Building a New Team: Alignment or Diversity?

A colleague from the US asked me: when profiling for a new team, would I want to see great diversity? In my mind that would make sense, but in reality I might want to see it aligned in some areas. What is your opinion?

In my opinion, the desired meta programs depend on what the team needs to accomplish. A sales team is different from a policy team. So in terms of priorities I would say: first of all you want the team to have the required meta programs and values to be successful at their main tasks. Once that is accomplished, you want to have as much diversity as possible. It is a bit like the relationship between towards (achieving goals) and away form (solving problems) in coaching. You want away from in the frame of towards. With team you want diversity in the frame of alignment.

If you want to put it in a procedure (which I often like to do) it would be something like this:

1. Define what the team’s main task is

2. Define what the necessary meta programs and values are for that task.

3. Make sure some team members have all (or as many as possible) of those thinking style elements.

4. Find additional team members how have some task-critical meta programs but who also have some meta programs an/or Graves drives that are distinctly different.

5. Explain thoroughly to the team why you composed them like this, and what the benefits of thinking style diversity are.

6. Prepare the team for dealing comfortably with conflicts that may arise from this engineered meta program diversity.

Good luck!

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!

Powered by MindSonar: Eviont

Eviont, a Dutch NLP oriented consultancy firm, launched their new product ‘Help My Team Doesn’t Work!’ in September 2014. This product, sporting their TAA-system (Train, Analyze, Apply) has MindSonar at its core. MindSonar is presented as an element within the context of this larger, more specifically focused product. This is a good example of the ‘Powered by MindSonar’ principle we like to see: offer the client a specific solution, rather than a general instrument. They have a funny cartoon movie explaining the product (in Dutch).

Go to product web page

MindSonar Professionals: Guus Hustinx & Team Building

In this video, trainer and consultant Guus Hustinx from the Netherlands describes how he uses MindSonar for team building. Guus aims to improve cooperation in teams and helps teams solve relationship issues and communication problems. He works mostly in large companies and for government agencies. One important insight he offers, is that MindSonar results often help people put a new frame around their differences. Continue reading