It is said that a good team is greater than the sum of its parts. By working together, all that brain, heart and muscle produces so much more than the total efforts of people working on their own.
Yet, so many of the teams I work with seem to resist doing the work that creates the chemistry for effecting teaming. Team chemistry is the “yeast” that gets teams to rise to the occasion. Without it, teams simply fall flat.
One of the easiest ways to improve team performance is to invest a little energy on understanding work styles and differences. They are actually pretty obvious to observe. Think about the most effective team you have worked in. What styles were present? Often you will see diversity: some people jumping into conversations early and others staying back to consider; some people striving for consensus, while others are driving for decisiveness. Sound familiar?
These style differences can be frustrating when they are not understood. When they clash, the team not only loses the opportunity to have the “magic ingredient” of teamwork, it may also sink into unproductive – even destructive – dysfunction. But when they are understood and appreciated, the team generates more together than the sum of the parts could ever generate alone.
It takes some understanding and communication to be able to accommodate these different approaches – each of which is effective in its own way and at an appropriate time. The good news is, it is possible.
What’s your type?
Using data from 190,000 people, professional services company Deloitte, identifies the following four primary work styles.
Pioneer: Outgoing, focused on the big picture, spontaneous, drawn to risk, adaptable and imaginative.
Integrator: Diplomatic, empathetic, traditional, relationship-oriented, intrinsically motivated, non-confrontational.
Driver: Quantitative, logical, focused, competitive, experimental, deeply curious.
Guardian: Methodical, reserved, detail-oriented, practical, structured and loyal.
Ideally, teams achieve a balance of all four. But often that is not the case. Certain styles tend to be drawn to certain career choices (think of a group of statisticians), which can create lopsided group dynamics.
As an example, a workshop I led benefited greatly from identifying the styles of its 16 participants. This particular team, which was working on leadership development over the course of a year, was carrying some tension.
Any group has its ups and downs, but this one was particularly strained. Using a styles activity, similar to the Deloitte one described above, we discovered about two-thirds of the group had a personal style that could be described as “Driver”. This is a person who is quite fast-paced, quite direct, doesn’t hold back opinion and is more comfortable with taking risks.
Once the group recognised they had this dominant style, they were able to talk about it and how it was impacting the group dynamic. It gave them an understanding from which they could build.
A clash of styles
When you have a dominant style like this in a group, then others in the minority tend just to retreat. It is like having too many predators in the fish tank.
To improve the group dynamics in a scenario like this, you start by allowing people to self-identify their styles (you don’t want people to feel they are being labelled or judged).
Improvement often comes from simply pointing out that in an evenly-balanced team, 75 per cent of the people will be different from them. People should also pay attention to where the opposite styles exist in the group and work to build on the strengths that can be created by understanding and appreciating the contributions from the polar opposite style.
People often ask me ‘what is wrong with having a dominant style in a team?’ At one level, a group of Drivers can get things done more quickly. But, being overwhelmed by one style can create a cognitive bias in the group. In the workshop I facilitated, a lack of Guardian styles was leading to too many mistakes, and too few Integrators was resulting in people taking offence and abandoning the group.
Understanding people’s different styles is even more important in times of high stress and conflict, when people tend to default more strongly to their type.
When differences are left unspoken, people tend to make assumptions about the motivations of others: that person is brusque because they don’t like you, that one is dragging the chain because they are lazy, or that one wants to leap to the next project because they are bored.
Lack of information creates a vacuum which gets filled with suppositions. By segmenting the team into types, you can fill that information vacuum and see that the first just wants to get things done, the next one is checking for errors that may derail the project, and the third is merely excited about new possibilities.
When I see teams that are working in silos, it is usually not a lack of technical skills that is the problem. It is the interactivity (or lack of) between individuals that is getting in the way. When this happens, people revert to a more comfortable, siloed, approach and focus on their individual preferences, rather than the team.
But, as the African proverb says…
”If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
