Why You Should Encourage Your Team to Rock the Boat at Work

By James O. Rodgers

Effective diversity management is not a recipe for harmony--it is intended to produce better results. Few people will argue with the logic of having more cognitive diversity on a work team.

It seems obvious that the more perspectives we apply to a problem, the more complete answer we will produce. Yet, few managers are actually constructing teams with a radically broad range of cognitive diversity. And, even fewer managers are actually deliberately using the cognitive diversity on their teams to create better business outcomes.

Ever wonder why that is the case? Here’s a clue. Most organizations prefer harmony to creativity, robustness, innovation, or peak performance.

The Quest for Harmony

Creating a pleasant work environment is certainly a worthy goal. But to do so at the expense of improved business results is unwise.

Too often, managers have opted to create a harmonious workplace in which people all get along, they generally agree on most points, there is little contentiousness, most decisions are left to the team expert in that function (design, engineering, marketing, etc.), and team members are often not invited to contribute their unique ideas. The result, of course, is that the team produces mediocre results.

Expressing or Suppressing

Recruiting and retaining top talent is an ongoing challenge for many organizations. Most employees (at least the best and brightest) would prefer a dynamic, exciting, challenging, and learning environment more than so-called harmony. The key to retaining the best talent is giving them “voice.”

Workers want to give 100 percent (including their unique perspectives) to their work teams. Organizations can benefit from this fact by allowing everyone to bring their unique points of view to the table.

Unfortunately, many organizations go out and recruit a diverse team only to suppress the value of their uniqueness. They get the right people on the bus (diversity recruiting), give them a nice comfortable seat (inclusion), and then insist that they not rock the bus. What a waste of resources!

Boat Rocking by Design

There is overwhelming evidence that (cognitive) diversity is the essential ingredient for quality decisions, better problem solving, more accurate prediction, constructive innovation challenges, high performance, and increased productivity. But it only works when managers allow that diversity to operate freely and naturally.

The value of cognitive diversity is in the tension created by team members who approach problems with genuinely different points of view and who choose to express those differences. Diversity management is a process intended to produce the best possible outcome for the team. Diversity management has never been a recipe for team harmony. It has always been intended to produce better business results.

Avoiding Chaos, Confusion, and Conflict

The presence of differing opinions and interpretations can be challenging for a team, unless they expect it and are conditioned to manage it. Poorly managed diversity is a recipe for chaos, confusion, and conflict. Dissension can degenerate into argument without a workable process of arriving at a great solution.

In that process, disagreement is celebrated, dissent is welcomed, dialogue is encouraged, boat-rocking crazy ideas are valued, and people are hard on ideas while showing respect and appreciation for all fellow team members.

The theory of effective team operations supports the efficacy of this approach. It is the best way to achieve better results with a talented team.

The Role of Effective Managers

A popular song of the '70s asked the question, “I’d like to know where you got the notion – to rock the boat?” In a well-managed diverse work team, rocking the boat is not a notion. It comes about because the team members have naturally occurring different perspectives and interpretations of life.

If properly constructed, these work teams do not have one or two outliers who rock the boat. Every team member is a boat rocker at some point in time.

This occurs because effective managers recruit cognitive diversity, nurture team members to express their points of view, and facilitate different perspectives toward a consensus solution that far exceeds the value of any single expert’s solution.

In the hyper competitive world of the twenty-first century, no company can afford to pass on the opportunity to use well-managed deliberately diverse work teams to execute on the needs of the modern enterprise. Boat rocking can no longer be seen as a dysfunction to be eliminated. Instead, it must become a management strategy to be executed deliberately.