How Diversity and Inclusion Exercises Can Strengthen Your Teamwork Soft-Skills

To better understand how to work with your colleagues, it helps to learn their points of view. But also how their beliefs influence how they work.

Better yet, learning about others can also help you understand more about your own viewpoints. Naturally, this affects your personal work style preferences too.  

In career development, there is a valuable training topic called “Diversity and Inclusion” and it helps people understand, accept, and value the differences between them and their colleagues.

Most people define “diversity” as general topics such as race, culture, gender, and sexual orientation. But “diversity” can also include educational, economical, and social backgrounds. As well as the hobbies that shape who a person is, even if two people share common racial and cultural backgrounds. 

Here’s a simple Diversity & Inclusion exercise you can do to illustrate how you think about your own identity and how it affects your communication with others:

Step One

On a piece of paper, write down 5 things you’d say to introduce yourself when you speak to a stranger. 

Step Two

Once you’ve finished, write down 5 things you’d say to describe yourself to your best friend. 

Step Three

Did you use different words to describe yourself? If so, why?

To a stranger, Aaron would describe himself as “a millennial American architect who enjoys travel and food”. 

To a friend, Aaron would describe himself as “a guy who grew up on a farm in Michigan. Whose love of design took him to Italy where he used his spare time to learn how to cook the perfect pizza”. 

In Aaron’s case, he describes himself differently to the stranger than he would to his friend. Why? Because he’s unsure about the stranger’s worldview.

By being uncertain of someone’s worldview, Aaron has made the assumption that giving a broader description of himself would be an easier way to communicate his background and identity and to establish a connection with the stranger.

But the words he uses to describe himself to a friend paint a more detailed picture of who he is as a person and his priorities: an adventurous, creative, curious person from a small town.

Your answers from the activity can reveal different things to you about how you view your identity and how you communicate it to others. 

In Diversity and Inclusion training, exercises like this help you learn more about your colleagues beyond your general knowledge and observations of them. It enables you to get a better sense of each other’s perspectives.

The key element between how you’d introduce yourself to a stranger compared to a friend is the closeness of your relationship. As well as your comfort in sharing meaningful insights about yourself.

When getting to know your colleagues, this kind of exercise can take you deeper into the connection you have in your relationships.  

These traits that we learn about people through Diversity and Training exercises can help us understand how people can approach problem-solving differently. But also what kind of perspectives would be useful to leverage in resolving issues and moving projects forward. 

The more we know about each other, the more we can understand how to take advantage of each other’s strengths. We can also identify when feedback from different perspectives can be helpful in a workplace environment.

It helps colleagues understand our personal values and viewpoints which makes us feel closer in connection through feeling understood. 

At Beyond Academy, every intern has the opportunity to receive career development training on soft skill topics. Our interns makes the most of this development, in addition to learning about other cultures through working abroad.

At Beyond Academy you can live and work in 14 global cities and enroll on 18 different industry-specific programs. For more detailed descriptions of where you can go and what kind of internships are available, take a look at our programs, here.