How to enhance team collaboration - using Insights Discovery
Robert Paul Schwippert
Do you have several personalities and/or nationalities in your team? Do you feel that collaboration between these – in itself very capable – individuals is not always effective? Do you see misunderstandings and rivalry where there could be complementarity and high performance? In that case you may want to consider holding up a mirror for you and your team members to look into - and find out how you could leverage the different skills to create high performance. Here is a case study:
The Director of the Heineken Central & Eastern Europe Export team asked us to design and deliver a three-day team workshop under the title ‘Winning Together’. The team consisted of ca. 40 members from 15 nationalities, a family of Austrians, Russians, Hungarians, Bela-Russians, Serbs, Greek Italians and so on... The objective of the team session held in Austria was to become aware of the characteristics of a high performing team and understand how their diversity could be leveraged to bring the team to high performance.
We chose the Insights Discovery approach to support the process. Insights Discovery is a powerful system that draws on psychological preferences and uses a unique colour language to promote self-insight and facilitate effective interaction. The session was designed from the following building blocks:
1. Defining High Performance,
2. Understanding ourselves
3. Understanding others
4. Connecting for High Performance.
On day 1 the focus was on defining what is a high performing team. Via fun outdoor team exercises the participants were made aware of the common critical elements of high performance. Bringing in videos of success stories from the team created a common understanding of the team's strength and weaknesses.
On day 2 we explored the personal drivers of the individual team members. The Insights individual profile provides useful information about communication styles, value to the team, blind spots, motivation etc. for each individual - allowing enhancement of personal effectiveness. Also each team member shared his/her profile with three others in one-on-one conversations. This really helped the participants to obtain insights into themselves and their differences compared to others - and what could be done differently in the workplace.
Day 3 was about the different roles in a team and how the various functional teams (Marketing, Sales, Customer Services) worked together. We discussed how the interfaces between the teams could best be best managed based on the preferences of the teams. The workshop concluded with another outdoor team exercise that showed clearly that winning is done not individually, but together and finished with reflection on how the team members had used their learnings to be successful.
All in all it was a great experience with very positive feedback from the team. Insights as a tool fits very much our approach of leveraging diversity by making people aware of their differences, having them respect these and then combining these for high performance - Winning Together in more than one way!
If you want to learn more about the Insights metholodogy and team development please click here.