Mining Perspective Gold for a High Performing Multicultural Team

Diverse teams are a fact of life at work today. And rightly so! Our companies need the creativity, commitment, mental flexibility, and talent of people with different perspectives working together to solve organizational challenges. Teams in general, and multicultural teams in particular, can tackle complex tasks extremely effectively. Why? Because... • Diverse teams produce a greater number of ideas. • Diversity of perspective helps teams come up with creative solutions to complex problems. • Diversity of perspectives requires team members to explore a wide range of viewpoints that generates greater confidence in their final decisions. • When effective, inclusive multicultural teams produce stronger commitment to decisions. • Implementation of decisions is easier when people have been involved or represented in the decision-making process. The diversity that truly matters in this regard is perspective diversity. The key factor in high-performing teams is that all of the team members contribute different (diverse) ideas from their various perspectives—with the ideas coordinated to serve the team mission