversity: cognitive diversity. 22 This refers to the diverse ways that
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