KACHARAGADLA

Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey  report  on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. In a global  analysis  of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board. In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance. Let’s dig into why diverse teams are smarter. They Focu

Millions of words have been written and published about what it takes to become a strong leader. We should talk about another aspect of leadership, which is the fact that it’s really hard to be a great leader because the corporate and institutional framework make it much easier to manage badly than to manage well. Every manager who isn’t the CEO of his or her own company has a higher-level manager to report to. That leader may not be keen on a strng leader’s desire to treat his or her employees like the adults they are. The higher-level leader may only care about production. It’s hard to be a strong leader because strong leaders have to speak their truth on a frequent basis, and that can be very challenging to do. We all know that it can be scary to tell the truth. Managers are no different from anybody else. They might hesitate to tell their boss when he or she is wrong, or to stand up for an employee. Yet strong managers do it all the time. It’s easy to look at a strong man

Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership). But while teams face new hurdles, their success still hinges on a core set of fundamentals for group collaboration. The basics of team effectiveness were identified by J. Richard Hackman, a pioneer in the field of organizational behavior who began studying teams in the 1970s. In more than 40 years of research, he uncovered a groundbreaking insight: What matters most to collaboration is not the personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles of team members. Instead, what teams need to thrive are certain “enabling conditions.” In our own studies, we’ve found that three of Hackman’s conditions—a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context—continue to be particularly critical to team success. In fact, today those three requirements demand more attention than ever. But we’ve also seen that modern teams are vulne