Stimulating Team Interaction with Mindsonar

Working in a multidisciplinary team can be fun and rewarding. In the harsh day to day reality of dynamic business settings however it is often the opposite and team members tend to ‘shut down’ when faced with difficult meetings. Teamleaders  want to boost the team skills to innovate but do not know how to built a bridge closing the communication gap. One of our customers, a local sales and support organization for a global player asked us to help build that bridge. I decided to combine the Mindsonar® test with other business NLP techniques.

What is the big picture
Team members from various disciplines had to work together to set up a new business line. These disciplines included technical support, marketing, sales, management and fulfillment. The objective of the team meeting was to translate existing best practice into innovation for a newly set up business line. On the surface everything seemed to challenge the current business model: instead of delivering the product directly to large customers, the full service needed to be delivered via business partners to consumers. It faced the team with a new focus:  how to accelerate revenue and market presence?

The approach
Each team member filled in a Mindsonar® test for a specific context: the biweekly team meeting. The outcome of the test was used for:

  • Individual feedback to team members – how to improve personal performance;
  • Design of the interventions during the team meeting;
  • Finding stimulating interactions.

Interventions
Each team member received the standard Mindsonar® report with personal drives. During the team meeting I intervened by providing each team member with feedback on their behavior during the team exercises. I focussed on improving team interaction and creativity.

Using MindSonar
Analysis of the Mindsonar results led to the following conclusions:

  • 9 out of the 13 meta programs showed a high deviation from the average
  • Team members showed a variety of Graves drives.
  • Meta criteria (what is important to me) came from different angles (people, task, cooperation)

Based on this I designed the following interventions:

  • A presentation to create awareness of the positive effect of diversity
  • Experience the positive effects of diversity in a one-to-one setting
  • Gather meeting information using questions that are tailored to diversity
  • Group brainstorm with feedback on successful interactions.

Finding the right interaction
Positive human interaction boosts the emergence of innovative business concepts, plans and actions. Depending on the context similar or diverse kind of people boost creativity. Because the problem cause was unknown, I used a three-step approach with different interactions:

  1. Information gathering
  2. Problem solving
  3. Finding creative solutions

For the information gathering phase I analyzed two meta programs: Global/Specific and Procedure/Options. By plotting team members in a XY-graph I set up two teams of maximum diversity and one team of maximum similarity (see graph). These teams answered a set questions that were formulated using as many as different meta programs as possible. The advantage of this approach is gathering a great range of information.

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In the problem-solving phase the complete team interacted. Practical guidelines for team cohesion, such as balancing internal and external reference, were already given in the presentation. These guidelines came from an analysis of two types of meta programs and the Graves drives. During and after this interaction I provided feedback on specific meta programs that stimulated group cohesion (matching, specific, concept and use)

In the creative phase team members used the Disney Strategy as a general process. Now the teams were set up from the principle of similarity on two sets of meta programs : towards/away from and matching/mismatching.

MMiTA

For the dreamer (I,E and G): towards/matching. For the critic (F, D and A): away from/mismatching and for the realist (C, H and B) people who easily switch between towards/away and between match/mismatch.

Benefits
By using MindSonar to boost team interaction various effect arise:

  • A rich set of information is gathered
  • Information is analyzed from different perspectives and filters
  • Creativity is stimulated

Background information
The Disney strategy are described in Skills for the future (Robert Dilts with Gino Bonnissone).
Specific meta programs for team learning are derived from Energie door Wisselwerking (Published by Ruysdael, Author Rien van Leeuwen).

MindSonar and Teams: Lots of Insights!

It was a wonderful combination: working with a management team that was specialized in Graves’ theory. They asked me to accompany them in answering their question: How to put more effective marketing efforts in motion for the company, with the help of MindSonar? It was a typical win-win opportunity: the three of them experts in management drives, and me combining those with meta programs.

At first, we had a funny mistake about the colours. There are so many instruments in the HR-world that work with colours. The colours of the measured metaprograms in MindSonar do not correspond with the Graves’ colours in the report. The team thought it had to match and looked for the connection. I didn’t catch that immediately so for a few minutes we had a funny dialogue, misunderstanding each other  in our different colour perspectives.

After solving our confusion, we spent the evening looking at their team profile. This was very interesting, because most significant in their score together was:

  • they  scored very low on “concept”. “Use” and “structure” where both high;
  • they were high on “kinesthetic” and low on “visual”;
  • they were low on “information”, higher on activities, and highest on “people”.

This was fascinating because the firm has existsted for more than 20 years. One might think that without much “concept”, “vision” and “information”, a company doesn’t live that long! But their power was mostly in doing a lot of projects and things, and feeling what was going well and what was less successful.

During the evening I asked many questions to activate concept, visual and information as metaprograms. For example:

  • What is the essence of your product? Why does the company exists at all? What is the greater purpose of it?
  • What can you see as the advantage of your products for your customers? How do you see the future in a few global words?
  • What do you know about your customers? Are there any facts and figures to find about them? Is anything measured in what kind of customers the company attracts?

And so on. This was very funny, because as almost always, MindSonar proves itself in the now. The answers were all no……..

We later discussed the individual profiles and analysed who was the best in which metaprogram, and how he could contribute to the goal. And so MindSonar gave them  a lot of input for different marketing actions in the future.

And so I had a nice evening with my beloved instrument!