I was reflecting on my week-long experience in Singapore with a pan-Asian group who work at a large oil and gas company. There was the exuberant Japanese HR director, the congenial Korean group leader, the attuned Nepalese business manager, and so on.

“What was the group like?” my partner, David, asked upon my return. As I thought about the answer, I realized that I didn’t have a word that fit the whole group. In fact, the group didn’t feel like a group at all. It felt like a collection of individuals.

From one perspective, identifying a group of people as a “collection of individuals” is exactly right – if we see people through the lens of the “group”, we miss what is most important. How can I acknowledge, respect and connect with a group without getting to know the individuals? From another perspective, however, isn’t cohesion a characteristic of an effective group?

This brings me to the question I have been examining for my entire career: what gets in the way of a cross-cultural group from becoming cohesive? It’s not easy, after all, to bring a group of distributed, culturally diverse people together, especially those who work in different functions. But there are many procedural, structural and behavioral considerations that shed light on the answer.

A study from the MIT Sloan Management Review* showed that groups will have natural “fault lines”, that can easily break into subgroups based on demographic characteristics. When fault lines occur subgroups rarely collaborate with other subgroups, instead tending to share knowledge only within their own. The authors found that one defining factor on whether fault lines occurred depended on the behavior of the team leader and the way in which she or he structured the leadership role. Some leaders were able to reduce the problems by how they prioritized their actions, specifically, if they were aware of when to move from a focus on the task to a focus on the group process, or vice versa.

Fault lines are less likely to emerge when all members of a group are fairly similar, or, ironically, when all members of a group are very different from one another. Fault lines are more likely to emerge when there are few, homogeneous subgroups that identify themselves based on demographic attributes which allow them to form distinct, non-overlapping identities.

My eventual observation about the group in Singapore was that the individuals were very different from each other and, therefore, less likely to break into fault lines. Moreover, their active participation allowed them to become highly differentiated from one another. I am reminded that while my first inclination when working with a collection of people is often to support them to integrate. But a more examined stance is that supporting integration is often premature.

So what does this mean for you, leader or facilitator of a culturally diverse group? It means that before you support cohesiveness, you may need to support individuals. What does that look like?

• Acknowledge individuals (challenges, risk-taking, successes, unique contributions, strengths, skills, etc.)
• Be ardent about hearing the differing views during decision making and reinforce the importance of idea diversity in creative solutioning
• Ensure that all put their individual voices into the room by “checking in” when possible at beginning of group meetings or conversations
• Distribute and rotate leadership to individuals
• Support those who exude less influence in the efforts to equalize power differentials

* Gratton, L., Voigt, A., and Erickson, T. Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams. MIT Sloan Management Review. July 2007. Volume 48, Number 4, pages 22-29.