MindSonar Benchmarks for Project Teams – I wish I’d known about Them!

In my previous role I was responsible for managing a major programme involving multiple project teams. Part of the programme management involved regular risk management and “lessons learned” meetings. During these meetings, representatives from each of the project teams would discuss any issues that had arisen since the last meeting, and what steps had been taken – or needed to be taken – in order to rectify the issue and prevent it happening again.

The aim of the meetings was to ensure that the systems and processes we had in place were adequate to minimise the risk of problems arising and to enable a rapid corrective response when needed. However, at times these meetings could become quite tense because there was a fine line to tread between good risk management and problem resolution on one side and the development of a blame culture on the other. This was clearer to some members than others. Some members would always want to attribute all problems to individuals, rather than to consider the more common situation of them arising from system weaknesses. Tthe result was that friction would arise between those individuals with a “name and shame” approach and other members of the programme board. This created risks to the programme itself as it could result in people being reluctant to raise issues when they spotted them in fear of being blamed.

As the manager of this programme I had to manage the situation and try to cultivate a systems approach in the individuals concerned, most of whom I had no direct line management of.

How helpful it would have been to have had MindSonar back then. I believe it would have been possible to construct a Benchmark Profile to help identify the members of each project team who would be best suited to be the risk management/lessons learnt representative. This Benchmark Profile could have been constructed in consultation with other project and programme managers to provide a narrated estimation (with consultation).

My first thoughts about this are that this benchmark profile might include the following:

Graves Drives: Ideals; Learning;

Thinking Styles:

High: Away From (for risk management); Past (for lessons learnt);Structure (for systems approach)

Low: People (to avoid blame approach)

There are likely to be others and different views which is why I would prefer a benchmark profile resulting from a narrated estimation with consultation.

It would be great to hear from other MindSonar Professionals about their thoughts on this – and about whether anyone has yet used the MindSonar tool in this context.

It would also be good to hear from project and programme managers who have found themselves in similar situations – they could find MindSonar particularly useful when allocating project roles to their team members.

What are your thoughts?  Use the comments box below to share your experiences and views on this.

Procrastination – not just about Reactive versus Proactive

Procrastination – it affects virtually all of us at some time and I find that it’s a particularly common problem for those who seek a coach. In fact, it’s often the reason why someone finally decides to hire a coach – to help get them moving on ambitions and plans that they’ve had for years.

At the surface, procrastination seems to be predominantly about the person being overly reactive rather than proactive and so not stepping into the actions needed to take them forward.

However, the more I’ve looked at the clients’ behaviours in the context of the MindSonar profile, I’ve begun to notice just how many of the Thinking Styles can contribute to their procrastination. That is to say that I think that being overly Reactive is, in some cases, a result of other Thinking Styles that are in operation. Here are two examples that I’ve come across:

Example 1: A client had relatively recently become self-employed after being in his profession for over 20 years. He loved his profession and was keen to be his own boss. He had always worked hard and had always been happy working on his own initiative . To minimise business costs he had set up an office at home, equipped it well and had everything in place. He soon had a good flow of clients as he already had a good reputation in his field. He was excited by his prospects.

Within a year he found himself constantly procrastinating. He was finding a million things to do before starting his work. He had never experienced this in all his years of working for someone else. He had become demotivated and was rapidly losing his belief that he could be successfully self-employed. Before finally giving up, he decided to hire a coach to help – that’s when he came to me.

What was going on? When talking with this client, it was clear he had not lost his love of his profession, nor had he lost the desire to be self-employed. However, it became evident that in the past, although he had worked independently, he had liked the knowledge that there were others around him. They did not need to be others in the same profession, just people who were nearby with for support. He worked best with a proximity Thinking Style. Without others around he found he couldn’t get into what he called “work mode”. At his home office he needed to work well with solo, and he found he could not.

His solution? He decided to rent an office near to home in a building occupied by other self-employed professionals. He very soon found that he was back on track, enjoying building both his business and his professional reputation. His change from reactive to proactive happened naturally as a consequence of a change from solo to proximity.

Example 2: A client had recently been promoted from a role in which she was a technical expert into a managerial role in a similar team. She had been with the employer for a number of years and had a reputation as a hard worker and an excellent problem solver. She was excited about her new role as it provided a chance to influence senior management and have her say about policy at key meetings in which she had previously only attended as a technical advisor. Shortly after starting her role she found she was getting behind in some areas due to a new habit of frequent procrastination. She came for coaching to help her get over this.

