Multicultural Talent and DevOps
While reading the Harvard Business Review while flying across the Atlantic, I spotted a short story on some research recently published in Organisation Science. We already know that diverse teams have advantages of heterogeneous ones. The new research suggests individuals with multicultural backgrounds strengthen diverse teams. This was true both when when the multicultural background bridged a gap (an Indian, an American and an Indian-American) as well as when it didn’t (a Japanese-American helping Germans and Chinese collaborate).
This was interesting to me, but brought a “well, duh” response from @EllyMinick. She’d spent years recruiting college students to study internationally. A common pitch was that time spent in another cultural will make you better at brokering between cultures.
What this means for DevOps teams
The rift between Dev and Ops is significantly cultural. These silos within organizations have developed distinct cultural and value systems. Developers stereo-typically value change while Ops stereo-typically values stability. Effective DevOps requires collaboration between individuals from these backgrounds, often in a new shared product-centric team.
Ideally these teams should feature individuals who are fluent in both cultures. That could be someone who has spent time in both Dev and Ops roles in their career or someone with experience in a role like release management who has brokered between those groups in the past.
Alternatively, leaders putting together these cross-functional teams should highly value individuals with any multicultural background. They are more likely than anyone else on the team to successfully bridge the gap and bring out the best in the team.
... Hey, I hoped you enjoyed this article. We had a huge release for our continuous delivery tools today. UrbanCode Deploy 7.0 and UrbanCode Velocity 1.0 shipped! Check them out.
In my humble opinion, a person with open mind and diverse experience of working with teams from various countries, cultures , background, belief-systems etc is just as valuable and capable of bringing a sense of balance to the team...even if he/she belongs to a single culture. Exposure through work experience is just as important.
Completely agree with new research suggesting individuals with multicultural backgrounds strengthen diverse teams
I strongly believe this is true
Diverse work force is the key to serve our customers internal and external, as we move into international business. So this research is proven most of the times, though there might be some cultural and communication challenges, but if the mentors and the managers are equipped properly on how to handle the diversity, this can lead to a great journey and helps brings innovation forward.