Last night we hosted the Berlin Scrum Meetup at idealo and had an inspiring presentation about the value of teams diversity presented by Kristina Mueller and Petra Stuehler. With this post I’ll share some insights from that session.

Update 01.05.2016 – Slides are now available too

Why

Why should you consider diversity for your teams?

Kristina and Petra showed some important areas like innovation, recruiting, motivation, productivity and efficiency, learning from other perspectives,… (see more on the 2 following pictures) where adding diversity has a positive influence.

How

Based on the book Diverse Teams at Work – Capitalizing on the power of diversity one can consider 4 layers/dimensions of diversity – personality, internal dimensions, external dimensions and organizational dimensions (see picture below for details of all layers).

Using that rich set of diversity areas one can build a map of the team’s current diversity. Petra and Kristina presented a great map of a former team constellation (see picture below).

By building that map the team can learn a lot about

• their current solution scope
• what knowledge areas they cover
• why they behave differently or share common approaches
• weaknesses for missing pieces (that can be addressed by either hiring or growing knowledge to add a special diversity)

Kristina and Petra showed their usage of that map to derive their teams service portfolio.

And their derived teams commonalities.

To Learn

Further readings

• Team genius – The new science of High Performing Organizations – that describes a lot about diversity and dimensions of diversity to consider
• Use personal maps to get a better understanding of one another and shrink the mental distance in your team – I guess an interesting way to build your team’s diversity map
• Consider the Riemann-Thomann-Model to analyze behavior and cause relationships in your team and get deeper insights in the personality dimension in your team (other personality tests like the Myer Briggs Type Indicator can also provide interesting insights). But please – use with care as putting people in a box should be avoided!
• Play moving motivators with your teams – to discover different motivators for your team

Thanks to Kristina and Petra for sharing your insights about the value of diversity in teams. Thanks to Ioana Buliga and Gerald Weith for organizing the event and to Lisbeth and Marco for preparing a great host environment.