Building a Team to Address a Diversity Issue
Three verbs, three different problems, and five to seven slides. Selection is where diversity work usually fails before collaboration is ever attempted.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 16, 2026
Select, foster and educate — three different problems
Three verbs and each is a separate problem, so treat the deck as three answers rather than one. Selecting is the one that decides the rest and the one most plans skip past: a team assembled to address a diversity issue that consists entirely of senior clinicians will produce a plan that works for senior clinicians. Selection means naming roles and the perspective each contributes — frontline staff who see the issue daily, the affected group represented rather than described, someone with authority to release resources, and someone from a function that will have to change. Say what each brings and what would be missing without them. Fostering collaboration is a different problem: it is about how the team operates once assembled, and the failure mode is a group where hierarchy means only two people speak. Name the mechanisms — psychological safety, an explicit charter, rotating facilitation, decision rules agreed before the first disagreement.
Educating is the third and it needs the same specificity. Diversity education has a poor evidence record when it is a one-off mandatory session, and a better one when it is sustained, tied to actual work, and connected to a measurable outcome — so say which you would do and cite the reason. The ethical criterion is graded separately and deserves its own slide: representation without power is tokenism, the affected group should not carry the unpaid labour of educating everyone else, and confidentiality matters when people share experiences of discrimination in a work setting. Goals and initial priorities complete the set, and they should be modest enough to be achieved in a first cycle, because a diversity plan that promises culture change and delivers nothing measurable in a year does more damage than a small change that holds. Five to seven slides with detailed speaker's notes means the notes carry the argument.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Select team members by the perspective each contributes.
- 02Distinguish assembling a team from making it function.
- 03Choose an education approach with evidence behind it.
- 04Apply ethical considerations specific to diversity work.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01Goals and initial priorities, sized for a first cycle.
- 02A selection plan naming roles and perspectives.
- 03A collaboration plan with named mechanisms.
- 04An education approach with its evidence.
- 05Ethical considerations applied to diversity work.
- 065-7 slides with detailed speaker's notes.
Goals, selection, collaboration, education, then the ethics
The issue and the goals
Define the diversity issue and set achievable initial priorities.
Selecting the team
Name roles and the perspective each contributes.
Fostering collaboration
Set out the mechanisms that make the team function.
Educating the team
Choose an approach and justify it from evidence.
Ethical considerations
Address tokenism, unpaid labour and confidentiality.
How you would know it worked
State the measure for the first cycle.
Evidence on diverse teams and on what makes them work
Recommended databases
- PubMed Central
- NCBI Bookshelf
- Capella library resources
- Healthcare leadership journals
Search sequence
- 1.Search for evidence on diversity training effectiveness, including negative findings.
- 2.Look up psychological safety research for the collaboration section.
- 3.Find evidence on representation and decision-making authority.
- 4.Check the scoring guide criteria and map a slide to each.
Reference shortlist
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Diversity and Discrimination in Health Care - StatPearls - NCBI Bookshelf
StatPearls Publishing, via NCBI Bookshelf · 2024
Diversity and discrimination in health care — the issue the team exists to address.
- 02
COLLABORATION WITHIN THE INTERPROFESSIONAL TEAM
Nursing Management and Professional Concepts, NCBI Bookshelf · 2022
Interprofessional collaboration and what makes teams function.
- 03
AONL Nurse Leader Core Competencies
American Organization for Nursing Leadership · 2024
The leadership competencies the selection and fostering criteria map onto.
- 04
Mapping Strategies for Strengthening Safety Culture: A Scoping Review
Healthcare (Basel) · 2024
Strategies for changing culture, with what the evidence supports.
- 05
TEACHING & LEARNING
Nursing Advanced Skills, Open RN, NCBI Bookshelf · 2024
Education design, for choosing an approach that changes practice.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Assembling a team of senior people to address an issue they do not experience.
- Treating collaboration as something that happens once people are in a room.
- Proposing one-off mandatory training, which has a poor evidence record.
- Setting goals so large that nothing measurable can be delivered.
Submission checklist
- Does each team member bring a stated perspective?
- Are the collaboration mechanisms named rather than assumed?
- Is the education approach justified by evidence?
- Are the goals achievable within a first cycle?
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.
Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.
Reviewed by
Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.