This being my 100th Value Alley blog post, I thought I’d focus on the general subject matter that seems to have generated the most interest over these past four years: culture, strategy and communications - the “soft” issues that turn out to be harder than one might initially think.
Constructing or selecting a team is not the same as team building. The latter focuses on team cohesion and cooperation, whereas the former, by definition, precedes this exercise in camaraderie.
An effective team requires a balance of skills and team member styles. The problem with most departmental teams, and even executive teams, is that certain team member styles tend to be over-represented in particular functions. You end up with nearly everyone in the team exhibiting one particular style and therefore competing with each other for that one team member role, while other styles and roles go begging.
A model I was introduced to many years ago delineates eight distinct team member styles:
- SHAPER – A task leader who makes things happen and brings drive to the team.
- INNOVATOR – The imaginative, creative brainstormer who brings ideas to the team (Yellow Hat).
- RESOURCER – This person, like Morgan Freeman’s character in “Shawshank Redemption” (or Radar O’Reilly from MASH), gets things and can improvise when necessary.
- COORDINATOR – Leads through respect, is focused on goals and defining roles.
- MONITOR – Keeps the team on track, focused on metrics, and risks, and offers critical analysis (Blue Hat).
- IMPLEMENTER – Results oriented. Turns goals and strategies into actionable, manageable tasks.
- COMPLETER/FINISHER – Worries about the details, sees things through.
- HARMONIZER – A good listener who builds on the ideas of others and promotes team harmony.
I have been on many finance department teams and can state with certainty that we have more than our share of Completer/Finishers, as you would expect from a profession that balances the books to the penny every 30 days (a more impressive task back in the days before automated intercompany transactions, when accounting systems permitted one-sided entries, when the Trial Balance could actually be out of balance, hence its name). On the other hand, we might likewise have a dearth of Innovators and a relative shortage of Resourcers, Harmonizers and Innovators.
You can imagine other stereotypical functions such as engineering, QA or HR, having an overabundance of Innovators, Monitors or Harmonizers respectfully, but coming up short on Completers, Resourcers or Shapers.
Cross-functional teams tend to provide for a ready-made solution to this conundrum, with built-in team style diversity coming naturally as part of the cross-functional package. Within a department or function, however, the problem can be a bit more difficult to resolve unless management has been wise enough to hire for team style diversity to begin with. This of course is not easy to do, as the primary hiring objective is ‘fit for role or task’, followed typically by CONFORMITY with the prevailing team style so that they’ll “fit in” with the functional culture.
A team member style assessment is a good place to start, in order to discover everyone’s predominate primary (and secondary/tertiary) team styles, and to find out where the gaps are, and who those rare departmental members are who can fill those gaps.
One approach that has been available to me personally has been flexibility. I can’t count the dozens of Myers-Briggs and similar assessments that have been done on me over the years. Some have additionally come with “Z scores”, measures of adaptability (where I tend to score high) in addition to the X and Y scores that place you in your proper box on the 2×2 grid. I remember one proprietary classification that tended to score 90% of the people somewhere along an upwardly sloping 45 degree line, with the rest scattered about the grid, but when the counsellor came to plotting my point among the others, he paused for moment then drew the orbit of Jupiter around the entire matrix, which he said represented my extreme flexibility.
My own team member style profile of course ranked me high as a Completer/Finisher along with my fellow financiers (with Implementer as a secondary strength – scores of 8-10 on a 10 point scale), but unlike the typical profile, I did not drop off into the 2’s and 3’s for everything else, but profiled with 4’s, 5’s and 6’s for the other style attributes. So when I find myself on a team, instead of rushing to volunteer for a task utilizing my strength(s), and for which there are usually several others just like me, I often wait to discern if there any gaps, any missing skills, styles or roles on our team, and will instead volunteer to fill that shorthanded role in support of a better functioning, more effective team outcome.
An effective manager or team leader needs to recognize this would NOT likely be the normal response of most team members - the path of least resistance and most security is to migrate toward your strengths, and it will likely take some attention and persuasion to get people to volunteer to fill those those open but crucial team roles.
As you can imagine, different team member styles, just like different Myers-Briggs personality types, acquire and utilize information in different ways, which is one of the primary drivers behind SAS’ structuring of our Visual Analytics offering. A highly visual and intuitive, robust BI platform that the entire team (or enterprise) can use forconsistency and communication, but with plenty of flexibility and variety in its reporting and analytics to benefit anyone’s style or type.
Whereas the Innovators might like to use it as a visual sandbox in order to “tell me something I don’t know”, Monitors can apply it as a metrics/KPI monitoring tool, Resourcers for its drill-down capability, Coordinators for its promise of consistent, enterprise-wide communication, and Completers as the corporate source for “one version of the truth”.
And if you are flexible and adaptable, why not try out the entire range of capabilities. Analytics - Visual Analytics - for the non-data scientist; Analytics for everyone, no matter your style, score, or label on the 2×2 management matrix.
By Leo Sadovy, EPM Contributor, from: http://blogs.sas.com/content/valuealley/2014/01/07/analytics-for-your-varied-team-member-styles/#!
Leo Sadovy handles marketing for Performance Management at SAS, which includes the areas of budgeting, planning and forecasting, activity-based management, strategy management, and workforce analytics, and advocates for SAS’ best-in-class analytics capability into the office of finance across all industry sectors. Before joining SAS, he spent seven years as Vice-President of Finance for Business Operations for a North American division of Fujitsu, managing a team focused on commercial operations, customer and alliance partnerships, strategic planning, process management, and continuous improvement. During his 13-year tenure at Fujitsu, Leo developed and implemented the ROI model and processes used in all internal investment decisions—and also held senior management positions in finance and marketing.Prior to Fujitsu, Sadovy was with Digital Equipment Corporation for eight years in sales and financial management. He started his management career in laser optics fabrication for Spectra-Physics and later moved into a finance position at the General Dynamics F-16 fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas.He has an MBA in Finance and a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing. He and his wife Ellen live in North Carolina with their three college-age children, and among his unique life experiences he can count a run for U.S. Congress and two singing performances at Carnegie Hall.See Leo’s articles on EPM Channel here.