Mentors Comment:
Bring out the challenges faced due to diversity in workforce such as age, gender, marital status, place of residence, etc.
Mention the need to build an inclusive culture and striving towards a common organisational goal, while simultaneously pursuing personal goals.
Answer:
Leadership is about engaging and energizing people, and inspiring them to give their best. Leaders serve as role models and set examples worth emulating. In today’s organisations, which consist of diverse and differently motivated individuals, the inclusive nature of leadership can play a decisive role in forging unity and create a harmonious work culture.
The teams today are becoming increasingly diverse with a mix of culture, nationality, geography, gender and age. Although this mix brings in increased range of expertise, it also presents several unique challenges to the ones leading them, such as:
Managing varying expectations of both the work culture as well as the rewards.
Varying degrees of motivation of employees which can hamper the achievement of desired goals.
Language and cultural barriers may result in breakdown of communication, confusion and lack of team cohesiveness.
Working across different time-zones also makes communication challenging and may hamper productivity.
Inclusive and open nature of leadership is crucial for managing such teams. For e.g. having access to information and resources necessary for effective task performance or an opportunity to influence important decisions increases association and belongingness.
Leaders should engender a sense of shared purpose and clear paths among team members and promote a common vision based on shared values that are directly linked to team outcomes.
Emotional intelligence of the leader in understanding and managing expectations of the team members is equally important. Understanding different motivations of individuals helps leaders to be mindful in applying similar approaches to influence behaviour of different individuals.
Leaders should authentically value and respect all individuals for their talents and contributions. They should first be aware of their stereotypes and biases that impede valuing diverse others. Rather than constraining, they should recognise the diverse identity expression and should demonstrate a willingness to learn from diverse perspectives.
They should hold others accountable for disrespectful behaviour towards different others and must articulate the value of diversity for team effectiveness. Leading by examples, they should promote team relations that are fair, democratic, supportive, and welcoming of questions and challenges, rather than team relations that are authoritarian, unsupportive or based on favouritism.
