Diverse teams are here to stay.
So in this module, we'll look at some examples of best practices that encourage
high performance on diverse teams.
A high performing team is one in which there is one,
a high quality output of product or service.
Two, strong working relationships and information sharing among team members.
And three, individual members of the team make meaning from the work.
One important best practice of high performing teams
is the willingness to be accountable for results.
Even though its results were not so flattering, Google elected to share their
diversity numbers to show how much farther they need to go to make opportunity more
equitable within the company, to a more diverse group of employees.
Google Senior Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Boch,
posted that 70% of Google's employees are men.
61% of its total workforce is white.
Another 30% are Asian, 3% are Hispanic, and 2% are African American.
Boch said that Google had been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity
of its workforce, but now realized that it was
time to be candid about the need to better attract and retain a diverse workforce.
Publishing demographic information about employees,
held Google publicly accountable for improving diversity.
Most critical to Google's future diversity efforts
is that its leaders are willing to self reflect.
Research supports that using structured reflection is a proven method for
achieving high performance on your team.
Another important aspect of high performance identified at Google
is this idea of psychological safety.
In order to find out what qualities were most common among its most productive
teams, Google undertook a two year self study of over 250 attributes,
over 1800 Google teams.
Over 200 interviews and thousands of data points later,
Google discovered that who was on a team was less important.
What mattered more was how team members interacted, structured their work, and
viewed their contributions in the context of the team.
The positive relationships among team members and
the ability of team members to speak their mind created psychological safety.