Step 1. Balancing the Team
This is the latest in a series of blog posts on building a high performance team based on the principles described in my new book, Build the Perfect Team.
If you want to build the perfect team, make sure the team has good balance. This means having people with relevant hard and soft skills, who think differently, are diverse and culturally aware, and understand the needs and capabilities of the people affected by the team’s work.
Hard and Soft Skills
To be successful, teams must include individuals with the hard and soft skills necessary to identify and develop effective solutions to the problems or opportunities they face. People with hard skills (such as technical and product knowledge), are easier to identify and add to the team than those with soft skills (such as self-awareness, communication, collaboration, and leadership). Potential team members as a rule have well-developed hard skills, typically gained through formal education or job-specific training. But most have inadequate soft skills because academic curricula do not stress the need for them and many leaders lack the time, knowledge, or ability to instill them. As team leader, you should include as members, whenever possible, people who bring both sets of skills to the team. When this is not possible, you should develop the soft (people) skills of those who lack them as part of the team development process, which you will learn how to do later, or through formal training.
Different Ways of Thinking
Every team leader knows the importance of having people with the knowledge, skills, and experience needed to achieve the team’s mission and goals. But many team leaders do not realize the importance of differing viewpoints to achieving those goals. Having the broad perspective that results when team members have different ways of thinking helps teams to avoid group think and improves the quality of the decisions they make as a team.
One well-known, research-based method of understanding how people think is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). An MBTI type, as measured by answers to a scientific questionnaire, shows an individual’s preference in each of four dimensions: Extroversion—Introversion, Sensing—Intuition, Thinking—Feeling, and Judging—Perceiving.
Extroverts focus outwardly; introverts focus inwardly. Sensing types rely on concrete data; intuitive types grasp the big picture without the need for much sensory data. Thinkers prefer to decide based on logic; feeling types make decisions based on their potential impact on people. Judging types are planners who seek closure; perceiving types are more spontaneous and prefer to leave their choices open. Opposites in each category balance out. Having team members who are similar along these four dimensions can lead to problems such as group think. Ensuring the team has members with different ways of thinking can help avoid this frequent problem. If you are interested, you can find out more about using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to achieve team balance in Build the Perfect Team.
Diversity and Cultural Awareness
Common sense suggests that the perfect team must consist of intelligent, knowledgeable, and motivated people. To avoid groupthink, having a blend of team members with hard and soft skills who look at problems differently is also important. In addition, having a diverse team increases the quality of decisions and the odds of implementation success even more because of the team's heightened ability to understand the culture into which their innovative solutions must fit. Team solutions to an organization's problems, regardless of how good they are technically, will not stick if they do not fit the culture.
User Perspective
To ensure they solve the real problem, the team needs to have a user perspective. The best way to do this is to include representatives of the user community on the team. The inclusion and active participation of people who will need to use the solutions developed by the team increases the odds of implementation success. As a wise business school professor of mine once said, “People support what they help to create.” This statement captures the essence of the change process—the best way to overcome resistance to change is to involve people affected by the change in the decision-making process as early and meaningfully as possible.
In future blog posts, I will examine these and other aspects of how to build the perfect team in more detail.
