team management

Meyer’s Cultural Map

I have just finished the Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It’s taken me longer to read than it should, but that’s not her fault. She argues, building on the work of, her predecessors, including Geerte Hofstede, that there are eight dimensions of business communication, these are communicating, evaluating (feedback), leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling and persuading. She argues that cultures share positions on these dimensions as people’s comfort and natural style is based on their education systems and often deep seated cultural and historical factors. She argues that differences are relative i.e. you might be mediumly robust in offering direct feedback, but if you come across someone more so, you will find them rude, and need to recognise that if delivering such feed back to some one from a more robust culture, they may fail to understand. She uses charts to illustrate cultural differences across the dimensions and I reproduce one. I also offer an Anglo-Dutch phrase translator. I finish by wondering how useful this is for 121s. The blog article says much more, ...

Valuing people

I was nudged to look at Psychometric systems, both Myers Briggs which I see as offering one insight into yourself and Belbin which more orientated to managing teams. Perhaps one reason they’re important is based on the insights one of my ex-managers shared with his team,

“You’ll be good at what you enjoy! What’s not going to happen, is that I sit you down in front of your manager who’ll tell you what you’re bad at and then we attempt to remedy your weaknesses through training; that’s how you build mediocrity”
One of my Old Managers

Shame he was shagged by his global management who introduced a system of stack ranking which means no-one will admit their weaknesses and managers recruit for the permitted talent spectrum.

Myers Briggs helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses and this know what help you need, If you build teams where people do what they’re good at and are encouraged to rely on the complementary strengths of others, you teams will perform well and even those perceived as adding the least value may be critical for success. No man left behind! As Belbin’s theory says, we can’t all be Plants, i.e. too many of some skills/personality types diminishes team effectiveness. …