Diversity of Thinking in the Workplace
6th May 2022
There is broad consensus that a team which includes people who think in different ways is good for creative problem solving and innovation. This is because they can trigger ideas from each other and more easily see the potential and problems as a solution is being developed. If, however these people who think in different ways have different viewpoints on an issue, there is much more potential for misunderstanding and miscommunication.
Multi-Disciplinary Working?
In order to get a varied and balanced team, employers may recruit people from different subject backgrounds to allow for a range of expertise. But did you know that each academic discipline has its own language, as well as its own way of training students to think about the subject? Different subjects often have different terms for the same concept and, even more confusingly, the same name or the same acronym for different concepts. For people from different disciplines to communicate effectively and to really work together collaboratively, means that they must learn each other’s language. A working knowledge of other team member’s subjects is useful too!
Often this can prove quite challenging, and each team member ends up completing their part and then everything is glued together at the end. This is multi-disciplinary working of a sort, but it could be better. True multi-disciplinary collaborative working brings different perspectives to a particular problem and different expertise is combined in such a way that it is difficult to identify the elements from different disciplines in the final solution.
Our director, Dr Elizabeth Guest, has worked in this way and in fact Aspiedent’s autism/neurodiversity/everyone profiling tool has used Dr Guests ability to do multi-disciplinary research to think about autism differently. To do this, Dr Guest has had to learn the many different subject languages and combine lots of different ideas from different disciplines herself.
This ability to do multi-disciplinary research is a key strength of Dr Guest’s autism. As a university lecturer, she was often berated for having too many interests and delving into too many different areas of research. Generally, this is not something academics would usually do and in fact whilst it created many problems for Dr Guest it was extremely useful for solving intractable problems that nobody else could solve.
Organisations that need these kinds of skills give their employees experience in many different areas. The civil service, for example moves its staff into different areas regularly so that they become generalists. Other organisations that act in a multi-disciplinary consultancy role do the same thing. Building up experience in many different areas is seen as a strength which improves overall problem solving abilities.
This feeds into the general notion of IQ. Someone with a high IQ is good across the three primary areas of an IQ test: verbal ability, visual-spatial ability, and processing ability. Someone who has a high IQ has good overall intelligence with no areas of particular weakness – precisely the kind of people the civil service and these other organisations are looking for. Precisely what they studied at university then has little or no relevance.
Uneven or Spiky Ability Profiles
What you do not have a high level of intelligence combined with an uneven ability profile? (Yes, IQ tests don’t do these kinds of people justice!) You might still be very good at multi-disciplinary problem solving. Dr Guest has an uneven ability profile. She can solve the problems in a multi-disciplinary way, is good at picking up new subject areas quickly, good at learning different subject languages. The one area she struggles with is documenting it all as in writing it down. Explaining it to people via presentations is not an issue. This made Dr Guest struggle as an academic, where publishing is an essential part of the job.
There are other examples of uneven ability, such as being particularly good at coding, but struggling to take effective notes. Often, but not always (some make good managers), autistic people struggle to manage people effectively. This might be because of difficulties with social interaction and communication or simply because they have little tolerance for dealing with people. This limits opportunities for promotion within a company as usually promotion comes with managing people.
An employee who has an uneven ability profile may excel at their current job but is much less likely to be selected for a promotion because they would struggle to complete all elements of the role. It might be that they are unable to manage people because they lack good social-communication skills. Another example is where the organisation expects all their employees to be a generalist, but a particular employee would do much better, and be an asset to the organisation as a specialist.
There is often no obvious career path for people with this kind of diversity of thinking.
What kind of career path could they have? Would a technical career path be possible? Would being allowed to specialise and becoming a world leader in their area be a possibility? Could they be a hidden asset to the organisation?
Many organisations struggle to cope effectively with this kind of diversity, leading to disillusioned employees who feel undervalued.
If true diversity of thinking is to be incorporated into the workplace, then this is an issue that needs to be solved. The solution will be different depending on the organisation. If a person is not improving in their job via expertise or speed, then there is no scope for promotion. But what if someone is excelling at their job, but there is no scope for recognition of this? This is likely to be a problem.
Creating Balanced and Diverse Teams
The key is to be more intelligent when building teams. Sit down and make inventories of the all the different ways of thinking present in your highest performing teams. Use this to recruit new people who think in the ways you are specifically looking for. This will improve performance as well as diversity.
Only when workplaces can properly accommodate this kind of diversity of thinking, will they really be able to say that they are good at accommodating diversity of thinking.
Don’t have any idea how to go about doing this? Contact us today on info@aspiedent.com! We can teach you how to make inventories of different ways of thinking and help you create recruitment strategies that build more balanced teams.
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