I’ve written and talked previously about how important it is to get the right people on the right bus in the right seats (i.e. building a great team or Jim Collins’ “First ‘Who’” concept). But how do we do First “Who”?
A simple approach that has worked for me repeatedly in various leadership roles is the compass points.
I once participated in a workshop where we self-assessed our personality based on the four points of a compass:
- North: action-oriented, decisive, “do it now”, jumps in and gets to work
- South: “people” people, caring, wants everyone to be heard and have their opinions voiced and considered
- East: big-picture, vision generators, speculates on possibilities and considers the big picture and the future
- West: detail-oriented, asks lots of questions, needs to understand the who/what/when/where/how before starting
I later used this activity for years when teaching teamwork in management classes and professional workshops.
The key lesson of the activity is: no one personality is best. You need all four represented, in roughly equal proportions, for a team to be successful.
Again and again, I have built or worked with others to build teams that contain each of the four styles. While it’s a simplistic model that depends mostly on self-assessment, it’s usually more than sufficient to assemble the foundations of a great team.
When we have East people thinking about the vision for the future matched with West people who make sure we consider all the details, then combined with North people who get to work on implementation, and then paired with South people who oversee team maintenance activities, we can achieve great things.
So, if you’re trying to figure out how to act on “First ‘Who’”, give this simple exercise a try. Who is already on the team? What are their styles? What’s missing? And where can we find those styles? Then deploy a well-rounded team on the right issues and opportunities and you can build sustained greatness for a very long time.
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