I recently wrote that to be your best, you need to find your people. These are the people who get you. They are professional colleagues who understand the work you do, and can help you to more effectively address the challenges you face as a leader.

But that’s only half the equation.

There is downside to only hanging with people who are like you. Birds of a feather flock together, and that is actually limiting.

Here are three reasons why diversity is important.

Better Results

Richard Freeman and Wei Huang analyzed over 2.5 million research papers from US-based authors. They found that authors with English surnames were more likely to have co-authors who also had English surnames. The same was true for those with Chinese, Russian and Korean surnames, as well as four other groups.

Freeman and Wei found that, to the extent that there was diversity among surnames, researchers who worked with other ethnic groups had better results. Researchers with four or five authors of multiple ethnicities had, on average, 5-10% greater citations, a common measure of credibility and impact.

A study by McKinsey & Company found that a more diverse executive board, correlated with better financial results for the company. Diversity is good for the bottom line.

More Creativity & Innovation

Multiple studies have been done on the impact of intercultural relationships and creativity. William Maddux and researchers at the University of North Carolina assessed 115 MBA students at an elite international business school at the beginning and the end of a 10-month program. They found that those who had dated someone from another culture during the 10 months performed better on creativity tests.

Adam Galinsky has done research at Columbia University on cultural exchange workers who come to the US on a J-1 visa. He found that workers who had more contact with their US friends after returning home were more likely to have started their own business and to have developed new practices for that business.

I have certainly seen the impact of cultural exchange. We hire international camp staff for our summer program through the J-1 program. My daughters, who worked on summer staff, still maintain contact with their international friends. It has given them a broader perspective on life. Working with people from different cultures encourages divergent thinking, which can generate multiple solutions to a given problem.

Better and Faster Decisions

Diverse teams have been found to make better decisions, and make them more quickly, than individual decision makers. Furthermore, cognitively diverse teams, that is teams with people who have different perspectives or information processing styles, solve problems more quickly. Cognitive diversity is different than gender or ethnic diversity. It’s not readily apparent until you get to know how someone views problem-solving and processes information.

You want a mix of people who prefer using their own expertise and those who synthesize the ideas and expertise of others (perspective). You also want people who prefer applying existing knowledge and people who generate new knowledge (information processing).

Building a diverse team is a challenge. Most of us are more comfortable with people who look like us, act like us and think like us. Like anything else, doing your best work requires going outside your comfort zone. It’s worth the effort.