What CEOs need to know: how to build the culture that enables all employees to thrive and contribute their best (podcast and article)
Published on 11 July 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
Imagine being at a dinner with ten CEOs who ask, ‘What do you think we need to know?’
That was the premise of a podcast that I recorded recently with Matt Roberts and Ian Harvey of Zokri. Their expertise lies in deploying objectives and key results — OKRs — to ensure that every employee is aligned with organizational strategy to create maximum value as quickly as possible. They are increasingly finding that culture is the reason that organizations fall behind on their strategies, or perhaps don’t achieve them at all.
“Setting up a cognitive inclusion program should be a strategic priority. It’s about enabling your employees to do their best by working more closely to their preferred style. Businesses need to set an example from the top, but also allow for freedom within a framework. This balance can accommodate complexity and drive meaningful change.”
I summarize key takeaways below, and elaborate on them in the following article. If you prefer to listen to the podcast and see the key points selected by Matt and Ian, you can find the episode above.
Three key takeaways
Research shows that cognitive diversity — a mix of thinking styles — is the only type of diversity that significantly enhances problem-solving capabilities in teams. When we only recruit people who think like us, “entire organizations lose their way”. Diverse demographics alone, such as gender, ethnicity, and age, do not improve problem-solving outcomes.
The recipe for an organization that wants to sustain its success in the face of change is a mix of cognitive styles with a culture that enables all these styles to thrive. This culture encourages interpersonal risk-taking, trust, and fairness, and ensures all employees can thrive and contribute their best, leading to superior business outcomes.
Cognitively inclusive organizations experience substantial and tangible benefits in a wide range of business metrics. I led an transformation with an increase in eNPS of 63 points in 3 years that included covid lockdowns and a reorganization. More generally, organizations see improved innovation (19% increase in revenue), employee retention (35% lower turnover), talent acquisition (40% larger talent pool), and overall business performance (23% higher profitability).
These points underscore the importance of integrating cognitive diversity and inclusion into your organization’s strategic initiatives to drive innovation and maintain competitive advantage.
Which team of experienced, high-performing people would you bet on to solve a critical problem?
Team 1: 2 men, 3 women; similar ages; ethnically diverse
Team 2: 4 men, 1 woman; noticeably wide age-range; all European
Team 3: 5 men; similar ages; all North American; 1 is visually impaired
Let’s summarize.
How would you balance the different diversities that you can see represented in these teams? Which kind of diversity is most relevant in the context of problem solving?
It’s a difficult discussion to have, and it’s also difficult to be objective and not bring in personal affiliations and anecdotes.
And, although it would be a good conversation-starter at a dinner party, this is a leading question for me to have asked. The reason is that no kind of demographic diversity — diversity that you can see — is relevant in a team’s ability to solve a problem. I haven’t given the CEOs the information they would need to answer my question although, to be fair, they could have asked me for it!
What matters is something that you can’t see: cognitive diversity.
What is cognitive diversity?
Cognitive diversity describes the different ways that people think, how they take in and use information.
A good example is when we think about best practise in learning and development.
Some people like to be trained on-the-fly, some prefer written materials.
Some like text, some like visuals.
Some people want to ask questions immediately, some want to think first.
Some people like to learn alone, some like to be in a group.
These are all different ways of engaging with information. One way isn’t right or wrong, better or worse; it’s just different. But for any individual, one style lets them learn most effectively — understanding and building on information, and being able to use it. Everyone has a style that they prefer to work in and that’s when they do their best. A good learning and development program provides a mixture of ways to engage with the information being taught to cater to all of these preferences.
Why should our ten CEOs care about cognitive diversity?
They should care about it so that their organizations excel at solving problems, whether those problems relate to coming up with ideas, selecting which idea to bet on, planning and executing the selected idea, predicting and mitigating problems, communicating progress to your organization and customers, and so on.
Some fascinating research done to show that cognitive diversity is the only type of diversity that makes any difference in problem solving. Ethnicity, gender, age, disability — none of these impacted the outcome.
To go back to the question I asked the CEOs, the authors of research I’ve previously written about described one test where the team of Western white men easily out-performed a seemingly diverse group of researchers with doctorates. The researchers were cognitively similar and were unable to solve a problem. The white European men (who didn’t even have a team member with a disability; the real example was even less diverse than I described) succeeded because, cognitively, they had what it took.
Why does cognitive diversity make such a big difference?
