Resist the urge to hire people like yourself.
It's easy to find definitions of "cognitive flexibility" on the Internet. That is the ability, residing within an individual, to undertake task switching and cognitive shifting. Broadly, that means a person's ability to change tasks rapidly and to deploy different thinking skills quickly to suit a situation. Everyone has this to some extent, and you can probably already think of a person you know who is particularly good at it.
But what is "cognitive DIVERSITY" and why is that phrase apparently less interpreted? This phrase is commonly used across individuals, rather than within one individual. We say that a team has cognitive diversity or a company has cognitive diversity. And it's so, so important for team and organisational function.
At its most basic level, cognitive diversity means having in your team a variety of cognitive abilities and preferences. But when you really think about it, it's quite a nuanced concept. Consider, for example, just some of the dimensions that might distinguish people on your team in how they work:
Skill Orientation - What are people good at doing? This usually goes hand in hand with their desired work behaviours too. For example, some people are skilled with numbers, while others are skilled with words. Some are analytical. Others abstract.
Working style - There are lots of variables here. Some people want to work alone. Others can't function if you put them in a room by themselves. Some people are fast and decisive. Others are more consensus driven, take more time, want to discuss things.
Team roles - Take, for example, the Belbin Team Roles model. Observe how differently people can manifest in terms of how they contribute to a task.
"Personality" type - I use quotation marks for efficiency, because not all of these dimensions are, in fact, about personality. In the social styles model, consider how different an Expressive is from an Analytical, and how much separation there can sometimes be between a Driver and an Amiable. In Myers Briggs terms, don't be surprised if an ENTJ and an ISFP don't go about their work the same way. You will see similar range if you look at other models like DiSC and HBDI.
The science of this is less important than the principle, which is this: If you are building a team of people, there is a natural tendency for you, the leader, to gravitate towards people who think and work the same way that you do. If you follow this urge without question, you risk populating your team (or worse, your company) with people who don't question your thinking, who can't support you when you get stuck with something, who don't help you to see your own blind spots. Painful as it might be in the short term, you will do much better long term if you maintain variety - and that is a multi-faceted thing - within your team and your company.
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