Author Chat: The 5 Disciplines of Inclusive Teams by Andrés Tapia and Michel Buffet

In today’s fast-paced, interconnected world, breakthroughs don’t come from individuals—they come from teams. And not just any teams, but diverse and inclusive ones. Andrés Tapia and Michel Buffet provide a revolutionary model that empowers teams to harness the full potential of diverse perspectives.

In this edition of Author Chat, Disrupt Your Career speaks with Andrés Tapia and Michel Buffet about their book, The 5 Disciplines of Inclusive Teams: Unlocking Collective Power to Achieve Breakthrough (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, March 2025). Andrés and Michel introduce an actionable 5-step framework for building truly equitable, high-performing teams and unlocking their collective power to deliver groundbreaking results.

What need were you addressing as you wrote the book?

Andrés: This is a part of a trilogy that has two books before it, the 5 inclusive disciplines trilogy: the 5 disciplines of inclusive leaders, the 5 disciplines of inclusive organizations, and this completes a series of the 5 disciplines inclusive teams. I had a different co-author for each one of these, and I’ll talk about my relationship with Michel in a moment for this particular one. We wanted to prove several things, that there’s a systematic, codifiable way to really create an inclusive organization that requires inclusive leaders leading inclusive teams. Then we wanted to bring in the disciplines and the practices with each discipline to execute that. So think about this at the intersection of the ivory tower and the street: a lot of research every which way, but also a lot of practicality. Then when it came to inclusive teams, Michel and I set out to crack the code and understand there is a correlation in many other studies that more diverse and inclusive teams lead to better performance, more innovation, higher engagement. But no one has been able to really explain how it happens, and we felt that if we could, we could then codify it and create an accelerated process for these diverse, inclusive teams to have those kinds of outcomes much more quickly, much more predictably, much more effectively.

What was your process for writing the book? 

Michel: Part of the partnership here is that we both have a passion for both the ideas of diversity and inclusion and teams. Andrés brings lifelong experience and insight on the diversity and inclusion side, and I lead our top team performance practice at Korn Ferry. I’ve work with executive teams for a very long time, and so we’ve had plenty of conversations where this book basically was the combination of all these conversations that we had where we were sharing about our respective areas, and so there’s an opportunity to really bring these two things together, and it fits perfectly, as Andrés has mentioned, with the idea of a trilogy.

Andrés: We wanted to demonstrate throughout the series and in this book: by partnering the reality of diversity and to find ways to work inclusively, which co authoring can be tricky, but we have found ways to make it work and be synergistic. So this book is significantly better because there were two of us with very diverse backgrounds, different disciplines, different cultural experiences, that collaborated effectively on it. 

What are the key concepts and messages from the book?

Michel: There are three main components. One is wanting to contribute some new, fresh thinking that’s research based and practice based on our own experience as practitioners – a clear framework to think about, to help teams and leaders think about what an inclusive team look like, and what are the true signs and the disciplines that that you’ll see. So five disciplines which I’ll describe briefly.  I’ll list them: it’s Connecting, Caring, Synchronizing Cultural Dexterity and Power Sharing. The first two, connecting and caring actually are totally different from the the other three in the sense that they create the conditions, necessary conditions for the other three. You really have to have a strong sense of connection and caring before you really look into the ways, you’re going to synchronize, which is how do you find ways for the team to operate as one team? It’s a lot of the work we do with teams is the sense of how does the collective occur? And it’s not just that everybody’s doing the same thing, but it’s the sense of orchestration and intentionality when the team comes together. Cultural dexterity: we live in a global world, we are an increasingly diverse world, and so that is a really critical discipline to have to be able to operate, influence, drive results, and bring the team together in that highly diverse context. And then the last, I think probably, our most kind of thought-provoking discipline, is the power sharing. It’s probably the most difficult one to achieve as well, which is for team leaders to recognize that their role is always going to be there, but that the true unlock for any team, any particularly inclusive team, is to find ways for power to flow on the team and to have different team members take on leadership roles at particular given times. And so those five, these are the five concepts. André and I put a lot of attention to convert these into specific tips and practices. We wanted to make sure that this was theoretically sound but also highly practical and so we put a lot of efforts in defining specific practices and the conditions for increasing those five disciplines. And then the second piece is that we also look for implications for three areas: the evolution and the future of diversity, equity and inclusion, the future of leadership and the future of innovation. The last component is, because we are practitioners, we want to leave the reader with a blueprint of a journey: what is it going to take for a team to actually develop as a more inclusive teams using these five disciplines. 

