People Strategies: Recognizing individual diversity key to group taking action

Linda Bower is a speaker, executive coach and human performance improvement consultant in Rogersville.

Last week, I met with some of my European clients in Oxford, England. Doesn't that sound glamorous? Yeah, well, I saw four walls of a conference room most of the time.

At first thought, one might assume that the meeting was very different than if it were with a typical group from southwest Missouri. However, the only differences I witnessed were based on the professional experience in the group and in their exposure to diversity. Everything else was the same, including the skills each individual required to be a productive member of a team.

The Oxford group is made up of highly experienced professionals who consult on behalf of a global human-performance improvement company. There was a South African man (he fought in three wars) with a doctorate in psychology, a British-born, Canadian-raised woman who now lives in Belgium, and four Englishmen, all with master's degrees, with three dialects represented. An American woman living in Wales completed the group.

My role was to give the group a deeper understanding of leadership, management and team issues, and to provide additional consulting tools for them to use with their clients.

The impact of the profession of this group on team interaction was unusual. Most people expect consulting companies to behave better internally than their clients. In fact, it's often worse. It is possible to know too much to work effectively with other people. Expectations of behavior are sky-high, and the ability to articulate complex concepts is a competitive battleground.

The high professional expectations in the group were counter-balanced by their acceptance of diversity. These people are constantly confronted with obvious differences among cultures and the languages that support them. Therefore, they walk into a room assuming that each individual is unique and entitled to represent their personal experience of the world.

In our area, where differences aren't so obvious, we forget that each individual is unique and entitled to represent his or her own experience of the world. We actually need to recognize our own diversity to gain enough ideas before we can bring people to common action.

With the Oxford group, I used one of the consulting company's own models Mutual Influence Skills to increase the group's ability to generate innovative solutions for client situations. The skills include Listen to Learn, Express to Explore and Integrate to Innovate.

First, I introduced the purpose of using Mutual Influence Skills by discussing a quote from author and consultant Charles Kepner: "Where people do not listen and are not courteous, you do not get their best contributions, and people do not tell the truth."

This group had not been listening to each other, a few were not courteous and, in general, people only told the truth in e-mail whispers. The consequences of their behaviors were showing in the group's performance. The Mutual Influence Skills would be applied during the meeting to counteract the group's historical competitiveness.

Imagine, for a moment, how your group would behave differently if individuals were using the following Mutual Influence Skills during your next meeting.

Listen to Learn: Most people listen for what they want to hear. This skill requires people to govern a learning mindset. It means ceasing "brain-noise" to listen to what another person is really trying to say. Listening skills include the ability to be silent, to ask clarifying questions and to ask questions that discover the person's perspective more fully.

Express to Explore: Usually people think of expressing as a means to be heard. This skill requires people to express as a means for deepening a group's thought process. This is really tough. For one thing, it forces people to stop using time to restate what has already been said. Individuals must start connecting their thoughts and expressions to the benefit of the group.

Integrate to Innovate: If the first two skills are being demonstrated, then this one is really easy. New and better ways of doing business rely on this skill being present in organizations. This is the ability to combine and modify ideas and vision and explore new solutions.

These Mutual Influence Skills are powerful because they give individuals goals for interpersonal behavior. No one can use these skills in every situation. Stress has a huge bearing on our ability to demonstrate these skills. However, the rewards for effort are extraordinary on a personal basis, for teams and for organizations.