Most any search for articles that deal with team performance and the factors that are important for optimal team performance will yield two elements that come up consistently: Engagement and Trust.

Thanks to a study by Reynolds and Lewis published in the March 2017 Harvard Business Review, we can now add another significant factor of great impact on team performance, Cognitive Diversity.

People tend to think of diversity in relation to demographic factors like age, ethnicity, and gender. As important as these are, the cognitive diversity of the individuals who make up a team is important for our purposes. These differences in thinking styles can bring a more powerful dimension to innovation, even though they also bring the challenge of engaging people who think differently in team problem-solving processes and engendering their trust.

There are many creative problem-solving processes, and what I particularly like about Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is that it describes the cognitive steps we take in solving complex problems together. There are four basic phases:

1. Clarify to understand the challenge.
2. Ideate to come up with ideas to address it.
3. Develop ideas into viable plans.
4. Implement the solution

While teams will progress together through all four phases, research shows that different team members will have more energy for some phases than others. Those are thinking preferences. Professor Gerard Puccio from Buffalo State University created the FourSight Thinking Profile assessment to measure thinking preferences. And here is the important part: our thinking preferences strongly influence our engagement in the problem-solving process.

As Sarah Thurber, author of The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker writes: “The assessment shows whether you have a high, neutral, or low preference when you clarify, ideate, develop, and implement. In problem-solving stages where you have a high preference, you may feel ‘in the flow’ and energized. You may feel less engaged and less interested in areas of low preference. The combination of your preferences is your thinking profile.”

Be honest with yourself and reflect on where your preference might be in the creative process. This will also tell you where you are most likely to be highly engaged. For example, I have been guilty of showing my bias by asking too many questions at the front end of the process and getting very excited about ideation because new possibilities excite me. Then, the wind goes out of my sails and unconsciously I let others take over for the development of an idea into a solution and identifying ways to implement the solution.

We all have these cognitive biases, and a good team leader capitalizes on them by doing two things:

First, by using the FourSight profile to identify each team member’s preferences and determine where each can be of most help to the team in working through the CPS process.

Second, training team members to use cognitive tools that will strengthen their participation in their “low preference” phases. This is similar to being a right-handed or left-handed pitcher and taking advantage of that preference in certain situations but also practicing becoming better with your low preference arm so that in a pinch you can contribute what is needed.

A few years ago, I was doing a project for a chamber of commerce. Part of the project was to create a better understanding of the cognitive preferences of their executive team of approximately 30 people.

After we presented and debriefed the profiles, everybody was excited because they had a new understanding of the way they could put together teams and eliminate a lot of the “storming” that takes place when teams first get together.

About a month later I attended another meeting at the chamber’s headquarters and discovered that each member had printed their profile on the back of their badge so that when they were in a meeting, they could all flip their badges over and see what the preferences were for each person in the room. I was stunned listening to how they had achieved higher levels of engagement by this simple act – which not only eliminated initial storming but had also greatly increased individual participation because each member was doing what they loved.

Engagement is doing what you love and loving what you do. Trust follows.