Building a Work Culture that Understands the Value of Diversity

Understanding our differences as individuals drives the success of our team. That understanding comes from each of us being open to sharing who we are, our culture and how we do things. It also requires us to be curious enough to listen to how our team members differ from us. Our differences make us stronger.

How do you show up at work?

• Do you prefer decisions to be made consensually by the team or do you prefer that it comes from top down?  

• Are you used to receiving high context communication (very typical of the Japanese culture or low context (like the US)?  
• How about leadership – do you prefer Egalitarian leadership or Hierarchical? Are you more confrontational or do you avoid conflicts?  Or are you somewhere in the middle ground.  

Culture combined with our individual characteristics plays a big role in how we show up, how we think, how we make decisions and how we communicate. If you understand more about your colleagues, you can better work together.

Because we have a team of diverse individuals at RedBit, I wanted to deep dive this topic further and really find out how our culture or character has shaped how we think and how we work. Taking inspiration out Erin Meyer’s book, The Culture Map, I have run a couple of workshops where we spent time getting to know our colleagues better. As a result, we have gained a deeper understanding of the different cultural influences in our team. Breaking the team into smaller groups we discussed where we individually stand on the eight scales of the cultural map (Decision-Making, Persuading, Communicating, Evaluating, Disagreeing, Leading, Trusting and Scheduling). The workshops were a great success, the collaboration between the team has increased by understanding and respecting the different perspectives within.  

RedBit is built on the grounds of its dynamic and diverse group of individuals who bring unique perspectives to the table. At RedBit, we truly believe in being transparent, harnessing true potential, Getting Better on Purpose (GBOP) and sharing imperfect work. I look forward to sharing my thoughts about GBOP in a future post.  

If you would like more information on these workshops that we run internally, reach out to us at hello@redbitdev.com and we will be happy to share.  

So, my question for you is how do you show up at work?