Managing Diverse Teams

Improve communication and collaboration across your team

Work teams are diverse across demographics, learning styles, work functions, communication styles, and personalities. As a manager, it’s important to actively build cohesion and collaboration across your team’s differences. Managing diverse teams can bring challenges that we feel unprepared to confront or don’t see until they blow up in the form of unbridgeable conflict or lost insights. From understanding what team diversity is to digging deeper into why we respond differently to those around us, this booster will offer research-backed information to help your team thrive and harness the potential of diverse teams.

Upcoming course dates

Tuesday, March 11, 2025, 12:30-3:00pm PT
Monday, September 22, 2025, 12:30-3:00pm PT

Benefits of attending this online course

• Gain a new awareness of the challenge and rewards of diverse teams.
• Develop helpful tools and strategies for making safe spaces for diverse members to speak up and feel heard.
• Complete a behavioral assessment to discover what you can do more of in managing diverse teams.

Managing Diverse Teams content overview

For teams to be effective, members must bring their diverse perspectives, talents, and ideas to accomplish the team task. However, there are numerous barriers to getting those diverse perspectives and ideas to surface in the first place, and to be incorporated by the team. In this session, we will employ a mixture of lecture, exercises, and discussion to investigate these barriers in depth and learn strategies to overcome them.

1. We will discuss the case for diversity; what unique challenges and opportunities do diverse teams offer, that in turn can lead to them outperforming homogeneous teams, or falling short of expectations?

2. We will discuss challenges that can prevent diverse teams from achieving their potential, centering around two questions:

• Do you enable members of diverse teams to speak up with divergent perspectives and information?
• Do you foster inclusion (while disarming bias and defensiveness) toward the ideas of diverse others?

3. We will engage in practice exercises to develop skills around strategies to address the challenges above, namely:

• Getting the right people onto the team and creating a context in which individuals feel empowered and safe to share their diverse perspectives and ideas.
• Translating those diverse perspectives ideas into action that facilitate team performance, while promoting a sense of inclusion and belonging.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Certificate

This course is offered on its own or as part of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Certificate. Learn more.

Registration and Fees

Program fee includes instruction and learning materials. Payment must be made by credit card or UW budget transfer prior to the program. Discounts are not applicable to UW Executive Education online classes. It is strongly encouraged that you register early as space is limited. See cancellation policies.