Application trumps theory

How 1900s theory + 21st century application = a perfect team in today’s world

Whether a business has less than ten members of staff or is a huge corporate with 100,000s of staff members, it’s likely that team cohesion has been a challenge over the last few months.

Team cohesion is the challenge, but what’s the solution?

It’s been a challenge for many even before the COVID pandemic though. Team building exercises, treasure hunts and other activities have, in most circumstances, had their day, and many business owners and business leaders have been looking for something that can both improve team cohesiveness and provide a commercial outcome.

When an organisation starts looking to understand the members of their teams, more often than not they will be pointed towards a number of instruments on the market and their different variations- the majority (if not all) being based on Carl Jung’s psychological theory from 1921.

Since starting our research into the formation of the perfect team over a decade ago, we’ve often asked business leaders and owners that if they were given the option of buying a mobile phone made in the 1980s or a phone made in 2020, which would they choose? 

For us, and the hundreds of other businesses we’ve profiled, it’s the same question when it comes to the profiling instrument you’re using- 1900s theory or 2020 working application?

It’s not just about the psychological theory

As an engineer by trade, our founder has always been fascinated by things that work- the application of theory, not just the theory itself, so for him it’s about how you apply that psychological theory to make a tangible difference.

If you think of the Scottish inventor James Watt and the laws of thermodynamics, for example, you’ll see the importance of practical application over theory. We would, in fact, argue that James Watt did more for the laws of thermodynamics than thermodynamics ever did for the steam engine because his application came 48 years before the theory caught up. Empirical application trumps theory every time.

Combining the psychological theory with application to understand and build a perfect team

It stands to reason then, that the best way to understand and build a perfect team is to therefore combine psychological theory with application, and to profile team members according to how they interact and communicate, both alone and together.

If you do this right, you will achieve three things that will allow you to increase the cohesion within any team:

1)    Awareness on an individual level:

Combining psychological profiles with real world applications will make team members aware of their characteristics and motivations, as well as how they interact and communicate with others.

It will therefore support them, on an individual level, to manage and get the most out of these traits. 

The Perfect Teams profiling tool offers that exact service, and also highlights how to avoid conflicts based on specific profile characteristics.

2)    An understanding of where your teams will gel and clash:

By correctly profiling each team member you will be able to compare their individual profiles to isolate and, importantly, understand the areas where people will both gel and clash. 

As one of our users said recently, the Perfect Teams profiling tool provides him with the ability to see the different types of characters he works with and to adapt his method of communication accordingly.

3)    An understanding of what’s missing within teams:

Finally, applying the psychological theory, along with a character profile, to each member of a team allows managers and others to understand what’s missing within the team. 

From our experience of running the Perfect Teams profiling tool in over 250 businesses, with over 2,000 users, we tend to find that teams are made up of people with the same characteristics. This is information which has helped countless organisations to identify and plug gaps quickly.

Nobody is perfect, but your team can be. Individually we all have strengths and weaknesses, and understanding these is important. 

When we speak to business owners and leaders looking to understand what’s going on with their teams, they actually want to make a difference and plug the gaps where possible. They want to build perfect teams. Which is why we’re expanding the Perfect Teams profiling tool. 

If you’d like to find out how we can support your consulting business by adding the Perfect Teams profiling tool to your offering, please click here.