(bright music) Look around you, you might be working with people from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures. This is a sign of a diverse work environment, which can be beneficial to your organization. In these lessons, you'll learn about diversity and how you as a leader can encourage diversity and inclusion within your teams. Organizational diversity refers to when your workforce is comprised of people from a variety of backgrounds, genders, religions, and other demographics. There are many advantages to having a diverse organization. In fact, studies have shown that organizations with diverse executive teams tend to perform better financially. Why is that? There are many reasons. For instance, organizations with more diversity tend to have a variety of employees with different perspectives, which can help them be more innovative, provide better customer service, increase their creativity, and help them become better problem solvers. When organizations are diverse, employees tend to feel more engaged, which reduces employee turnover. While some countries have laws in place to ensure diverse workplaces, following and exceeding these laws will directly benefit your organization. But it's worth noting that while diversity is important, like when hiring people from different backgrounds, inclusion matters, too. Inclusion means to provide equal access and opportunities once you have that diverse workforce. Many companies hire diversely, but don't focus on inclusion. Think of diversity and inclusion as a two-step process. First, you can implement strategies to attract and retain a diverse workforce. Then you might want to try keeping that diverse workforce by ensuring you implement strategies to include and provide support to everyone on your team. But what challenges come with a diverse workforce? Communication issues are a particular challenge, since diverse groups of people may have different Another challenge is that often in a diverse workforce with many perspectives, too many opinions can make decision-making difficult. Bias can still crop up in a diverse workforce, which may result in hostility or personality conflicts that make it difficult to work together to achieve goals. While diversity brings about many organization-wide benefits in the long run, learning how to lead diverse teams to maximize productivity can help alleviate some of these challenges and result in an efficient team of diverse individuals.