Expert advice: You can’t lead a diverse team the old way. Here’s what works now

In ancient times, the role of a chief leading their tribe was crucial. The chief was more than just a leader; they were the heart of the tribe’s customs, identity and values.

They had the job of looking after the safety, wellbeing and survival of everyone in their group. Defending against threats while seeking new opportunities. Keeping the peace within the tribe and building relationships with nearby neighbours. Being a chief meant making decisions for the good of the tribe and building a culture and set of customs that kept the group alive.

Even though times have changed a lot, many of these qualities are still important in leadership today. However, there has been a significant shift in the types of people we need to lead. In today’s business world, we aren’t like tribal chiefs, who had the time to build relationships with their people over decades. Modern leaders are often tasked with pulling together a group of strangers to deliver immediate results. We rarely have the luxury of selecting people who understand our ways, practise our traditions and share our beliefs. Instead, we have to be able to bring together a variety of people from all sorts of backgrounds.

The diversity challenge

Managing people is more challenging today because of the complexity diversity adds. In its initial decades and well into the late 20th century, Toyota primarily employed Japanese staff. This choice stemmed from its goal to cultivate a uniform corporate culture and philosophy, deeply anchored in the Japanese traditions of ‘Kaizen’ (continuous improvement) and ‘The Toyota Way’. Such practices were not unique to Toyota but were rather a hallmark of many Japanese firms during the post–World War II economic surge.

Similarly, Qantas, in its earlier years, exclusively hired Japanese-born flight attendants for routes to Japan. On the other hand, Henry Ford, known for his diverse workforce, implemented an ‘Americanisation Program’ at Ford Motor Company, aimed at integrating employees into a specific cultural framework.

The focus on these historical hiring practices might seem unexpected in a book about empathetic leadership, yet it underscores a crucial point: naturally forming and thriving in large, diverse teams is a challenge for humans. The concept of diversity, while now recognised as valuable, presents real and often overlooked challenges. For millennia, diversity was an unfamiliar idea, and our inherent abilities to manage it effectively are only still developing.

As a species, we evolved to live in small, highly social and largely homogenous groups. We called these groups tribes, and for thousands and thousands of years they were the dominant way humans survived and thrived. These tribes were small, tight-knit groups that were generally fiercely protective of their people, customs and beliefs. These tribes are the foundational structure for homo sapiens. We evolved as tribal animals working together to protect our group.

Leading a team

The massive challenge we face today is that we need to lead teams that look nothing like tribes. Modern teams are very different.

Today, we need to bring people from different backgrounds with completely different, often conflicting opinions and ideas together and motivate, coordinate and support them to achieve tasks that people just two generations ago would have thought impossible. The challenge for the modern leader is not if you need a more diverse team. It is how do you lead them effectively as a team?

This is an edited extract from The Empathy Gap: The Bridge to Real Connection and Lasting Influence (Wiley $32.95) by Daniel Murray. 

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