March 27, 2021 | by David March.
Businesses require solid systems and structures to perform efficiently, so the question is how do business leaders ensure that they hire competent individuals from diverse backgrounds? Secondly, how do they organize their hiring practices to factor into account not just technical or hard skills, but soft skills as well?
The answer is not simple. But one thing is obvious: it’s in the interest of most companies to hire people from different backgrounds because doing so increases their ability to innovate and significantly enhances a business’s problem-solving capabilities. A company’s “problem-solving consciousness” is best served by people that can collaborate and call upon a wide range of skills and life experiences.
When I speak about diversity, I’m looking at it in several ways: diversity in values; diversity in skills; and, of course, diversity as it correlates to our different personalities, cultural backgrounds, and ideologies.
All these different “types” of diversities can be gathered and placed into what I like to call “the problem-solving pot.” Let’s take a deeper look into the problem solving-pot through the lens of the Myers Briggs Typology. The Myers Brigg test was originally developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs based on their study of Carl Jung’s theory of human personality.
For example, some Myers Briggs questions ask:
- “I am the life of the party”
- “I feel little concern for others”
- “I am always prepared”
Look familiar? Perhaps you’ve taken this test, or one based on the Myers Briggs test as a team-building exercise. If you have, you may recall that you mark your answer on a 1-5 scale that ranges from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. The cumulative “score” of the questions determines your general personality profile.
I have always liked this idea of using this assessment to promote cognitive diversity in the workplace, because it provides a quantifiable way to measure the differences between team members’ emotional and perceptual orientation.
The Myers Briggs Typology analyzes a person according to their psychological tendencies — preferences such as… is the individual in question geared towards Extroversion (E), or Introversion (I). It also measures a person’s perceptual tendencies — Sensing (S) or Intuition (N); their preferred way of processing information – Thinking (T), Feeling (F), and their orientation to the outside world – Perceiving (P) and Judging (J). When the test is completed, a combination of one’s preferences is revealed, and the results take the form of one of sixteen combinations, see the color chart below.
The most important set of knowledge that can be gleaned from the Myers Briggs test is one’s dominant mental functions (DMF) and Temperament. The DMF represents an individual’s inclination toward Introversion or Extroversion as well as their tendencies toward either a Perception function or a Judgement function. For example, one DMF could be the combination of Thinking and Introversion. The hallmarks of an introverted thinkers are that they look for consistency and logic. Temperament is the center two letters for Intuitive types NT and NF and for Sensing types it’s SJ and SP.
Now imagine a dynamic department consisting of a team that represents all mental functions, let’s say it is a social-media department that consists of a Te, Fi, Se, and Ni. Each of these four employees – an Extrovert thinker, an Introverted Feeler, an Extroverted sensor, and an Introverted intuitive are gifted with their own unique assets.
Each employee’s strongest mental function plays an important role in how they approach and tackle a company’s problems. When working together, their differences make for a recipe that encourages innovation and novel solutions.
Let’s take a step back and look at what plants can tell us about the benefits of diversity in the workplace by examining a chapter from Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, which examines The Irish Potato Famine. For the purposes of our analogy the Farmers will represent Business, and the Citizens of Ireland will be Consumers. Now, imagine what the different DMFs of the characters might be to find a solution for ending the famine.
During the Irish Potato Famine, Ireland experienced a period of mass starvation and disease due to a fungus-like organism that spread through the food supply and ultimately decimated millions of acres of crops. At the time, Ireland’s agricultural practices could best be described as a “monoculture.” This meant that a single breed of potato, the Irish Lumper, was planted in the same soil year after year. Over time, this caused the soil to become toxic and vulnerable to a fungus for which the Irish Lumper had no natural resistances. Banking one’s fortunes on a monoculture, in other words, paved the way for a disaster.
The solution to the great famine was biodiversity. On the opposite side of the globe, Peruvians knew that a single breed of any potato was susceptible to fungus. To avoid a famine, they planted many breeds of potatoes, including purple, blue, red, yellow and white. They worked and planted different varieties of potatoes to increase their crops’ resistance to disease and avoid a famine altogether. To this day that’s why you see purple, blue, red, yellow, and white potatoes in the grocery store.
Like the Peruvian’s, the Irish overcame The Great Famine through using multiple breeds of potatoes. From this historical anecdote we can infer that a diverse group of people with varying DMFs and cultural backgrounds can accomplish more than a set of people hobbled by uniform group thinking. Like the many-colored potatoes that helped turn the Irish famine around, a business should establish a diverse combination of employees, in order to cultivate the “soil” in the workplace that lends itself to innovation.
It’s smart to staff your organization with a diverse group of people that have an array of soft skills and hard skills to bring to the table. By way of example, you may be fantastic at developing video games but not so great at assessing personalities and onboarding new hires. Or you may be amazing at Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAP) but not so great at assessing people’s soft skills and knowing where they best fit into your customer service teams. Or you can be amazing at IT but have absolutely no clue when it comes to assessing someone’s potential.
Assessing a person’s soft-skills and not just rating them by their hard skills (education) offers your company a fantastic opportunity for growth through cross-functional collaboration. With a range of different insights and knowledge to draw from, you’ll be grateful to have an array of cognitive tools to throw at any given problem. If managed correctly, a structured and diverse workplace will always outperform a workplace that subscribes to a one-dimensional, single-minded, the boss’s-way-or-the-highway, one-potato “monoculture.”
To think outside the box, find the best combination of people, with a mix of different personalities, to give your business an edge over the competition. Biodiversity worked to reverse the Irish famine. Imagine what it can do for your business!
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