Leveraging individual’s strengths through diversity
Although I’m Latino living in US since 2003, I usually don’t talk too much about diversity. The reason for that is because when I started working in a large corporation in US (2004), I heard thought the halls some coworkers saying: he is here because he is part of diversity. That made me very upset and since that day I promised to myself that I would never leverage the diversity card in order to grow in my career. I wanted to be recognized as a professional by the quality of my work. I wanted to be rewarded by what I deserved based on what I’ve accomplished. Thankfully, this has been happening over the past 16 years.
The reason I’m talking about this now is because diversity has multiple dimensions, and one of the dimensions that I’ve been exploring as Professor is the unique experience that each individual brings to the table, their strengths will vary a lot according to their unique capabilities, and that’s where diversity becomes so powerful. One of the advantages of teaching online and having students from many countries is their perception on the problems that they face on the daily basis and observing how they approach to solve these problems. What can be consider basic for someone in US (like having Internet access), may not be the same for some students that are located in a more poor country with limited Internet access. Their way to workaround problems reveals their strengths in problem solving and critical thinking. These attributes can be very powerful when you provide the opportunity for these students to resolve bigger problems by providing them the appropriate tools.
Leveraging individuals’ strengths through diversity means that we should embrace the unique capabilities that each individual has, identify what they are passionate about, and empower them to do more. The article A Framework for Turning Individuals' Strengths into Team Synergies, has a great example of how this approach is used in Sports to benefit the entire team. The author says “It’s important to understand the strengths of the individuals on your team. The only way to optimize synergies on a team is to leverage differentiated individual strengths in complementary ways.” In other words: you don’t need every single team player to be good on everything, they must complement each other.
This topic brings me back memories from my high school years in Brazil. In my junior year, when I was playing soccer we had a new coach that started the season saying: from now on everyone will need to attack and defend. His goal was to train defenders to know how to cross the mid-field and attack, as well as having strikers to go back to defend when needed. Guess what happened? We lost most of the games in that season. To be honest, we (players) all knew it was not going to work. Despite the efforts, the reality was: a good striker that is good scoring goals, needed to continue refining his skills to score more goals. In other words: continue to improve his strengths in the field that he is already good. When a great striker saw himself having to learn new skills that has nothing to do with his passion, he felt he was not progressing, that he was wasting time doing something that he didn’t like. As result, he failed, and some players even stop going to practice because they were not motivated.
When we have a diverse group of people, we have lots of opportunities to do more things and achieve more as a team. Each individual has different goals and passions that once they are explored, that person will take off and be extremely happy knowing that is helping the team while making personal progress in their career.
Diversity should always be celebrated, but not only with nice words, instead we need to empower individuals to grow by levering their strengths and reward them by their results.