In this client’s case it became clear that she had not previously had to argue her case at meetings, or had ever needed to direct other team members. In her current role she needed to do both. Her procrastination resulted from her being worried about what others would think of her if she disagreed with them or if she had to actively manage a member of her team. She was highly externally referenced which was not a helpful Thinking Style in her new role.

Her solution? Through coaching for assertiveness and confidence alongside employer-led management training she developed her internally referenced Thinking Style and was able to end her procrastination at work.

The lesson for me from such clients is to not simply focus on coaching to change from reactive to proactuve , but to look across a full MindSonar profile and see where the root of the problem is. That way the client is likely to move to reactive quite automatically.

In your experience, what other Thinking Styles might lead to procrastination? I’m very interested to know, so do please comment below.

MindSonar F5 Team Refresh Program – Great tool for Project Teams

Prior to becoming a coach and therapist I was a programme manager responsible for the development and delivery of a complex national programme. This involved coordinating people from teams of very diverse specialties: people who were mathematicians, IT developers, communication specialists and policy developers to name just a few.

On the whole, the programme team members got along well and all were really committed to delivery of the programme. Overall they shared the same end goal and vison for its delivery. However, disagreements and misunderstandings would often arise between different members, some which carried a real threat to the success of one or another area of the programme. More often than not, such problems were caused by the different approaches and priorities of the different areas of speciality. For example, the policy makers hated details and wanted to know that the overall concept was being developed well, whereas the mathematicians were focussed on accuracy and statistical significance. The quality controller was seen as a miserable person, seeing only faults and always raising problems and the communications person wanted simply the good news to communicate to our stakeholders.

If only I had known about MindSonar back then! It would have been a fabulous tool to use with the programme team to enable them to understand their differences better and so appreciate each other’s strengths and see their own blind spots. The Team Refresh programme would have been perfect for enabling each member to see that there was no single right way to approach our programme – that, in fact, it was the range of thinking styles that was the team’s strength.

Within a Team Refresh workshop each team member completes a MindSonar profile in the context of working in that team. Using these profiles, each team member gets the opportunity to discover the “superpowers” and blind spots of every team member (including themselves) and to consider how the different profiles might both cause them stress and be able to help them.

At the end of the workshop the team members have a greater understanding of themselves as well as of the other team members and have also learned how they can work together, complementing each other to the benefit of the programme that they are delivering. As a team they will be able to communicate much more effectively between themselves, and to other teams.

Equally importantly, the MindSonar workshop would demonstrate that in such projects all thinking styles are equally valid, and that each contributes in an important way. In the case of my project for example, the meta programmes Specific, Use and Information were vital for the mathematicians, whereas for those developing the overall policy the meta programmes General and Concept were needed. It was essential that the data quality control individual was operating Mismatching, whilst the communications team needed to be running a Matching meta programme to be able to tell our sector how well the programme was coming along.

Some of these understandings did evolve in my team, but only in a piecemeal way as and when an issue arose. Had I been able to undertake a MindSonar Team Refresh workshop early on in project I believe a lot of the misunderstandings and resulting conflict and delays would have been avoided.

If you lead or coach project teams with a variety of specialisms then do consider arranging for a MindSonar Professional to deliver a Team Refresh programme for your whole team. The improvement in the way the team work afterwards will make it a very worthwhile investment.

MindSonar for the self-employed

Here in the UK, the number of new businesses starting up each year is rising significantly, with 660,000 being set up in 2016. However, statistics suggest that as many as 40% of start-ups don’t make it to 5 years. I suspect the same is true for many other countries too.

It’s not surprising therefore that coaches are often approached by clients who are in the early years of their business . Many are wondering why they are struggling to keep the business afloat and are suffering from more stress and unhappiness than when they were employed. Many are already considering ending their business to go back to employment, where they felt more comfortable.

A MindSonar profile analysis for these clients can be incredibly powerful. It enables them to identify any Thinking Styles they are operating which are not helpful for a business owner, and which might be getting in the way of their success and happiness. Once problem areas are recognised, coaching can then enable the client to identify the Thinking Styles they want to develop in themselves and also ones which might be best strengthened in the business by outsourcing a service or employing someone else.

The Thinking Styles likely to be c