Month: August 2022

Reflect on the outcome of your Vocational Personality Radar Test.

My results were ENFJ – Giver

You are passionate, responsible, caring and compassionate. You can keenly perceive the emotions, needs and motivations of those around you. You can find the potential in other people and would like to help them to maximize that potential. You always promote personal development and team growth. You are very sensitive about praise and criticism. You treat everyone with loyalty, and have a high social fitness and collaborate with other people well. You are a very infectious leader who can stimulate others easily.

Overall, the results of this assessment were SPOT ON!!

• What was the most revealing outcome of the assessment? I have never had keenly sharp attention to detail skills – for example the “deep” details. I have always enjoyed and thrived in the big picture space where I can be creative and ideate. My results in the iNutrition/Sensing section truly showcase that this is not my strength, but seeing how it is described confirms that they way I work, ensuring I am on teams with individuals with strong Sensing will be important to overall success. 

  You are iNtuition Tendency, that like abstract theories and principles. You are concerned with the entirety of things and enjoy the tendency of change and development. You are concerned about inspiration, imagination and creativity. You like implication, analogy, connections, possibility, inference and prediction.

  People are different from you Sensing Tendency, that are concerned about the detailed information gained through sense perception: things that you see, hear, smell, taste and touch. You tend to notice details and descriptions more. You like to use and develop the skills which you already possess.

• What are your areas of strengths in regards to EI? I am all about the people and how they feel. As someone who has been a people leader and coach much of career, and even when I think back to college, I was an RA and in leadership roles, I go deep in understanding the people around me, their emotions, how their work/life makes them feel and turn into an encouraging positive coach to cheer them on. I do pride myself on being a coach that is not afraid to give feedback, but as my results show, I definitely strive to coach feedback with compassion and kindness, yet also with directness. 

You are Feeling Tendency, that attach the most importance to the feelings towards yourself and other people. The value and harmony will be your standard for evaluation. You are very sympathetic, kind, friendly and considerate. You always think about how your behaviour will affect the feelings of those around you.

People are different from you Thinking Tendency, that pay attention to the logic relationships between things. You like to evaluate and make decisions through objective analysis. You are very rational, objective and fair. You think principles are more important than being flexible.

• What are your areas for improvement in regards to your EI results? I want to continue to work on my attention to the details and I also want to be more reflective in my judging tendencies. I sometimes get quite excited, in a good way, and want to jump into problem solving right away. I am trying to “slow down” when the world allows it, to ponder a bit more.

You are Judging Tendency, that like to make judgments and decisions. You enjoy making plans and would like to manage, control and grind for the results. You focus on accomplishing a task. In your daily life you tend to be organised and meticulous, and you respect a timeline.

People are different from you Perceiving Tendency, that You need to collect more information before you make a decision. So you try to understand and adapt. You focus on process and change your goals based on the information changes. You always allow for unforeseen circumstances in your daily life. You like a loose and free life style, which may be bit disordered.

Based on our discussion surrounding team development, use the stage, project, and cyclical theory models of team development as a basis for your responses.

In what phase do you feel the team facilitator role is most critical? Upon completion of the reading, I believe the facilitator role is most critical in the Stage model.  I imagine projects that are starting at the beginning. Teams being created for a specific goal, training or task to be completed. I view this model as a group that will likely be together from A-Z – beginning to end. As the stages show, orientation, storming and norming, the foundational part of this stage of development, the facilitator will be guiding, coaching, observing and determining how this group will pivot into the performing and adjourning stages.  I have seen this quite often in 1-2 week training classes where team work will be required. And if I am recalling correctly, the facilitator was critical during these sessions.

What developmental stage do you think poses the greatest challenge for teams? I have witnessed and believe based on these readings that the project development perspective posed the greatest challenge for teams. When you are choosing groups/teams for a specific project, you may not be choosing based on skillset strength or technical abilities. You may be placing people on a team solely based on demand and capacity or prior work completion. In a ideal setting, all projects would have time and space to choose the “best” people to complete it, but in the real world, this is often not the case as many projected needed to be completed “yesterday.” Through the stages of inception, problem solving, conflict resolution and execution, there is not a lot of time to build trust and relationships to strengthen the team, especially if they do not already know each other. This poses a great threat to the team engagement, outcomes and overall success.

