Most times my team have awaydays (twice per year face to face, travel budget permitting) we will have a session where we try to understand each other as people. As a virtual group, there is so little chance to meet up that anything we can do to help us work together well is of great value.
Often we use one of the tools on the market to frame the discussion. We've tried MBTI, Belbin, Kingdomality and Strength Finder. I've discovered that they all have different plus points - and as a team we've learned a lot from each of them.
MBTI is the expert's tool of choice, and you can see why. It is obviously based on very rigorous research, and the sixteen boxes across four dimensions give lots of diagnostic and suggestive power. But, as a humble user, I can never get my head around all the permutations at once, so I can't get so much value from it, at least not without constant reference to copious reference manuals. And you can't really run a good session around MTBI without having an expert present - ah, the cynic in me concludes that it is no wonder those same experts love that tool and diss all the others!
Belbin is very simple and intuitive, but the experts hate it. Maybe it is a bit discredited by now, who knows. What I like is that when someone is a chairman or a completer finisher or a plant, you can immediately picture their preferences and use them to deploy them well in teams and coach them. But it does seem just a bit too shallow - in most cases the allocation seems pretty blindingly obvious in advance (what else could I be but a plant!), so I found that I was already coaching according to Belbin even before we did Belbin. Not so much value there then.
Kingdomality I think is my favourite. It is not so well known as some of the others. the whole theory is in a thin book (I read it one morning on the train/airport lounge/plane to Manchester). People fall into one of twelve categories, pictured around a clock face, in one of four "schools". the schools are competitors, explorers, scientist types and altruists, with "pure" examples being at 12 o'clock, 3 o'clock etc. The other eight flavours represent, for example, altruist with a bit of scientist (actually called a shepherd). The reason I like it is that I can use it as a coach. For example, say I'm trying to motivate the team to submit articles to our discussion forum. For the competitors I set a target, for the scientists I flatter their knowledge and argue how useful it is to share it, for the explorers I argue that this is their best way to learn something new and exciting, while the altruists are performing a service to the world! I have proof - this works! And I didn't do it before Kingdomality.
Strength finder is a bit different. Everyone is told what their five most natural strengths are out of a list of 34. As an example, one famous member of my team is a "woo" - a sort of empathetic networker. Others can be learners, maximisers, strategists, etc. Just like in all the other tools, none of the strengths is "better" than any other. This tool I also found useful, though remembering 5 strengths of 12 people is a bit of a memory test, so it doesn't quite have the same simple beauty of Kingdomality or Belbin. What I like though is that it focuses us where we are best rather than worst, unlike most feedback and development tools. In retail we had a saying "max the max" - as a simple example, don't try to double your sales of ice cream in the winter from 10 to 20, try to grow them in the summer from 200 to 300.
I wonder how many ENTP, Plant, White Knight (pure altruist), strategic/ideation/activator/maximiser/ individualisation people there are in the world? Maybe if you are another one we ought to meet up? Then again, we'd probably find each other very dull.
No comments:
Post a Comment