After working with more than 2,000 individuals within over 250 organisations, we’ve found that many growing and large organisations struggle to identify and truly understand how to build perfect teams. Our team believe that you need to combine 21st century application with 1900s psychological theory to build the perfect team in today’s world, and our definition of the perfect team is founded on this basis. With that in mind, in this article we have decided to outline what it really means to have a perfect team, and why you should care about building perfect teams within your organisation.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE THE ‘PERFECT TEAM’?
As you might observe from your own organisation and those that you interact with regularly, teams are made up of a number of different characters, who all have their own distinct qualities and traits.
Following our extensive research, we have distilled all those qualities and traits into 12 distinct characters based on three ways of processing information, and seeing the world. Everyone will have a combination of a number of these characteristics, but one core element will tend to dominate their profile.
The perfect team, therefore, will have a mixture of all three of these core elements- the green, the blue and the red.
You know the characteristics – now what?
While it’s all well and good to understand that you need a mixture of these three characteristics, there are three things you need to do to build that perfect team:
1) Ensure team members are aware of their character traits and respect those of the other members of their team:
As we highlighted in a previous article, if team members understand their own character traits and those of their fellow team members, it will support them to manage their own traits and get the most out of themselves and others.
2) Understand the gaps and potential clashes:
If you are able to understand the profiles of individual team members, you will be able to isolate three key things: where they will gel, where they will clash, and what gaps you have within the team.
3) Plug the gaps: By understanding the gaps you have within your team, you can then start to plug the gaps you have identified.
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT BUILDING THE PERFECT TEAM?
Put simply, without understanding your team members and what’s missing, you’re likely to be dealing with a number of issues within your organisation.
For example, many of the organisations we work with have had issues hitting their targets and some have even lost members of their teams due to the internal issues.
Should a group of footballers just run on the pitch and play?
A great analogy for this could be a group of football players who just want to run onto the pitch and play, without organising a strategy beforehand, without having an overall direction and without the relevant infrastructure.
Where the football team needs all these facets to be successful-so do all teams.
A real-life example:
One of our recent clients, a major engineering company, was experiencing a number of different issues within their organisation-including a lack of business focus and commercial awareness, and a lack of urgency.
Isolating and comparing the examples of the London 1 and London 2 teams from the organisation, for the key deliverables we knew that London 1 was a high performing team, while there were issues within London 2.
By using our profiling tool, we were able to identify the core reason that London 1 was performing much better than London 2.
The former had team members with dominant character profiles being ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘4’– which provided three strong, business-focused, team members. In fact, characters ‘2’ and ‘3’ were the leader and second in command respectively.
Our core takeaways from this, and why you should care:
Understanding the key deliverables allowed us to highlight that while the London 2 team were good at delivering on the job at hand, they lacked urgency, business focus and commercial awareness.
In comparison, London 1 had a dynamic team and attitude. It’s no surprise therefore, that the team leader for London 1 was a ‘3’ in our list of character traits- energetic.
By isolating the profiles of each team, and understanding the gaps, we were able to support the organisation as they built their perfect teams and improved on their key deliverables.
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.
To find out how we can help your organisation build the perfect team, please click here and get in touch.
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