Diverse teams weather challenges more easily.
Everyone having the same background dooms you in a team. You will all have similar experiences and knowledge. When you meet the unexpected, then you have less breadth in how you might respond.
Diverse groups with people from a range of experiences and backgrounds are more able to handle unexpected events and situations. A diverse team will have more experiences from which to draw inspiration for how they might handle unexpected situations.
Make your team diverse
When you have an opportunity to add someone to your team aim for diversity. Add people who are not like you. Look for a variety of experience and background.
If you find it hard to find diversity in the normal places you find your people, then look in different places.
If you find the people in different places, are missing some of the skills, then that is not a problem. You can train them in those skills.
Recruit people to your team based on their attitude. You want people, who are open, and welcoming. You want people to bring innovative ideas to your team. You can train, or learn new skills together.
If you’re putting student teams together, then you can apply some rules to forming diverse teams.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.