Leading Teams with Care - Lesson 7

Dr. Rick Sessoms
Leading Teams with Care
MC611-07
Team Dimensions (Part_1)
Lesson Transcripts 

So, we're talking about roles now and we're talking about two kinds of roles. One is function, and the other is what we refer to as team dimension, or preference, or natural inclination, and so you all have access to a tool that we use in this course called the Team Dimensions Profile, and at this point, if you have not taken that, you might want to stop the recording and go and take that tool. It’s a self-administered tool. You should have an access code, and you can go in, and it's a self-administered survey, and this will provide this information for you. So if you've not taken that, I encourage you to stop at this point and take it. 

Assuming that everyone here has taken that now -- I'm assuming that everybody's done that, is that right? -- let me ask you to take out, if you have access to your team dimensions profile, you should have received after you hit the send button a report. Did everybody receive a report, hopefully? and if everything is working right, I think it's about a 21-page report, and if you didn't print it out, that's okay, but you certainly can, and there's some very valuable information in here for you. 

When we take a look at this team dimension, research, and a lot of it, shows that people use one or more of these approaches when working on a team in terms of their natural inclination. The combination of these approaches is the four primary dimensions of a team, and as you can see, each letter in the word CARE stands for one of the primary dimensions, C for creator, A for advancer, R for refiner, and E for executor, and one final role in the CARE profile is the flexor person. The flexor role appears in the center of the circle. This role, the flexor, spans the four quadrants in fairly equal areas, and the reason is the flexors are characterized by their ability to work more naturally in all of the dimensions, and we'll get to that as we unpack this as we go along. Let me just kind of go through these and explain in summary what these are about, and then we'll go back and look at them in a little bit more detail. 

First, let's look at the Creator. Few of us fall naturally into only and exclusively one area, and so I want to say as we start that most of us have one dominant area, but we also have a complementary area as well. For example, when I have taken this team dimensions profile over and over and over again, I consistently come out as a dominant creator, but also significant focus in the dimension of refiner as well. So, most of us are a bit of a mixture of more than one approach. Having said that, your profile probably frames you in one dimension more strongly than any of the others, and so that's the one that you want to pay attention to in this discussion. So let me start with the creator. How many here rated highest in the creator dimension? Okay, we've got about 1, 2, 3 of us. Okay. Let me talk about the creator dimension, and those of you that are creators, maybe you can add something to this, because I hope that you've read through this report, but let me just make a couple of statements. 

The creator on a team is a person who has lots of original ideas, has fresh concepts. It doesn't mean that we all don't have good ideas from time to time, but creators tend to provide new ideas more consistently than others on the team. They tend to think outside the normal patterns. Some people would say, “outside the box,” but they tend to think beyond what is normally thought of by others. They don't tend to perceive risk as very risky. Risk, at least in the thinking, is kind of the way they're wired. And so, they kind of enjoy that space of thinking about new things. 

Now, when we think about creators, I want to suggest that we avoid some stereotypes, particularly those that are not creators, okay? Creators are not necessarily natural leaders. I have known creators that are quite timid and can actually be not perceived as leaders at all. Sometimes that's very unfortunate because their creative ideas don't tend to get as much exposure as they could if good leadership is guiding the team with creators that are not natural leaders. But we often tend -- I should say it this way -- sometimes on our teams, we tend to think that just because a person has creative ideas, that person is naturally the leader. In our Christian circles, we sometimes call that vision. The person is the one with the vision, that person must be the leader. That isn't always the case, and so I just want to be careful that we don't make those two terms, creator and leader, synonymous, because that isn't always the case. Creators are not odd; they are not eccentric, necessarily. Some are, Tim, but not all. I work with Tim, so we love each other. And they are not necessarily temperamental, although they can be. They are not necessarily the absentminded professor. What are some of the strengths of a creator? Let's talk about that. 

STUDENT: Their creativity. 

Okay. They’re creative. 

STUDENT: Vision caster. 

They can be a vision caster. Yeah. 

STUDENT: They can help folks get unstuck. 

Yeah. They can get the system unstuck. Sure. Michael. 

STUDENT: Think of options that others may have overlooked. 

Right.

STUDENT: And they can encourage others to feel free to bring out their ideas as well. 

That's right. They give a framework for encouraging others. That's good. What else? Those of you that are creators, it's time to brag on yourself. 

I mentioned awhile ago that sometimes creators are not seen as leaders. I was working with a group a few years ago, and it was an organization, and people from the international director-type person all the way to the receptionist were sitting in the room, and they were working on a project. It was just kind of a case study. They were trying to figure out how to do recyclables in their workspace. You know, this was just the time when there was an emphasis that was being started on not throwing everything away but trying to create recyclable things, you know, instead of just throwing everything. And I put people in groups of about five or six, and they started to work on this, and as I did with you awhile ago, I sort of moved from one group to another and was listening, and there was one group, I remember in my mind's eye, they were over here in the back corner, and there were about six of them, and there was one director-type level person and a couple of middle management-type people, and there was the part-time receptionist in this organization that was sitting there. And these directors, they sort of took charge of the meeting, and they were kind of guiding the way, you know, as they naturally would, and everybody was chiming in, and nobody really had any ideas. I mean, as the truth of the matter, they were just kind of spinning, you know, and then all of a sudden, the part-time receptionist, she just kind of raised her hand kind of quietly, and she just kind of threw a bomb in the middle of the table and came up with a brilliant idea that others had not thought of, and actually, that whole organization adopted that idea of recycling, and they've been using it ever since. It was interesting that this part-time receptionist had never been asked anything about any idea she had ever had, and she had worked there for something like 11 years as a part-time receptionist in this organization, and for the first time, her creativity, her creative role got exposed, and it was just a wonderful awakening for this organization because, as I said, it's not necessarily the person that is the leader that has all the good ideas, but it takes leadership to expose and pull out those ideas from the creative people. Does that make sense? And so that's why understanding these roles is so critically important. 

