If you’re going to use the same old vanilla cake mix, you can’t expect to serve a chocolate raspberry mousse cake to your dinner guests. Yet every day, leaders everywhere think they can do just that within their organizations. They construct new teams with the same players and anticipate dazzling outcomes. While they certainly get an “A” for optimism, they’re failing when it comes to building teams with the diversity required to drive engagement and performance.

With hope in their hearts, managers pore over their pool of potential team members, noting factors such as job title and years of experience. But are these the sole ingredients needed to whip up a masterpiece? Will a pinch of gender diversity do the trick? Studies show that innovation levels can increase by as much as 80 percent when diversity is recognized. In addition, racial and gender diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater relative profits and management teams exhibiting a wider range of educational and work backgrounds produced more-innovative products.

While it’s easy to acknowledge that diversity impacts outcome, strategically building diverse teams is anything but simple unless you have the right tool. Most organizations don’t have an easy way to capture information about their talent pool, much less maintain it in an easily-accessible central repository. If a repository exists, it’s often in the form of a burdensome Excel spreadsheet. If this sounds familiar, you may have noticed that a spreadsheet cannot automatically send team invitations, track acceptances or show when talent is over-committed to too many work teams. Nor can it capture the detailed information you need to identify and analyze performance trends while you tend to other important tasks.

It’s time to close the spreadsheet and open lineup, a simple, easy-to-use tool that integrates with your current systems and makes capturing, storing and searching detailed information about your talent pool intuitive, accessible, customizable and secure. Create tailor-made teams by using the powerful search engine to identify positions and fill roles. Use filters, tags and evaluations to drill-down to particular traits, qualifications and expertise. Once you’ve invited your new team members to join, simply wait for the acceptances and voila -- your perfect work group has been assembled.

Building diverse teams doesn’t have to be a time-consuming manual task. With lineup, it’s a (yep, you guessed it) piece of cake.

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