#33 – Diversity

Authors comment:

According to Harvard Business Review (“How Diversity Can Drive Innovation”, December 2013), companies with diverse members (with different gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) of their leadership are 45% more likely to grow their market share and 70% more likely to capture new markets, compared to companies with “non-diverse” leadership. 

However, according to the research, it’s not enough with “inherited” diversity; behavioral diversity is the other half of the equation, which includes: ensuring that everyone is heard, making it safe to propose novel ideas, giving team members decision-making authority, sharing credit for success, giving actionable feedback, and implementing feedback from the team. And this is, of course, right down the alley of agile (especially considering the Scrum value ‘Respect’), where we as agile change agents are typically the ones encouraging this type of behavior in the Scrum team and organization.