You Built a Diverse Team. Now Comes the Hard Part.

The Roster Looks Great. So Why Is the Team Struggling?

Something I see constantly in organizations that have done the real work of building diverse leadership teams and honestly it still catches me a little off guard when it happens. The roster looks exactly right. Different backgrounds, different nationalities, different life experiences. Leadership is proud. And then about two months in the team is underperforming, the good ideas go quiet somewhere between the brainstorm and the decision, and nobody can quite figure out why.

I’d argue the reason is almost always the same one. We’ve confused diversity with inclusion and those aren’t the same thing.

The Surface Problem Everyone Recognizes

The symptom shows up as communication friction. Or conflict that doesn’t quite resolve. Or a team that technically functions but never really clicks. Leaders reach for explanations about personality mismatches or culture fit and they’re usually not entirely wrong but they’re diagnosing the wrong level.

What tends to happen is that the team has all the ingredients of a high performing group and none of the conditions that let those ingredients actually combine.

Research by Ashikali and colleagues studying 293 team members across 45 public sector teams found that greater team diversity doesn’t automatically yield an inclusive climate (Ashikali et al., 2020). You can have a fully diverse team and still have people feeling like outsiders in their own meetings. The diversity is structural. The inclusion has to be built deliberately, and it isn’t built by assembling the right people.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s where it gets genuinely surprising and I think this is the piece most leadership training completely skips.

A 2021 study by Leroy and colleagues tested this across three studies including 93 teams drawn from multiple organizations (Leroy et al., 2021). They found that when leaders encourage team members to share their unique perspectives and viewpoints without first building a shared belief that those differences are actually valuable, the effect on team cohesion and creativity can be negative. Not neutral. Negative.

You read that correctly. Asking people to show up differently, before the team believes that showing up differently is a good thing, can make things worse.

It’s a bit like asking someone to give an honest opinion at a table where they’re not sure whether honesty is actually welcome. The invitation lands wrong and people learn to give the safe answer instead.

The researchers describe this as a ‘double edged sword.’ What they call ‘harvesting the benefits of diversity,’ meaning encouraging people to express their unique viewpoints, only produces positive outcomes when leaders have also cultivated what they call ‘value in diversity beliefs.’ The team has to genuinely believe that the differences among them are an asset, not just a talking point on a slide deck.

When leaders push for diverse viewpoints without first cultivating a team belief that those differences are genuinely valuable, the effect on team cohesion and creativity is negative, not neutral. — Leroy et al. (2021)

What ‘Inclusive Leadership’ Actually Requires

The term gets used constantly and usually means something vague like making people feel welcome. I’d push back on that because it leaves out the mechanism.

Mitchell and colleagues studied 346 members across 75 interprofessional teams and found that leader inclusiveness works through two specific and distinct pathways (Mitchell et al., 2015). The first is increasing shared team identity, meaning members start to think of themselves as a collective rather than as individuals who happen to share a calendar. The second is reducing perceived status differences, which matters enormously in diverse teams where hierarchy and credentials can create invisible barriers between people.

And here is the detail I find most useful in practice: the status reduction pathway was stronger in teams with higher professional diversity. The more different people are from each other in background and credentials, the more that leadership behavior around status signals actually moves the performance needle. Which means if you lead a highly diverse team and you’re not actively thinking about status dynamics, you’re leaving meaningful performance on the table.

Four Things You Can Actually Do

Map who speaks and who doesn’t before your next team meeting. Not as surveillance but as a diagnostic. In diverse teams, the people who stay quiet in group settings often have the most contextual knowledge about the problems you’re trying to solve. A 2025 study of 54 ethnically diverse teams found that knowledge sharing had the strongest single impact on team performance of all variables measured (Kanya et al., 2025). The bottleneck usually isn’t motivation. It’s psychological safety.

Make the case for diversity before you ask for it. Before your next team session where you want people to bring different perspectives, explicitly name why different perspectives matter for this specific problem. ‘We’ve always approached this the same way and I want to know what someone coming from a completely different context would notice that we’re missing.’ That framing is the difference between harvesting diversity and actually benefiting from it.

Reverse the speaking order. When the most senior person speaks first, everyone else in the room calibrates to that answer. It’s human and it’s predictable and it kills the value of having a diverse team in the meeting. Ask the newest team member to share first. Ask the person with the least institutional tenure what they’d change. This isn’t just a nice gesture. It directly addresses the status dynamic that the research identifies as a key performance pathway in diverse teams.

Have the one on one conversations you keep postponing. Not about performance reviews. About how someone actually experiences working on this team. What they notice that doesn’t get said. What they’d change if they could. You will learn more in thirty minutes than six months of team meetings will surface, and that information is the foundation for building the ‘value in diversity’ beliefs the research says you need before the bigger invitation can land well.

The Part I Keep Coming Back To

I keep returning to that Leroy et al. finding because it challenges something that feels intuitively right but isn’t. Most of us, when we’re trying to be more inclusive as leaders, focus on the invitation. We create the space. We signal that all voices are welcome. We say it in the all hands and mean it.

But if the underlying team belief is that ‘different’ means ‘slower’ or ‘more complicated’ or just harder to work with, the invitation falls on soil that won’t grow anything. You planted something. The conditions weren’t there yet.

What’s the most significant status signal you’ve noticed inside a team you lead or work on?

If this is something you’re working through right now, this is exactly what we dig into in our team workshops at Peak Potential. Or reach out directly and let’s talk through what you’re seeing.