The Business Sensei

Cognitive Diversity? Mr. Johnson is Right!

In Mel Brooks’ classic comedy, “Blazing Saddles,” there’s a scene near the beginning of the movie where the inhabitants of Rock Ridge are trying to decide how to handle the crime wave besetting their town. As they meet in the church, Reverend Johnson calls up the various townspeople to speak: Van Johnson, Howard Johnson, Olson Johnson, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Don Johnson, Gabby Johnson, and so forth. After each Johnson says their piece, the next Johnson gets up to say, “Mr. Johnson is right.” The multitude of Johnsons don’t have any particularly creative ideas, but they did come to a very quick agreement on what to do.

I was reminded of this scene when reading Bari Williams’ article, “Tech’s Troubling New Trend: Diversity Is in Your Head,” in the New York Times.

Needless to say, the crowd in Rock Ridge are not very diverse. In the church scene, the high point of diversity comes when Gabby Johnson gives a passionate speech in authentic, if incomprehensible, frontier gibberish. What makes him an example of diversity? Well, all the other Johnsons spoke clearly articulated English. However, even Gabby’s authentic frontier gibberish didn’t stimulate any divergent thought in the group.

Bari Williams’ article discusses Apple’s vice-president of diversity and inclusion, Denise Smith, saying that, “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse, too, because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”

Perhaps all 12 men could be named Johnson?

The problem with this concept of “cognitive diversity,” as it’s known, is that it doesn’t work. It might sound good (although even that’s debatable), but if the goal is a team that can come up with varied and creative ideas, “cognitive diversity” by itself is a waste of time. It’s more likely that such a team will come up with fewer, less creative ideas, and more rapidly reach a consensus without considering a variety of options.

Why doesn’t cognitive diversity work? Fundamentally, because we can’t see cognitive diversity. Our minds respond to our environments. What we see around us influences how we direct and use our mental focus: The inputs shape the outputs. A dull, flat, colorless environment tends to be vaguely depressing, while a bright, open, colorful environment tends to be mentally stimulating. When the people around us all look like us, our thoughts tend to converge as well. When the people around us are physically different from us, we start to think in more diverse ways. The group is more likely to come up with more different ideas, and more likely to spend a greater amount of time exploring and developing those ideas.

To be fair, it is harder to bring a more physically diverse group of people together into a team than it is to do so with a same-sized homogeneous group. The more diverse group might spend a longer period in an awkward, “get to know you,” stage before it really starts to become productive. On the other hand, more diverse groups tend to be able to solve a wider range of problems, deal with a wider range of unexpected situations, and generally perform better than more homogeneous groups.

A focus on cognitive diversity just yields homogeneity. If you truly want people to think different, a focus on physical (i.e. race, gender, ethnicity, etc) diversity is the best way to do it.

For the people of Rock Ridge, diversity came as a bit of a shock. They didn’t adapt to it easily, but when they did they were able to find a way out of their predicament. To succeed, they had to learn to break down some walls. Corporations may have to learn to break down a few barriers as well in order to build effective, diverse teams.

When The Solution Is The Problem

I am pleased to announce that my next book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, will be published by Springer in 2013.

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“I sit down in a meeting and my phone goes nuts. I can’t even take a vacation!”

This very frustrated comment was made to me by a manager about his team. Whenever he’s in a meeting or away from the office at a client site, no work gets done. His team is constantly calling him to make decisions or help them solve problems.

“I don’t get it. The solution is obvious!”

This was a completely different manager at a completely different company. Same basic problem though: When he wasn’t there, nothing got done. He was frustrated; his team was frustrated. They were all loyal, all eager to please, but they also wouldn’t do anything if he wasn’t there.

Indeed, teams that don’t work when the manager isn’t around are legion. It’s a common problem, and common wisdom suggests that the team members lack motivation or are trying to goof off: when the cat’s away, and all that.

Common wisdom may sound good, but is often wrong. This is no exception.

When apparently enthusiastic teams are unable to get any work done when the boss is away, there are really three common causes:

1. The goals are unclear.
2. The group can’t make decisions without the boss.
3. The group is either unable or unwilling solve the problems that come up.

While the first two are important, the third is critical: If the team doesn’t think it can do the job, or isn’t willing to try, then it doesn’t matter how skillful they are at decision making and it doesn’t matter how clear the goals are. It’ll merely be that much clearer to them that they cannot do it.

In each of the cases mentioned above, and countless others, the situation was the same: a highly skilled, knowledgeable manager, a competent team, working under a tight deadline and the perception that there was no time for mistakes.

Perception can be dangerous: In this case, the perception that mistakes had to be avoided caused more delay than the mistakes would have!

In each situation, when the team ran into a difficult problem, they’d call their manager. He’d run into the room, quickly size up the situation, and tell them what to do. It usually worked; if it didn’t, they’d call him in again and the process would repeat.

Given the tight deadlines and how busy the manager was, this always seemed to be the best thing to do: solve the problem, move on. Unfortunately, it meant that the team never had to learn to solve the problems for themselves. Even worse, they were being given the very unmistakable message that they couldn’t be trusted to make the attempt lest they make a mistake.

In each case, the solution was easy, although the implementation was not: The manager had to slow down and work through the problem solving process with their team. Rather than solving the problems, they had to let the team see their process for problem solving, and understand their criteria for success.

Then, came the really hard part. Each manager had to step back and let the team move forward on their own.  Yes, the manager could help, but they also had to resist the urge to solve the problems. They had to accept that the teams would make mistakes.

This did not always go smoothly. It is not easy to tolerate mistakes, especially when the right answer is obvious to you. However, if the teams were not allowed to make mistakes, and then recover from those mistakes, the team couldn’t develop either the confidence or the ability to solve problems on their own.

Some managers couldn’t accept this. They couldn’t tolerate the inevitable mistakes or they couldn’t stop themselves from solving the problems. Others went the other direction: they were too quick to pull away, refusing to help at all. A couple firmly believed that they were making themselves irrelevant, and refused to move forward.

Most, however, were able to make the transition. Many needed some coaching: An outside perspective is very helpful. For those who were successful, they found that their teams became far more skilled and motivated than they had ever dreamed could happen. Instead of spending their time running around solving problems for the team, those successful managers were able to take a more strategic focus, further increasing team productivity. Several were subsequently promoted into more senior roles in their organizations.

In the end, teams don’t learn to operate when the boss is away by watching the boss solve every problem. It’s learning what to do, practicing, and recovering from the inevitable mistakes along the way that transform a dependent, low-performance team into an independent, high-performance team that gets things done when the boss is away.