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.

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.

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