Team Profile

What makes a great team? One important factor is that you have a balanced set of skills and personalities in the team. A team which only consists of leaders won't get much work done. A team which only consists of workers will not work into the right direction. So how can you identify the right balance and combination of people?

One answer is the Team Member Profile Test. It's a set of questions which team members answer. They are evaluated to give a result indicating which type of team member the person is and where it lies in the spectrum of possible types.

There are two dimension which are considered there, how much team members are oriented towards tasks and how much they are oriented towards people. This can be visualized in a Results Chart.

Here is an example:

You can see five segments:

• The center (5,5) is the "worker" who has a set of balanced of attributes, no extremes. These team members are extremely important because they tend to just get stuff done.
• The top left (9,1) is the "expert" who is focused on the task and its details but doesn't consider people that much. You need these to get the depth of work which is necessary to create great results.
• The bottom right (1,9) is the "facilitator" who is something like the soul of the team, focused on social interactions and supports the team in creating great results.
• The top right (9,9) is the "leader" who is strong on task and people and is giving direction to the team. You need these but you don't want to have more than one or two in a team otherwise there are conflicts of leadership.
• The bottom left (1,1) is the "submarine" who floats along and tries to stay invisible. Not strong on any account. You don't want these in your team.

The test can provide some insight into the balance of the team. You want to have all but the submarine covered with an emphasis on the workers.

How does your team look like on this diagram?