Great leaders know the power of soliciting breadth and depth of inputs
There is a lot of discussion taking place around diversity in our country and there are many parallels we can draw to our businesses. This great country was built on diversity of gender, race, culture and religion, all of which has provided a powerful, diverse range of thinking. Our strength was and should continue to be the ability to draw from and meld the best of all of these. The same holds true for every business owner and CEO. As you look to build the value or net worth of your business, are you leveraging the diversity of paradigms and perspectives from those that are and could be around you as you navigate key decisions?
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to see if you're getting the benefit of diversity:
- Think about those around you that you turn to for insights on business matters (your team, advisors, lawyer, accountant, etc), are you getting a diverse range of inputs or have the inputs become narrow and potentially stale? The world continues to change, are your perspectives?
- Do you have people around you that may sometimes disagree with you as they offer different paradigms or perspectives and do you openly embrace this or look to avoid it?
- When facing important business matters, do you first ask yourself if you have the right people around you to leverage their experiences and paradigms to maximize how you process your decision....or do you just quickly jump in to solve the matter, not giving much thought to whether the right people are providing input?
- Would your employee base say that your company leadership team has good diversity represented on it or do they view you and your key leaders as lacking any real diversity of backgrounds, cultures, race, etc?
- Do you have a good mechansim internally for your team and employees to talk about diversity of thinking? Are their formal or informal opportunities for you to solicit insights and opinions from a broad cross section of your employees?
Don't let your team and your thinking go stale by falling in to a comfort zone of like minded people around you. Challenge your paradigms and perspectives on a regular basis and grow as a person but also grow the current value/worth of your company and prepare for a more euphoric exit valuation one day.
