Fundamentals for an Empowered Environment
By: Nick Penston
Tags: Diversity, Cognitive Diversity, Empowerment, Cloud, Fidelity Investments

In a previous post, I introduced some key strategies that are critical to enabling cognitive diversity in the workplace. Having a supportive culture at your organization is essential to this mission.

Members of a team need to be able to speak openly, be vulnerable, turn any conflict to a collaboration-focused opportunity, and be supported to relentlessly pursue mastery in their craft.

Let’s take a look at some of the key areas that I have found to be fundamental in developing a supportive culture for cognitive diverse teams.

Interpersonal connection

Trust is the foundation of any successful partnership and is essential for a high-performance team. The quest to enable a true safe environment for the team to thrive starts here.

A critical building block to creating trust is creating and maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. Sharing who we are, our backgrounds and what has brought us together connects us at a fundamental level and it is the fuel to building an open and transparent team. This journey starts with you — actively communicate this vision, being mindful of differences in personal boundaries.

Strong relationships embrace our true selves — being your genuine self is paramount. Accept nothing less.

Things to try:

Leave work behind. Create opportunity for your team to connect, share experiences, share passions and interests. From casual conversations before a meeting kick off to planned activities, advocate these rituals and embed them in how you work.

Use 1:1 time to connect. Get to know people, actively listen and demonstrate your genuine desire to help and enable.

Name your team — helping to create a stronger sense of belonging.

Create a value system

Cognitive diverse teams bring a rich set of experiences, thought processes and backgrounds together. These differences are the team’s core strength and enable the team to solve complex challenges innovatively. However, with different views, styles and approaches conflict can arise. Conflict erodes trust and will inhibit the open culture.

Enter the value system.

The value system is a set of core behaviors agreed by the team. Everyone considers these important — this set of values becomes your social contract.

This social contract is created through open discussion, discussing the expectations and behaviors each member considers important. Emerging from these discussions is a set of common values, creating a guiding light to interactions of the team — removing ambiguity and reducing the potential for misunderstanding.

Revisiting these values ensures continual focus and empowers the team to accelerate their maturity by continuously pushing the boundaries of their shared understanding.

Things to try:

Prioritize the output, focusing on 5–7 values. Keeping it short makes them easy to remember.

Put the values up in your physical and virtual spaces. make them visible. Celebrate and hold people accountable to them.

Build a path to the ‘how’

If the value system is the way we work, a set of principles form the foundations to how we work. These principles play a pivotal role in empowering your team. The principles remove any ambiguity in relation to how the work should get done — moving away from personal opinions to team commitment.

Like the value system, revisit regularly, embracing disagreement and use it to generate a combined outcome — a sum of many parts.

Things to try:

Start with 2 or 3 principles — focusing on the priority areas in which you want to mature.

Create clear objectives and measurement for your principles — progress is a great motivator.

Agree upon the underlying practices which support your principles, continuously improving and seeking feedback through metrics and open dialogue.

Cognitive rich teams need a safe and empowered environment for them to flourish. The value system, combined with the guiding light the principles provide, help enable the openness and transparency which are critical pillars in any empowered environment.

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