Practical Coach: Management Skills for Everyday Life, The

Chapter Summary

Shifts in demographics, social norms, work expectations, and new technologies are dramatically transforming the nature of teamwork. Team members are becoming more culturally diverse and geographically dispersed. Work tasks are becoming more complex. The processes by which team members work are being significantly altered by technological advancements. Many of the skills we learned for managing relatively homogeneous, co-located teams are insufficient for effectively managing diverse and distributed teams.

Diverse Teams

Team diversity refers to differences among team members in their “observable” groups (race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth), organizational groups (function and level in hierarchy), and less visible categories ...