Andrés: If I could elaborate a little bit on the part that sounds so easy: connecting and caring. Michel and I make a distinction between the two. Think about connecting as cognitive empathy and caring more about emotive empathy. The emotive part, it makes sense, right? Just really getting to know each other and our identities and what’s important to us, and even some personal things that can help us better understand each of us within the work context. Because we are full beings that are affected by what’s going on in our life and the connecting. We did some really interesting work on connecting, and it’s so simple yet so powerful. If you think about a traditional way in which a team introduces itself to one another, when it comes together: what’s your name, what’s your title, how long you’ve been here, and it pretty much stops there. But if you think about yourself right now, and you think about any, even the three of us, and if we stop there, how little do we know about each other in ways that are relevant for the work that we’re going to have to do together? So one of our tips and techniques is simply to have the team spend 20 minutes on answering this one question. What significant educational, work life experience at any stage of your life, have you had that today affects how you approach your work? And I’ll tell you: there’s the Peace Corps volunteer, there’s the refugee, there’s the economist that work in a hyperinflation country, there’s a person with a linguistics masters has nothing to do with her role right now, but suddenly you find things out that then when you move into synchronizing and into really trying to do the work and bring the best of the team, and then somebody moves in with power sharing intent to say, well, here’s the word-smithing, just to use a simple example. Well, we can all wordsmith, and we should, but there’s a moment where the power should go and flow toward the person who perhaps has the master in linguistics, etc. So that that empathetic, connective, empathy, becomes very important, and I’ll tell you one thing, we have done this with senior teams and all kinds of teams at every level, and they turn to us and say: I’ve worked with this person for 15 years, and I found out something I never knew about them, and it helps me better understand how to better work with them. 

Can you share a success story or case study from the book? 

Michel Buffet: I will say, I don’t want to really want to reveal too much, but maybe what I’ll say about our case studies actually, is the fact that we try to really have diversity in the stories we were telling. So what the reader will find will find is first person stories where we really looked at the experience from the individual leader perspective, for example. But we also have stories about more so team dynamics. What happens on the team, and what are some of the unlocks, some of the learning. And so I think that that’s really a key takeaway. I’ll just maybe use a story, and I’m actually wondering if it’s in the book, but, but it’s recent, and so it’s really very much top of mind for me. But working with a with an executive team at a Private Equity backed organization, where it’s along the same lines. What André said is, I think the big unlock for them was to spend half a morning of a two-day off site learning about each other. We call that exercise 15 minutes of fame, where everybody would have 15 minutes to really tell their story, and exactly what Andrés said is that it’s this realization that here’s someone that I spent a lot of time with, and I had no idea that we shared this common experience. Some of these things can get really personal and but that’s also kind of where some things can really open up and be truly transformational when you have that awareness that you have those common experiences that are part of your identity, and can make things that maybe you thought were not possible now possible.

Andrés: From a synchronicity perspective, which also I think, is one of our other breakthrough innovative dynamics is leveraging the power of neuroscience that has discovered so much, not only about our individual brains and how little we activate to other parts, like the corporate world over-indexes in using the prefrontal cortex, it was just logic and all that stuff. In the world of disruption, a lot of executives and team leaders and team members just actually double down in the prefrontal cortex and try to think harder, and it’s just leading to dead ends. So the idea is how do you get teams to activate the parts that are with music or percussion or humor or the arts or illustration, and so some of our exercises are actually bringing that in. And this right now still Vanguard companies that do it, because it’s still counter cultural, but we believe the science backs us up, and when we’ve done it, there has been significant breakthrough in some problem that the team was trying to solve, that just thinking more and doing more flip chart work just was not getting them there, and it opened them up into very new, creative ways.

Pre-order André and Michel’s book The 5 Disciplines of Inclusive Teams

Andrés’ LinkedIn profile

Michel’s LinkedIn profile

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