For a leadership team to be successful you have to all be focused on the same goal – but there are multiple paths to each mountain.  Some leaders surround themselves with other leaders who could be mistaken for their mirror images and don’t get the benefit of diverse perspectives.  When this happens, every new challenge has only one solution: the ones we already know.

Each individual is limited by their own knowledge and experience in their ability to offer solutions to problems.  But each person has a diverse set of strengths formed by their abilities, knowledge, and experience.  When people with diverse strengths are brought together, the ability to offer multiple solutions to problems becomes possible.

In my book, The Leadership GPS, we follow Brian Alden as he fills his team with leaders who have diverse perspectives and he finds that success comes much easier. Brian learns that he doesn’t have to be the one with the best answer; he just needs to find the right answer.

An ancient Japanese proverb sums this up well: “All of us are smarter than one of us.”