Let’s say you’re a numbers person. Quantitative data guide all your decisions, all of your strategies. Your objectivity enables you to share with others why you made a decision because you can point to the evidence. These are great skills to have, but if you only hire people like you, you’ll enjoy amazing discussions about data, you’ll work harmoniously together, but you won’t be a visionary organization. Your team of numbers-oriented people won’t want to take a leap of faith. They won’t focus on what is not in the data, and often new ideas are not represented in data about what already exists.
Leadership strategist Sara Canaday wrote in Psychology Today that you have probably “interacted with a team that worked harmoniously but that overlooked a business threat or an opportunity to innovate.”
You can’t blame diverse-looking teams 1 and 2, or the team of highly qualified researchers. They are doing their best. But they are ‘functionally biased’, a term used by psychologists to describe everyone thinking in the same way. Functionally-biased organizations are conforming. They’re great at one or two things, likely the behaviors that made them successful to start with, but they are not good at everything they need to stay successful.
What I want the CEOs to understand, when they go home after their dinner, is that it is not about which thinking style or behavior is better. As Sara Canaday also said in her blog:
When we only recruit people who think like us, “entire organizations lose their way”.
Sounds great. So, what’s the recipe to recreate this?
You need two things. One is the mix of cognitive styles that I’ve described above. But sometimes, that’s didn’t explain all of the results of the researchers investigating how good teams were at problem solving. The researchers found that you need second ingredient: the right culture that enables these styles to work together.
The foundational hallmarks of a cognitively inclusive culture are:
Comfort in taking interpersonal risk: asking questions, suggesting ideas, sharing concerns, admitting mistakes, and trying out ideas.
Trust that your teammates, direct reports, manager and leadership will act fairly: everyone has the chance to thrive, while striving to contribute their best to the collective genius.
How do we change our culture so that cognitively diverse employees can make us continue to be successful?
Cultures are often not considered as a tangible element that can be designed, built, and measured. They tend to emerge unconsciously in organizations, and then become fixed. But you can implement a culture, just like you can implement a strategy.
Designing and executing cultural change programs is a skill and like any specialized job you can develop it yourself or bring in the expertise. The kind of expertise you should look for is broad, encompassing experience in inclusion, change and project management, psychology, influencing, and comfort in working with people of all seniorities, experience levels and cultures.
You need a vision to drive your organization in the right direction. The vision that I work towards is inspired by the extreme of cognitive diversity — neurodivergence. Neurodivergent people have different brains — you can see from brain imaging that they are structured and connected differently — and they are specialized in different things such as:
People with ADHD find it easier to take risks and try new things.
Dyslexics are great at seeing the big picture, and at predicting outcomes.
Autists excel at pattern recognition, and are highly rational in making decisions.
Everyone is cognitively diverse, and the solution works for the 30% at the neurodivergent extreme of this spectrum works for everyone.
Lisa, have you seen this in action?
Yes, I have. I led a transformation that resulted in the employee-NPS (eNPS) rating increasing from -33 to +30 over three years. Most remarkably, those 3 years included a reorganization and covid lockdowns, whose effects were more than compensated for by employee experience in valuing and enabling their mix of styles.
Are there other benefits for cognitively inclusive organizations besides problem solving?
Yes, there are. You can see the benefits in anything where people being happier in their work is going to make a difference.
Major benefits are:
Innovation: 19% improvement in innovation revenue.
Employee retention: 78% lower absenteeism and 68% higher employee wellbeing, leading to 35% lower employee turnover.
Talent acquisition: draw from a >40% larger talent pool.
Business performance: 41% fewer product defects, 15% higher productivity, 23% higher profitability.
“Setting up a cognitive inclusion program should be a strategic priority. It’s about enabling your employees to do their best by working more closely to their preferred style. Businesses need to set an example from the top, but also allow for freedom within a framework. This balance can accommodate complexity and drive meaningful change.”
References
Sara Canaday’s blog in Psychology Today: Cognitive Diversity — What’s often missing from conversations about diversity and inclusion.
The statistics about improvement in business outcomes are taken from Gallup’s 2020 Meta-Analysis: The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes.
Improvement in innovation statistic is taken from Boston Consulting Group’s 2018 article: How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation.
I'm Lisa, and I help leaders create inclusive cultures that embrace all neurostyles. By empowering every team member to contribute at their best, while fostering mental well-being, you will boost innovation, retention, and talent acquisition—leading to enhanced business performance.
Click here to learn more about how my services can transform your team.
