A great deal of work goes into the blending process of tea and coffee, to conjour up different tastes and flavours to
tickle your tastebuds. Transferring the metaphor to teams, it’s really important that you get the blend of personality types right in order to benefit from optimal performance.
In my business we use a psychometic test developed by Myers-Briggs to ascertain the dominant personality characteristics across members of our senior management team and external salespeople.
When first assessing the results, it provided some real breakthroughs in our thinking and understanding of our team blend. It allowed us to understand why some meetings always tended to go a certain way, who would have a natural tendency to plan or do things at the last minute, who our best ideas creation people are and who our best critical thinkers are likely to be.
When you get such clarity, it really allows you to drive your recruitment strategy and team dynamics. If you walk away from an interview thinking that a person is really good (setting aside technical competency), often it’s because they have a similar thinking pattern to you and you seem to gel.
By using psychometric tests, you can you understand your own personality type better and ensure that you are not recruiting a company of ”mini-me’s”, you can also have a sense check against job functions. For example, you wouldn’t necessarily want a project manager whose natural personality was to leave things to the last minute. Alternatively, your business might be dominated by a team of people who are all highly creative, people that love the next idea before finishing the previous, you may need to add a strong finisher/completer to provide that balance.
Managing people is considerably easier when you can get more supporting data, it allows you to marry the components of displayed behaviour you see every day, with core beliefs. Opinions you have formed about people may be changed, levels of output increased and your blend of team tuned for optimal performance.
The key takeaway is this. Be aware when recruiting, when holding meetings and when setting up projects of your decisions around who you select to work with you. Choose relevant to ability to get the task done, not on how well you perceive you get on with somebody.
This morning I attended a technology seminar, with three leading figures from the world of technology journalism sharing their views of the future. In my view, it’s vital that you always look ahead for the next big thing, or you end up like Nokia or Kodak, thinking that what exists today might last forever.
One of today’s panel members – Olivia Solon, Associate Editor of Wired Magazine – talked about the trend Collaborative Consumption. In short terms, what this means is how spare capacity is mopped up by the crowd using the web. Lots of examples of this are popping up all over, including car shares (one commuter one car who trades their free space), bike renting (let’s say someone rides to work and the bikes sits in a shed all day when it could be rented out), house sitting to name a few. Capacity is made visible to the crowd either on a short term (one day), mid or long term basis.
She made an excellent supporting point around trust. I’ve been talking about TATT (Time, Attention, Trust and Transparency) for about two years now, believing them to the key social currencies. If collaborative consumption is to be truly a success, then you are going to need to be pretty sure about the credentials of a stranger before you let them into your home, your car or have them riding away on your best bike!
Sites like e-bay and its payment platform – Paypal – build transparent trust by members giving feedback to build a reputation aswell as a pretty robust process to validate who you are are, before you can get a Paypal account. This highly visible feedback reduces fears with other potential buyers and sellers. It works well for e-Bay, so if collaborative consumption is to take off, how can demonstrate your trustworthiness in the future across multiple consumption plaftorms? Such a thing doesn’t exist today.
If you think about all the on-line transactions you make (Amazon, i-Tunes, e-Bay, Tesco, Council Tax, Utilities) aswell as your social graph (social media) and then imagine all those transactions being aggregated in one place to build a trust rating which is effectively validated through multiple sources validating your public trust persona, then that could be a vision of what the future might look like. It would be like a visible credit report, buyer/seller report and assessment of you as an all round good egg, which is available to others. That would be a big job, but not beyond the realm of impossibility given the amount of data that now exists.
If we’re truly going to switch from hyper-consumption to collaborative consumption, then the evidence of trustworthiness to strangers will become a big issue. Let’s see who gets to market first.
Expectations are shifting like sand. What once was acceptable, may no longer be.
The standard you do things by may not be the standard that your customer is expecting given all of the other things they can compare you to in life. One click purchasing on Amazon, timed delivery slots from Tesco, paying by Paypal, free delivery, being heard on social media are all examples of how a customers expectations are changing. They are the same customers, with the same money.
Last night I stayed in a hotel and I was thinking about the basics that I now expect before choosing to stay somewhere. Location, wireless network, cost of parking, access to leisure facilities are just some of the add ons that come along with a comfortable room and bed. The hotel industry has had to shift it’s proposition.
Last night, a perfectly comfortable hotel went into my black book of places never to go back to. I had a brilliant nights sleep, bed was super comfortable, room very contemporary, all the mod cons. However, I couldn’t connect to the wireless network, the car park for the hotel was a full five minutes walk away and fifteen minutes to drive due to a one-way system and my mobile phone had no signal, despite being in a major city centre. My expectations weren’t met, despite having lovely accomodation (the key proposition) the wrap around elements (related to the key proposition) diluted the key proposition so significantly, I became a one-off customer, rather than a repeat customer.
It was a reminder to me, not to just think about your core business proposition but the associated things that wrap around it. The add-ons, the after service, the details that make up a buying interaction. Using the above example, what is the wireless network equivalent in your proposition? It’s not your core but your customer may want more. They may have greater expectations, so stay close, keep listening and keep refining.
