The Misaligned Team

The Misaligned team

Rebecca was leaving a team meeting with a great deal of frustration.  Team members seem to be in perpetual conflict with each other, team meeting agenda were rarely followed, and the team ability to make decisions was essentially paralyzed.  As she thought about the team, it was apparent that unless there was an intervention not much was going to happen.

She called me (Roger) to discuss her challenges which we put into three buckets: teaming skills training, team norms, and individual team member learning.  To help with all of these buckets, the team took the Pearman Personality Integrator.  We identified key team skills--team communication, team conflict management, team decision making, and team roles. Each topic was treated separately and each training involved skill checklists and learning challenges for each team member.  We had a meeting to facilitate the creation of team norms and associated behavioral benchmarks that everyone discussed and agreed to.  Looking at the skills challenges and norm accountability through the lens of personality strengths as identified with the Pearman.

The Pearman provided team members with knights on how he or she typically approach their work and their individual areas of strength and less attended to skills.  With the Pearman, we were able to look at the degrees of flexibility that the team members felt they had.  A number of team members began to share that the personal stress levels were interfering with their ability to flex as much as needed to be effective on the team.  This led to talking about how to find sources of renewal and stress hardiness.  A key outcome if this exploration was a surprising level of personal disclosure which immediately enhanced interpersonal trust.

We looked at the challenges team members were experiencing related to what is natural in their approaches and what they felt was required in doing their team work.  Using the data in "natural" scores across the eight mental resources of the Pearman model, team members looked at what they had a great deal of and not much of.  For this team of seven, six had highest scores in Extraverted Thinking and one in Extraverted Intuiting.  As the team talked about this, they also realized there wasn't a good deal of energy committed to Extraverted Feeling related behaviors and few Sensing behaviors (Extraverted or introverted).  These strengths and areas of inattention led to discussions about how to increase team efforts with diverse perspectives.  We then connected the team strengths and areas of need with their norms, roles, and skills.  It became apparent that their personal use of resources needed attention and focus, which they could do because they now had a way to talk about it constructively.

We looked at:

Talking about what is on everyone immediate action list (Extraverted sensing )

Verifying information for everyone's comfort (introverted sensing)

Creating time to generate ideas (Extraverted intuiting)

Reflecting on scenarios and possible pathways forward (introverted intuiting)

Identifying the logic to be used in evaluating team options (Extraverted thinking)

Sharing working assumptions and models (introverted thinking)

Seeking connection and personal relationships (Extraverted feeling)

Confirming alignment with team values, company mission, and personal ideals (introverted feeling)

The Pearman allowed the team to look at its tactics for being more flexible, how personal team member strengths and areas of need impacted all aspects of the team, and create a plan to address what they had discovered.  Through facilitated sharing and disclosure, the team began to develop the kind of trust that enabled them to move forward.  There is no doubt that the commitment to the skill building needed for the team was dramatically increased, resulting in very intentional work to increase specific skills with conflict management, team meeting management, and team decision making.

If you want to take the Pearman, reach out to me at rogerpearman@yahoo.com and I'll send you information.