As diversity in the workplace increases, interacting and communicating with your coworkers will present specific challenges and rewards. In order to successfully navigate todays workplace, be sensitive to the diverse backgrounds of your coworkers.

Read the following scenarios, and then choose the best answer for the questions that follow.

You are a manager at an IT consulting firm. As a manager, it is your job to put together workgroups that will produce creative and effective results and products for clients.

What strategy could you employ to come up with the best groups?

Throw all the names in a hat and randomly choose your teams.

Choose teams that are primarily of the same culture or race and add one or two others based on their personal strengths and weaknesses.

Focus on the overall strengths and weaknesses of each person instead of focusing on differences such as race, gender, and age.

You are a manager at a greeting card company. One afternoon an employee comes to you seeking advice on how to deal with diversity challenges in his workgroup.

What is the best piece of advice you can give him?

There is a diversity training session being held in the conference room on Friday that I am requiring you to attend. In the meantime, understand that this is our culture, so if you dont get along with people, you will be fired.

There is a diversity training session being held in the conference room on Friday that I would encourage you to attend. In the meantime, try to focus on the similarities of your coworkers and stay away from making assumptions. Make sure you are clear on how you fit into your workgroup as well.

You are right. You work with a really difficult group from so many foreign countries. I dont know how you guys get along. Just hang in there and hope for the best.

Grant is in the process of setting up a new team to prepare a bid on a project for a large, multinational firm. In order to create a team that will consider a wide variety of options and alternatives, Grant purposely chooses team members with very diverse skills, backgrounds, and experiences. Although Grant knows that each team member will be able to contribute significantly to the team goals, he is very concerned about the group's ability to communicate well based on their diversity.

Which of the following should Grant do when introducing team members to each other to help ensure high levels of acceptance and harmony among team members?

Point out and build on similarities.

Reinforce assumptions about differences among members.

Expect all team members to conform to team rules.