Diversity. Autonomy. Cohesion. These are 3 characteristics that are often cited as qualities of high performing teams. Obviously, when building and growing teams, we want to enable the teams to be high performing, and therefore focus on building in these qualities seen in high performing teams. However, without fully understanding what is meant by diversity, autonomy and cohesion in the context of teams and the larger organization they belong to, these seemingly positive aspects of team culture can be misapplied and end up being detrimental to team performance.

In this talk, I’ll dive into diversity, autonomy and cohesion and how each can be interpreted and applied in different ways with varying results. We’ll look at how they can be applied and layered across the organization to achieve desired outcomes, as well as ways that they can be misunderstood and leave organizations, teams, and individuals floundering and wondering why they are not achieving their goals.

Key take-aways:

- Understand diversity, autonomy and cohesion within the context of teams, and how misunderstanding these positive qualities can lead to unexpectedly poor outcomes..

- Understand that building team culture in an organization takes deliberate effort at all levels.

- Understand how diversity, autonomy and cohesion work together to improve team performance and innovation.

- Consider ways to improve the balance in the layers of diversity, autonomy and cohesion in an organization in order to build focused teams that understand the organization’s goals and can work together to deliver the right value to their end users.