Building a Team
Last week's missive generated some great responses. This week, I will continue the discussion of Building a Team.
Last week I made the case for the difference between Team Building and Building Teams . While the two are intertwined, both are necessary when you are in a managerial leadership role and accountable to your manager for building a team of increasingly capable Direct Reports.
Team building is about interpersonal dynamics; building a team defines how the team will work together. We rarely take the time for the latter, preferring to rely on people's sense of personal obligation instead. Building the team is key to defining accountability and authority to succeed.
If we don’t start by building the team then, no matter how hard you work on personal interrelationships, you will not have success. If the team has been together for a long time and nothing has changed, we may be able to skip building the team, but it tends to come crashing down when someone new joins the team and upsets the equilibrium.
Since I covered Building Teams last week, today is about Team Building. Team Building isn't about going offsite for social events and games. While these can work for a period, they don't hold up well once back in the crucible of work.
For team building at Forrest, we help teams understand one another using Effective Intelligence (EI) by understanding how we all think about work. Many of you will have been exposed to this through us. EI helps people understand their thinking preferences and the preferences of others so that they can work more collaboratively.
Thinking is the core of behaviour. While many tools help teams understand personality, this tool helps people understand their preferences in thinking. Then, it gives them the tools to make decisions, sell ideas, or solve problems. As I like to say, we teach people how to think, not what to think.
In my 28 years of using the tool, I have not found two people with the same thinking profile in the same organization. There are similarities, sure, but each of us is different. Thinking is the core diversity for everyone, and, because we all think differently, we see situations differently. When conflicts in thought inevitably arise, it can lead to burying it, crossing fingers, or seeing it flare up. ?
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In its simplest format, EI defines six basic ways we think:
As you can see, an added dimension here segregates our thinking into cognitive, tangible thinking and intangible, emotive or affective thinking.
We have found that, when a team begins to understand one another's thinking preferences, it helps them understand one another better. The added bonus of EI, which general personality profiles aren't able to do, is that it provides a process for the teams to establish norms to work together. It works because it uses the same language to define a person's thinking to also define the process of thinking through a task at hand.
The norms are essential to team building because they remove the tensions of personal thinking by establishing a cognitive process for a team to work together. In this way, the focus of team building is not just shared experience but a path for teams to use to work more effectively together and value the diversity of thinking within the team.
Thinking is truly an undiscovered country, and if you can harness the thinking capability of your team, you will truly build it.
The very simple overview of the six ways of thinking above may help you understand your teams' diversity. So, I suggest you reflect upon them to help you understand your own thinking and the thinking of those around you. If you do, you are on your way to the first steps of team building, made possible by the work already invested in building your team.