Free Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations by Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone Page A

members—and thus less trustworthy. And it can get ugly: those individuals, now considered out-group members, can face exclusion from intragroup information networks and decision-making processes. 20
    And so we find ourselves with what is, scientifically speaking, the central paradox of teams: the most successful teams exhibit diversity in their ranks, but heterogeneous (that is, diverse) teams face serious structural challenges regarding motivation, integration, and coordination. 21
    Thus it all comes down to the team leader. The more diverse a team, the more volatile it is likely to be. And often the only thing keeping such a team from exploding is the quality of its leadership. Great leaders create team genius by bringing together, and holding together, the most diverse and heterogeneous teams.
    And that leadership is needed from the very start. Thus, leaders need to be mindful of how to “activate” the identities of new group members, especially when introducing the new team. And as we will see later in this book, that same quality of leadership is still needed, often years later, when the team is led through its retirement and dissolution. Great leaders make great teams because only they can manage them.
    Based on those four decades and thousands of research reports, Williams and O’Reilly summarize the different types of diversity, and their distinct challenges, as follows:
    •        Tenure diversity is associated with low social integration, poor communication, and high turnover in groups—all processes that can impair group performance.
    •        Functional diversity improves creative ideas in groups—however, not necessarily the implementation of those ideas.
    •        Age diversity can increase turnover and withdrawal, especially of those individuals most different from the rest of the group.
    •        Gender diversity typically has negative effects on men. Men are less satisfied and less committed when in the minority—even though in female-dominated groups men are likely to be more accepted, less stereotyped, and less likely to be treated with hostility.
    •        Racial/ethnic diversity research is mostly on white-black dynamics, and the results are inconclusive.
    GETTING THE BEST FROM DIVERSITY
    That’s a pretty daunting list.
    Is it really worth it? Why not instead just use all the other tools for team building and skip the diversity part? Or just pursue a lesser degree of diversity—one that may enhance the team without exploding it into a nightmare of cliques, accusations, and fights?
    The answer lies, like most things, in your own cost-benefit analysis of the importance of the project, your confidence in how well you will recruit your team, and how much risk you are willing to take to achieve your goals.
    The bottom line is that your greatest chance to create a successful, productive team involves a diverse membership—but the more diverse that membership becomes, the worse the odds are that the team will survive long enough to produce those results. So you need a strategy to mitigate the cost of that increased diversity. The scientific evidence suggests that this strategy should take two tracks.
    First, diverse teams need to be actively managed . 22 Abandon now any notion you have that you can build the most powerful team possible, wind it up, and let it run by itself. In fact, the more diverse the team, the more hands-on management it will need.
    That means, with larger groups, that you must be very selective about the team leader you choose. You will need a pro, not just, say, someone selected from the team. You will also likely want torelieve that leader of any duties that contribute to the operations of that group and reserve to them the job of full-time management. That, of course, will require increasing that team by one member, with a commensurate jump in the team’s budget. It also means that with small teams—that is, pairs and trios—you will