INSTANT MBA: Focus On The Team, Not The Person

Today's advice comes from Sallie Krawcheck, business leader at 85 Broads, via LinkedIn:

"Research has shown that the best performing teams are diverse teams. The power of diverse perspectives is such that diverse teams outperform non-diverse teams….and they outperform even more capable teams."

When finding the best person for the job, it's natural to gravitate toward like-minded people. It's an innate bias: humans enjoy working with people like themselves. But Sallie Krawcheck advises against this. Instead of looking for the "best person for the job", companies should shift their search for the "best team for the job". In addition to creating a team of diverse skills, companies should also be looking for a wide range of backgrounds, innate or acquired.

"When I have built business teams in the past, I've tried to round out the group by including a visionary, a doer, a skeptic, a client advocate and an “historian” as part of the team, to name a few...we will have accomplished a great deal on improving company performance. And we will have accomplished a great deal on increasing opportunity and diversity."

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