Having a cognitively diverse team gets the best results
Many organisations have an HR department that ticks boxes on whether they enough women, gays, colours and nationalities and they think they have diverse teams. In general they only care about the law and diversity and pay scant attention to inclusion, interculturality, neurodiversity and generational diversity as it is not a legal requirement.
Who Needs To Make Money?
McKinsey have proved over and over again that having a truly diverse team is the best way to improve profits. And to develop customers it’s better to have someone who has similar characteristics to serve those customers.
No amount of ‘diversity’ in any of the above categories will be successful if everyone thinks the same way. And a recruiter’s in-built bias will ensure that they still recruit people who will ‘fit in’ rather than challenge the status quo. Your customers don’t all think the same way so neither should your team.
Holistic approach to recruitment
Recruiting a diverse team requires a holistic approach, recruiting the best person for the team is way more important than recruiting the best person for a particular job. Not an approach even thought about by most recruiters who still look for hard skills and experience rather than the soft skills required to work in a team.
FREE EVENT 23rd November 2024
DISCulturally Decoding Human Behaviour with Clair Aghassipour – see below to get tickets
How do you go about this?.
Some people are more extrovert (or Active) than others and some are more introvert( (or Reactive). Some people absolutely rely on logic ( or Task Orientated) and have no time for emotion, others think emotion and behaviours such a empathy are very important (or People Orientated). Putting them all together which brings four combinations.
In reality everyone is a combination of introvert/extrovert and of logical/emotional but tend to be predominantly one combination such as ‘emotional/extravert’ , which can be expressed as through the colours red, yellow, green and blue.
Profiling Tools
There are many tools available to assess individuals as to which personality types. There are tools based on the work of Jung which include Insights, C-me and the variants of DISC. Others are MBTI, Enneagram which take a different approach.
Within Smart Coaching & Training we have expertise on many of these tools. And in order to gain an understanding of the concepts of DISC, SCT associate Clair Aghassipour is running a three hour workshop on Colour Profiling using DISC. This will cover the concepts of the understanding of individuals as well as combining to build a truly diverse team. (see details below)
Don’t believe all the stereotyping by Interculturalists
Many interculturalists believe that there are characteristics and behaviours based on nationalities, such as The Dutch are very logical and the Spanish are very emotional. To an extent this is the case, and is a good starting point. But given and even split of cognitive characteristics only half of the Dutch are logical and only half the Spanish are emotional. So the works of Hofstede are a good starting point , but also considering the way people think is a much more useful way of thinking.
All about Human Behaviour
DISCulturally Decoding Human Behaviour Workshop 23rd Nov 9.45 CET with Clair Aghassipour – FREE EVENT but you have to reserve your place . Send request to info@Smartcoachingtraining.com
Read also about Profiling in general here Read also about Cognitive Diversity here
Watch David Rigby give an introduction to Colour Profiling here and also …
- David presented a 7 minute test speech for Madrid Toastmasters on Cognitive Interculturality here
- Watch is webinar on Cognitive Diversity with DG Talks here
- Watch his ‘hot seat’ interview on Cognitive Diversity for GLEAC here.
Smart Coaching & Training works with 27 associates, in four continents speaking 12 languages and raised and working in a wide range of cultures. See our associates here.
Written by David Rigby © 2024 Smart Coaching & Training Ltd