What can the team facilitator do to help teams overcome this challenge? If there is a team facilitator or team lead, I believe it is critical that they take some time to build relationships, even if it is only for 15 minutes.  A series of questions to get to know the team, an ice breaker – conversation to humanize the team and begin to build trust. It will be critical for the facilitator to keep tabs on the team morale and progress to ensure that they will not need to step in should the team start to move backwards or not make progress. I think it also important to share that should a team already know each other, or at least the majority, some of these stages may not even occur. As McGrath shares in the book, perhaps the conflict resolution stage gets skipped as the group has strong trust and they know each other strengths and commitment. These are some of the finest “sprint” teams I have witnessed during my career.

Discuss external factors that have impacted the work (and success) of teams over the past several years:  In my experience at Vanguard, the biggest external factors that have impacted the enterprise and much of our work is technology, global perspective and the economy.

• Which factors supported successful teamwork?  Over the past ten years, prior to this year, from an economy standpoint, the economic external factor greatly benefited Vanguard and our clients. The markets were booming, the economy was strong and from a global perspective, Vanguard was boldly on the map as a top contender. Employees were thriving and the client mission always seems to be felt strongly when the markets are doing well – happy clients, happy crew as we like to say. Teams celebrated and engagement was high.
• Which factors prevented successful teamwork? As we see all around us, technology seems to be changing by the hour. It is constant and the competition to have the best platform, website, app and client experience is critical for success. This is an area that greatly prevented success on many fronts from both a client and crew experience. We did not keep up with technology advancements and were slow to incorporate new systems, especially internally. Although I applaud senior leadership for recognizing this mistake, especially as they are trying to course correct right  now, the downstream and engagement effect is very real and difficult. In a state of a now dropping economy, continued struggle with covid, this impact is not short term and must be dealt with. The teams that are working on these topics are overworked, not as engaged and attrition is high. It is a true struggle.

Pick one of the dual role situations listed below. Discuss special challenges or confusion that occur because of the dual nature of those roles. How can these challenges be overcome?

• Facilitator vs. Subject Matter Expert
• Facilitator vs. Trainer
• Facilitator vs. Mediator
• Facilitator vs. Leader

I have chosen to discuss Facilitator vs. Leader as this is a role I have commonly played during my leadership roles at Vanguard. In my experience, trust is a major factor that could ultimately play a large or special challenge as often in the workplace, the leader is playing both roles. It is quite common to be discussing or leading sensitive topics with a team, often your own team.  For example, Vanguard takes engagement very seriously – we strive for strong crew (employee) engagement and leaders are held accountable for a large portion of that engagement. Once survey’s are complete, it is not uncommon for that very leader to facilitate AND lead that discussion – regardless of the results. Does the team trust that leader? Will they openly share what they need? What they want? Will they feel psychologically safe to share what is truly on their mind.  On the other side, I have been lucky enough to be an Engagement Consultant, leading and coaching leaders with low engagement on how to improve their teams. I saw firsthand the profound difference trust, relationships and safety play when the leader is in the room and when the leader is NOT in the room (especially for lower scores). It is tricky – for certain.  I think how these challenges can be overcome is by providing a strong support system to a leadership team, especially when they are playing both roles. I was a fan and honored to be a consultant, as this was a wonderful way to support, teach and coach those leaders in need, as well as coach the teams to be candid and lead by example. Another way to overcome this challenge is to ask for a team volunteer or offer this role to an “aspiring” informal leader on the team. This is a wonderful way for them to build their leadership muscles and get some “at bat” moments of leading a group. I have witnessed and put this action into play many times and many of those crew are now prideful leaders themselves. #win

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