When I look back over my career and reflect about all of the people I’ve crossed paths with such as former bosses, former team members and former members of my innovation teams — the one of the key characteristics was breadth and depth of the “diversity”. Now you may be thinking I’m talking about the HR definition of diversity. In this case, I’m talking about much more.

One of the challenges for an innovation leader is to get his team to share their opinions, inputs and ideas so that they can be considered. However, most leaders hire people like themselves. Same education. Same economic background. Same interests. Same biases. To break that trend and to create more productive teams, leaders need to break the habit of hiring people “like us”.

So what are the different “traits” of diversity that you should recruit for?

* Gender

* Ethnicity

* Age – Avoid what is becoming the Silicon Valley boas against anyone older than 35.

* Education – Do they really need a college degree?

* Relevant Experience – Mix long experience with no experience

* Economic upbringing – Did you come from a family with money? Hire someone who didn’t come from money.

* Nationality

* Hobbies/interests outside of the job – Look for the closet creative such as a musician or photographer.

* Introvert and extrovert

All of these traits have an impact on how you look at ideas and innovations . The better teams have as diverse a team as possible so that views, opinions and biases are all put on the table when discussing a new idea.

If you avoid diversity, the “homogeneous” team will look at a new idea through a very narrow lens and view themselves as a proxy for the customer.

Guest: Tara Roehl – Speech Language Pathologist on Neural Diversity

Tara Roehl is a nationally certified speech-language pathologist. She owns Speechy Keen Speech Therapy, a telepractice-based private practice in Colorado focusing on the social/pragmatic and executive functioning needs of students with ADHD, High Functioning Autism and related disorders. She speaks across the nation at national and state conventions, medical conferences and local groups for parents and professionals. Her topics include executive functioning, telepractice therapy interventions and the integration of the iPad with gamification theory in therapy.

Topic: Neural Diversity (sometimes referred to as Neurodiversity) describes those in the population who have a different thinking process than those who are neurotypical. By using a diversity hiring effort around the way people think, an organization can greatly improve their creative and innovation output and impact.

Killer Question/Mind Hack

What is surprisingly inconvenient about my product??

The designers and engineers who worked at HP face many challenges in getting their ideas signed off on. It’s a long process from an idea to a finished prototype. Before any product can hit the market, it faces one final test. I take the prototype home, give it to my wife, and say, “Tell me what you think.” Now, my wife is an extremely smart and focused individual, but she is emphatically not a techie. She doesn’t care how a gadget works; she just wants it to work.

Her lack of specialized knowledge has been hugely valuable to me over the years. If I test a new product, I can troubleshoot it almost without thinking. I might not even notice a glitch that could cause major hassles for an end consumer because the fix is second-nature to me. On the other hand, if my wife can’t get a product to work, the first thing she does is call me up and yell at me, which is a great incentive to get our products as flawless as possible.