Cognitive Diversity is not the same as gender, ethnic or neurodiversity. Although it contains some of those elements, cognitive diversity is more about the nuances of the thought process, which often correlates with different ways of perceiving, problem solving and offering unique perspectives.

If we go deeper, it’s easy to see that different ways of perception and thought processes are reflected in distinctive approaches to communication, collaboration, making complex decisions, and engaging with the customer base. Suddenly, it becomes clear that cognitive diversity touches every aspect of employee experience, teamwork and getting things done in today’s workplace.

Managing for cognitive diversity entails going beyond merely affirming the organization’s  commitment to DEI and creating a culture of inclusion. Truly understanding and engaging cognitively diverse employees in a way that helps to maximize and leverage their unique perspectives, creativity, and contribution to reaching those performance goals, requires thought, planning, and commitment to the issue.

Team leaders have a central role to play in identifying, harnessing, and scaling cognitive diversity of the team members. It begins with building awareness and continues through the conversations, coaching and team development. While experience is important, those team leaders who have knowledge of individual differences are better able to engage cognitively diverse team members with a unique array of mindsets and behaviors.

For example, team leaders need to be aware that initially too much cognitive diversity complicates decision making but, in the end, cognitive diversity leads to better decision quality. Learning to be patient, learning to lean into a different perspective and explore its benefits before rejecting it in favor of a more familiar approach, together with a better understanding of the decision making process, helps team leaders to orchestrate better decision making processes and improve the outcomes of those decisions.

Today, the innovation conversation happens every day in every part of the business to ensure technology adoption, recovery from disruption, and continuous improvement of products and services. Moreover, many companies are acutely aware of the value of being more entrepreneurial and are actively trying to embed the entrepreneurial mindset in their cultures. When harnessed and leveraged, cognitive diversity leads to  innovation. Not only “classic” examples of innovation as in ‘products or services’, but a different way to appraise, re-purpose or ‘package’ an existing product or service, or a different ‘angle’ from which to view customer experience.

If you’re looking to better manage cognitive diversity in your organization, make sure you equip your team leaders and begin at the team level.  It is the team leaders and people managers who need to step up and embrace that the management of cognitive diversity is one of the core competencies in today’s workplace and marketplace.

When provided with proper training and development, team leaders have the opportunity to embed work and collaboration practices that are conducive to engaging and harnessing the power of cognitive diversity. Doing so improves the chances of cognitively diverse employees staying, performing, and enabling their teams to maximize the collective performance output and create a bigger positive impact.