Weekend Leadership Reading: 3/20/20

  |   Weekend Leadership Reading Print Friendly and PDF

Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular workdays. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles with diverse looks at diversity.

From Sujin Jang: The Most Creative Teams Have a Specific Type of Cultural Diversity

“Culturally diverse teams can help deliver better outcomes in today’s organizations. But these teams often suffer from conflicting norms and differing assumptions between members, which can keep them from reaching their full creative potential. When managers don’t know how to spot and address these situations, cultural diversity may actually inhibit a team’s creative performance. A series of studies shows that two types of culturally diverse team members can help a team’s creativity: cultural insiders (people who have multicultural experiences that map directly onto the cultures they are bridging), and cultural outsiders (people with experience in two or more cultures not represented on the team).”

From Adi Gaskell: Why Class Diversity Matters At Work

“The value of diversity in the workplace is something I’ve touched on repeatedly over the years, with a fascinating study from MIT perhaps making the point most pointedly of all. It found that the most diverse workplaces tended to be the most profitable, although it should also be said that those diverse workplaces were also quite fractious.”

From Fred Crawford: Critically Important Elements Of Leadership Team Diversity

“What does it mean to be diverse in thought? Consider the quality of thinking if a board had expertise across a mix of disciplines: strategy, innovation, creativity, customer and supply chain, revenue growth, brand building, risk management, strategic talent management, operations, cost management, technology, administration, governance, human resources, communication, and finance. This could provide the richness and holistic insight required for better decision-making and execution.”

From Shane Parrish: The Stormtrooper Problem: Why Thought Diversity Makes Us Better

“Diversity of thought makes us stronger, not weaker. Without diversity we die off as a species. We can no longer adapt to changes in the environment. We need each other to survive.”

From Julia Hanna: The Little Understood Problem Confronting Diverse Workplaces

“Knitting together a diverse workforce into a common fabric is a difficult challenge for managers—and even more difficult for the workers themselves, say Lakshmi Ramarajan and Erin Reid.”

Book Suggestions

The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything by Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews

The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien

Join The Conversation

What People Are Saying

There are no comments yet, why not be the first to leave a comment?