Building a High Performing Team
Many of my Vice President’s and Practice Area Leads tell me, “Your team is a high performing team.” Then they ask, “What do you do to make it happen?” They comment, “Your team members are smiling all the time with happy faces,” or “Your Key Performance Metrics are all green with an excellent CPI (Customer Performance Index). 9 on the scale of 1 to 10 with continuous extension of the customer contracts.” “How do you make this happen?”
Having a busy schedule never gave me the chance to articulate my strategies in words, however now that I’ve been given an opportunity to write this blog post, I’ve thought of a few things which I was doing subconsciously.
One of the challenges in managing people is that some team members are not adaptable and acceptable to change and there are others who don’t want to accept any changes. I found that understanding personality styles helps me to better manage my team.
Understanding my team members’ personality styles along with brainer technique is key to understand how the person thinks and executes. Are they a left brainer or right brainer or a well-balanced person using their whole brain for thinking and execution? (See below for more details on brain types.) Having a sense of how the person uses their brain helps me to manage more effectively. Knowing a person’s personality style, I can identify the right fit for teams for different projects. For example, people who are right brain type of people are the perfect fit for innovative projects. Whole brain type of people are often the right fit for team lead positions and so on.
Another example about working with a right brainer. One of my team members came up to me with loads of enthusiasm around an idea for building a new framework for automation even though we had an existing framework to support. His idea was creative and made sense for what we wanted to achieve in the long term – and had a bigger ROI (Return On Investment) than our existing solution. I gave him the opportunity to work on his idea which turned out to be a very successful project.
Left brainers are great for systematic approaches to projects. Based on the nature of responses to questions and the kind of artifacts delivered by one of my team members, I was able to identify her as a left brainer. I found her to be an analytical person with a logical approach to solving issues. I assigned her to our knowledge share SharePoint updates project which she was able to complete with very minimal support. This became a very useful knowledge harvesting platform at an organisational level.
What do I mean by right and whole brain types of people? Personality assessments (see related article) help to identify people who are left, right or whole brains types of thinkers. Knowing the strengths of my team members helps me to motivate, encourage and provide opportunities for them.
What I’ve learned about Left, Right, and Whole Brain Types
It would be amazing to be surrounded with whole brainers all the time. A whole-brained approach connects the right and left brain. Interestingly, these days, some educational systems try to foster a more whole-brained scholastic approach with teaching techniques that connect with both sides of brain.
Left brain and right brain dominated people can be classified with regard to their thinking style.
Left brainers have a more systematic approach and tend to follow the rules. Analysis and logical thinking are their strengths. These folks are often good on projects involving algorithms. For example, software design using data structures and algorithms however complicated it is.
Right brainers are more creative and think intuitively. They are a very good fit for innovative projects. These types of people are new ideas generators. Often, they come up with the right answer but are not sure how they got it. These types of people often do lots of reverse engineering.
The four quadrant model of behavioural types that is often used to understand how people think has these four types: Driver, Analytical, Amiable and Expressive. Here is a map of left and right brainers to this model:
- Drivers are right brainers who know what they want and how to get there with high energy.
- Analyticals are left brainers who are highly detailed people with a methodical approach.
- Amiables are left brainers who try to get along with all personality types blending to all types of situations.
- Expressives combine right brainers excellent communication skills and great speaking ability but are not very concerned about facts.
Picture: http://www.runrunlive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Personality-types.jpg
Knowing what kinds of thinkers my team members are allows me to provide them with opportunities that challenge and motivate them. It is my secret weapon in building high performance teams.
About Rashi Gaur
Rashi’s leadership and mentorship experience along with people management and high customer satisfaction has resulted in successful project deliveries globally for organizations including Honeywell, IBM, Boeing, General Motors, Shell and ABB Inc.
Rashi has 15 plus years of experience in IT projects and hardcore test management in various domains including automobiles, aerospace, oil & gas in industrial sectors at various management levels.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashi-gaur-pmp-b6b3b844/