So, let's turn the channel and ask this question. We talked about the strengths. You know, creative people tend to have fresh perspectives. They tend to see the big picture. They tend to get us unstuck, as we said, all those kind of things. But what can be the weakness of a creator if working by himself or herself? Tammy, you responded quickly. So why don't you tell us what you're thinking? 

STUDENT: I know for me personally, I can say I love coming up and eventually finding the right way to move forward, but I'm very slow to move until I have exhausted and thought through as many different possibilities as I can to find what I think is the right and best answer so that can be very slow. 

Okay, so you are a creator, then, but you need to have that assurance that your creative idea is indeed the best idea. Is that what you said? 

STUDENT: Okay. Well, yes, that is true, yes. 

But is that what you said? That's the question. 

STUDENT: That's very, very true of me. 

STUDENT: You spend all your time creating and not advancing to accomplishing the goal you set out to accomplish.

STUDENT: I think in my head –

STUDENT: You’re throwing out new ideas. I'm a refiner, so I’m refining things. 

STUDENT: -- which is my life --

Let's council here [laughter]. 

STUDENT: But I know that in my creative head, I have experience where you eventually get to like, what works for everybody. Like, there's that magic where that happens, where, you know, you hear all this is a win-win, and so eventually I know I can get to that place, so I'm not willing to -- I'm just slow to move and slowly get to that place. 

Well, it sounds like to me that you are a creator, but you also have a value for collaboration. There are some people that are creators that really don't have any value for collaboration at all, so that has to do probably with more of your personal value set. So those are two different issues. Do you follow what I'm saying there? I think that's a good thing, in fact, even though it may be frustrating that you feel somewhat slow in that, but personally, from my perspective, I see that value for collaboration, even though you do have these creative ideas, is a very healthy thing for the teams that you serve. 

STUDENT: I have a friend of mine who's a creator, and he's always generating ideas, and then he says something exactly, this is the way we need to go! But if you talk to him a week later, “Oh, that was so last year. Now, we’ll go in this direction.”

You're not talking about me, are you? [laughter] 

STUDENT: And it's like, how do you nail this guy down? There are so many possibilities, so many different ways, kind of, to help him or to help her – it’s like jello on the wall; you never know where it's going because it's always changing. 

So it can be very scattered if the creators are left to their own devices completely.

STUDENT: I know a creator who can sometimes be very excited about their ideas to the point where it's difficult for them to see any sort of problems or holes in their ideas. 

So, what we're really saying is that creators left to themselves can either provide marvelous breakthroughs or horrible train wrecks is the fact of the matter, so where we're driving with this is that we need each other. We need the different dimensions on the team. 

STUDENT: In fact, typically, creators are not good implementers. 

True.

STUDENT: They have good ideas, but they need other folks to take that idea to prove it. 

Very true. So those of you that are creators, have we captured you very well in this conversation? Anything you want to add about your dimension or your natural inclination in this process as a creator? Anything else you'd like to put on the table? 

STUDENT: It’s a little risky to put it on the table, but I'm just throwing it out there because –

STUDENT: -- We creators, we don't worry about wrecks. [laughter] 

STUDENT: Well, it's a little personal. I have wondered and kind of wrestled with, and I'm still not quite settled on, I think that I have definitely enjoyed the role of creator, but I question whether -- and I'm not throwing the woman card out there or whatever, but I'm wondering if personally, my experience has made me feel not embraced in the role of the creator, but have found myself actually playing out other roles and maybe throwing out ideas, but I'm just throwing that possibility out. 

So, you're -- and I appreciate your being vulnerable; it's a very, very helpful comment – you’re feeling that perhaps because of your gender, you have withdrawn sometimes from that natural creator tendency and played out other roles as a result. Is that correct? 

STUDENT: Yeah, and I don't know if that maybe is a little bit of what you were talking about at some point, like it’s in my head that that's a leader, you know, like that whole woman leadership stuff that gets mixed up, as women are trying to become who they are in the church and outside the church and all that stuff, and I just I wondered that about me in terms of – 

Yeah. Well, and I appreciate you bringing that up, and perhaps I need to say in the strongest terms possible that these dimensions are not gender specific. Full stop. There is no research that suggests that that one gender gravitates more toward one. Now, cultural expectations may generate a sense of appropriateness, but there is no research that suggests natural tendencies gravitate because of gender specificity. Okay? Thank you for that. Other thoughts? 

STUDENT: I think as a creator, you really have the ability to inspire other people, but the difficulty is finding a way to really communicate that vision and get everybody else on board, and, you know, sometimes you get really excited, but you have to kind of paint the picture. 

Mm hmm. That's a great comment, and that segways us into the second, because the truth is that's why the team is needed, because sometimes the creators tend to be on the moon for the rest of us. Their thoughts seem to be so far out there, and that's part of why the creators need the rest of the team, and that's what we're going to go into in this next part.