Intentionality - The Second and Central Imperative
Teams that excel foster accountable, collaborative relationships around work that matters
Intentionality. It’s a topic I touched on in previous installments but now we’re going deeper. To review, Intentionality is one of the Three Imperatives that are part of our collaboration framework, the other two being Clarity and Discipline. Recall that the Imperatives represent the three underlying needs that must be addressed to foster high performance collaboration.
on personality types and teams
Several years ago I was working with the Mars Food leadership team in California; they led the business responsible for Uncle Bens. I was doing what I did back then, focusing on relationships. I used not one but two personality instruments to help team members get to know and understand each other better. But I didn’t stop there. I added a step, naively but fortuitously, that made this engagement different from others I had run previously. And what a difference it turned out to be.
As I had done many times before, I had each team member stand in front of the group and review their personality reports with the rest of the team. They shared their types and preferences along with a couple of other facts about themselves. Then I asked them – and this was the twist - to identify the people in the room they needed to work most closely with. I then set up an exercise where they sat with their various collaborative partners to talk about how their personalities and preferences could affect their work together.
Some people identified numerous partners; others had fewer. The key was to have them engage with their important collaborative partners, regardless of number, and to use their personality data to inform those conversations.
In all the years I’ve worked with groups and teams I have never gotten more positive feedback than I got from that team. To a person they said they had never had a more worthwhile team engagement than this one. Why?
Personality types: so what? Here’s what.
Team consultants often ask us to share personality information and it just hangs out there. “I’m this set of letters, you’re that set of letters.” Okay, but so what? It’s interesting and I may remember some of it for a few days. I could put little carved wooden blocks with my letters on my desk to remind myself and others but before long those fade into the background.
By contrast, these conversations were clear about exactly what team members were to do with this information. For instance, one person was more analytical while their partner was more conceptual. They figured out how to take advantage of these differences to get their shared work done. There was another team member who favored cold logic and thinking, while their colleague was all about feelings. Their discussion focused on how they could divvy up their tasks based on those preferences in ways that would support their collaboration. Some partners were more alike than different and they talked about how to make the most of their similarities.
Through this exercise, the Mars Food team was practicing Intentionality, though back then we didn’t have that label. They were creating accountability for their collaboration, as are teams that use our framework now. Their accountability went beyond what they would do together; it included how they would do it based on who they understood themselves to be.
Commitments and relationship building
Relationship building done this way goes beyond “rah-rah,” feel-good team building. It means making specific commitments to our teammates and collaborative partners based on individual strengths, interests and capabilities we have identified.
My message is this; If you’re going to use personality instruments, connect the data to the work that needs doing and the relationships needed to do it. As I described in the previous blog, it begins by clarifying what that work is. Then you have get clear about specifically who needs to be involved with whom. Those people can then sit down and contract for how they’re going to work together using personality data to enrich those discussions.
Contracting and Specifics
I’ll add one more piece: focus on behaviors. Avoid vague pledges to “support” one another, or to “show respect.” Define what those things look like for each of you so you will know them when you see them. Spell out the specific behaviors that would demonstrate support or respect. Contracting for behaviors as well as for outcomes is at the heart of intentional collaboration.
Let’s take stock: Previously we talked about Clarity, how it creates a powerful Why and clarifies the What, the collaborative work that is required. In this blog post we focused on Intentionality, strengthening relationships and accountability for the work that requires collaboration. But how do you keep all this going? That’s the realm of the third Imperative, Discipline, and it’s the topic of the next blog post.
