Diversity in a team is something that is widely discussed today. However, we often miss to understand and therefore respect the different abilities that each person has to offer.

A good team leader has to understand the context and the vision to keep adapting the teams and the people belonging to it, according to their own skills but also according to the needs that each situation requires. This means that often one may have to reconsider having in the team one or more great performers to ensure a more balanced team setting and more importantly a team that is adapted towards the future.

Mixing experience with new talent is key to success, but you have to respect the different abilities that each one will offer. One can’t expect that a person that just started as a professional will have the maturity and flair of a seasoned employee that has been many years with the company.

Overall, it is critical to know each team member very well so that one can judge appropriately the alternative team settings that can be constructed and always give opportunity to each individual to maximize its potential by leveraging its abilities.

Strenght based feedback

Since years, I have been applying in my development conversations more focus in talking about strenghts and coaching people how to identify theirs. I believe that we are more efficient if we try to adjust ourselves to a career where our natural strenghts are put to a full extent rather than keep on trying to develop capabilities that either we don’t naturally have or are exhaustive for us to practice.

I often say that you need to choose the game you want to play… and it is always better to choose a game that you know you are good at. In sports, if you are that person that has no ability to football, why do you keep trying to improve? Wouldn’t it be better if you find out which other sports or activities you can perform in a better level without so much effort?

It starts wrong in our education system

It may already be well understood the analogy of the education system that doesn’t differentiate for each student’s abilities, but I think we fail to understand that our teams operate in a very similar context.

We explain people their job descriptions and processes to follow, but we forget to adapt those and the whole team setting to that specific individual. We should be doing that every time that a new person joins or that someone leaves.

Building a team is a constant exercise that requires good knowledge of each team member and often requires non-obvious individual solutions to compensate for a more balanced team performance.

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