The Leadership Lessons I Learned from Star Trek

I have followed Star Trek since 1966. Like many people of my generation, the values, stories, characters and lessons consciously and sometimes unconsciously are present in my thinking, my observations and my professional practice. I will try to share a lesson every few days.

Lesson One: Make Sure That Your Team is Interplanetary
Captain Kirk was facing some pretty hairy situations and he needed a team that could give him different points of view. A team made up of people from different backgrounds and training can guarantee that your team will come up with more creative solutions by seeing situations through different lenses.
The Captains team was radically diverse in a 1966 kind of way: a Russian, an Asian and an African American woman and a Vulcan.
Professional differentiation was also a factor: Scotty- looking for ways to fix things or make them work better, McCoy- empathetically diagnosing and healing, the rational Vulcan among the irrational humanoids and the Captain, able to take in lots of data, balancing it all, listening to opinions and take action.
Look at your team- if too many of them look like you, agree with you and have the same background as you, it is likely that you are working with a clone of yourself. Look for people that could add value by adding new angles and different insights. Multiple layers of diversity will add to the productivity of your team. Homogeneous groups get things done faster but heterogeneous groups get them done better and more creatively.