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How diversity in the office can increase productivity

Posted by / February 16, 2012

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There’s lots of reasons why diversity is good for the workplace, but what you may not consider is that diversity can actually be good for productivity. Open Forum offers several reasons. Here’s just one:

Be a talent hunter. Imagine having a reputation for being a talent hunter, for being known as the type of leader who walks into a room and looks for what’s right with people. Extensive research has proven that focusing on enhancing people’s talents rather than eliminating their weaknesses is the most direct route to individual and organizational improvements. A primer for this is Marcus Buckingham’s and Donald O. Clifton’s book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, which helps readers identify their talents and build on their strengths as a way to boost performance. Talents are defined as people’s naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied. The book also provides access to StrengthsFinder, a Web-based assessment that helps you identify the five most powerful signature themes, or talents, for you and your team.

When we shackle people with labels of what they are not good at, we diminish their confidence in their ability to succeed. Resolve to view your people as a reservoir of talent rather than a problem to be fixed. As Peter F. Drucker once said: “Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn’t play the trumpet very well.”

Full story at Open Forum.

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