2024 Community of Human and Organizational Learning 30th Annual Conference

The business case for a diverse workforce proposes that diversity can help organizations perform better by promoting innovation, and improving decision-making, adaptability, engagement, and retention. Further, research on elite teams emphasizes the importance of diverse perspectives in dealing with emerging, complex circumstances. This 'diversity of thought' helps form as complete an operational picture as possible as members of the team bring their distinctive backgrounds and experiences to bear on the situation at hand. However, diversity of personnel does not automatically create diversity of thought. Instead, teams (or workgroups) invite diverse perspectives when they create a local culture defined by psychological safety, where members feel welcome to communicate freely. In this talk, I’ll discuss concrete ways to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in teams; these techniques in turn, contribute to a culture of psychological safety. This talk first defines psychological safety, diversity, equity, and inclusion, then operationalizes those terms according to what group actions you would observe if you were seeing these concepts working well versus working poorly within a group. I will then walk through an example, drawn from the US federal wildland firefighting service, of how to intentionally re-design team practices to incorporate inclusion and psychological safety into the regular workflow of the group. This approach is different from common DEI approaches that rely on organization members to gain personal awareness about implicit bias and difference. Instead, my framework trains leaders on how to design an inclusive team culture by making small changes to existing group routines and practices, and intentionally designing new ones.