How to Improve Your Organization – Hire More Women

I am sure this headline will have all the men’s activist groups lobbying me; so let me explain.

I came across a study completed by Anita Woolley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Thomas Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management, which suggested adding women to teams, makes the teams smarter. As a father of three daughters I was intrigued (but with one son, I remained 25 per cent skeptical).

The study looked at 192 distinct teams. The findings suggest that there is little correlation between a groups collective intelligence and the individual team members IQ’s. However, if you add more women to the team, the collective intelligence rises.

Collective intelligence of a team is not simply a reflection of how intelligent the individual members of the team are, but how intelligent the team becomes through the impact of the team members.

The authors confirm that group diversity is good, but groups of women tend to be smarter than groups of men. (I am happy for my daughters, but feeling a little personally snubbed).

Like myself, you may be wondering on what grounds could such a statement be made. It seems that social sensitivity is very important to group performance. Women tend to score higher on social sensitivity tests; but gender may not be as relevant as how socially sensitive the group members are.

When you hear about hyper-performing teams, you tend not to hear how smart the individuals are but how well they listen to each other, how open they are, how they share criticisms constructively. This is well documented in successful sports teams.

The benefit of this research is to carefully design teams that perform better. Can a group’s intelligence be changed by weighting gender or providing incentives for collaboration?

Does this research extend beyond small groups? Can it be applied to family dynamics, entire companies or even cities? The challenges of face-to-face collaboration increases as the size of the group increases; but perhaps technology can overcome the issues of scale? Consider how Google harvests knowledge or distributed platforms like Wikipedia achieve high quality products with no central control.

Men, rather than assume this research is placing us under siege; consider different methods of collaboration. Examine how we operate in groups and how we might be able to improve our performance by being more sensitive, open and considerate.

In business performance and productivity are what differentiates and creates success. If this study can improve the potential for greater performance and outcomes then it is worthy of evaluation.