'Thinking- Doing -Communicating ' Building your team as a portfolio of strengths and weaknesses.

One of the biggest mistakes I have made as a people leader has been to reward talking instead of doing or to reward thinking instead of communicating. Every individual tends to have a unique mix of competence in doing, thinking, and communicating. Ideally, you have multiple individuals with high scores in each of these, but a more realistic chance is that you have no one who is great at all of these. However,?a stronger team tends to be one where each person, despite where he/she fits on the spectrum, feels like they are operating out of their strengths and have the space to fail but still be supported by other team members' strengths.?

As a team leader, when faced with the choice of picking someone for a challenge, I try to curate the overlap of responsibilities between team members in a manner that allows everyone to work with their strengths and find someone else within the team who can support them around their weaknesses. It is not easy to enable team members to work through their strengths but it is harder still to build a team with the level of mutual trust and sense of failure safety required to let another team member cover for their weaknesses. Team members can often take time to recognize that some roles require a stronger set of thinking and communicating skills than the ability to do individual tasks. Some team members will also take time to understand that the expert track is a better fit for their skills than the strategic thinking, communicating or team management skills required for certain leadership roles. Sometimes people would have reached their highest point of progress with self-awareness through a natural course of events and are either unaware of their blindspots or are not naturally inclined to be confident of their hidden talents. All of these require a study of each team member as a portfolio of strengths and weaknesses relevant to your strategy.?

As a leader, getting an accurate sense of how the portfolio distribution of your team's strengths and weaknesses looks is critical - It allows you to develop leadership talent within your team and also helps create autonomous teams. A good team leader can observe patterns and commonalities between team members and orchestrate communication around outcomes between people with complementary strengths/weaknesses. This will enable her to manage the overall direction of the group without creating tons of meetings, roles, and responsibilities documents and processes. Typically roles and responsibilities as well as processes are mechanisms to manage the minimum expectations and are not useful to help teams develop ownership and leaders. After all, no human is built to fit a job description.?

Note that this split between 'Thinking-Communicating-Doing' also applies in the other direction. Team members are often judging their leader for how she manages to do all these. Suppose the team perceives their leader purely as a cheerleader who communicates but not someone with the ability to maintain some thinking depth in their work or the ability to do some tasks. In that case, the leader loses credibility and the value of their cheerleading drops off. If a leader is purely thinking and talking but not involved in getting things done, eventually he loses credibility because the team knows that the leader cannot audit their work and cannot give specific suggestions when they need some direction. If you think your manager cannot understand your work, you eventually start discounting their positive feedback too.

Understanding the mix of thinking-communicating-doing skills in your team is one way to build a strengths-based team where diversity is respected and trust is nurtured.?

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Following are some of the questions I use to understand the mix of ‘Thinking-Communicating-Doing’ skills in my team... Please share/add your own questions too!?

Thinking

1. Can this person think only in shallow first-order effects or do they have the ability to engage in profound multiple-order effects thinking?
2. Can this person switch between thinking fast or slow using questions that allow one-way and two-way door decisions to be quickly identified?
3. Does this person have the ability to think through what they know and what they do not know?
4. Does this person have the ability to balance opposing views and possibilities while analyzing?
5. If I promote this person, will they become a delegating engine or will they be seen as contributing in terms of thinking, communicating, and doing the work needed to prepare for a longer time horizon in the next level??

Communicating

1. Can the person switch between open and close-ended questions - The funneling and filtering skills?
2. Can the person manage the balance between 1:1 and broadcast communications? Some things are better done as a broadcast, some others are best done 1:1, and some things need to be managed in cycles of 1:1 and broadcast communication.?
3. Can the person speak up and steer a group or 1:1 conversation when it is falling apart?
4. Can the person communicate vision, strategy, and plan in a coherent manner?
5. Does the person ask for help when out of depth on a subject or do they simply wash it off by a blanket statement around them not being into the details?

Doing

1. Does the person have the ability to audit outputs and outcomes achieved by the team? Can they answer the follow-up probing questions related to their work or the work their team has done??
2. Can this person defend their team member’s work when she is absent or cannot defend her work??
3. Does the person have sufficient knowledge of the basic workflow and fundamental elements in their area?
4. Can this person work out the details even if you do not know the specifics?
5. Does the person show an ability to break down big wins into small chunks?
6. Does the person consistently show the ability to know how to switch between tasks and when to decide if a task is ready to be delegated??