You're standing up a new project team and want it built to succeed, not just staffed by who's around
This is for you if you're standing up a new project team from people who have shared their Career Discovery results with you. Maybe the last one all thought the same way and shipped the wrong thing fast, and you don't want a repeat. You want this one built to succeed, not just staffed by whoever jumps on it first.
Grab whoever's keen for a new project and you rarely get a balanced mix. The people who jump on first tend to be the same kind, the fast movers itching to get going. So the team quietly leans on one style and shares its one blind spot, and whether those styles pull together or grind was never decided. It just happened.
This won't settle everything a team needs to win. The mission, the skills, the budget are their own work. What it settles is the thing hardest to fix once people are in the room: whether the styles complement or collide, and whether the group covers the work.
You'll work from two parts of each person's report. Understanding Styles, about the middle, names their working style and, in "Working with [each style]", how their pairings land. The Five Types of Work, further back, names the work each is built to do. Set aside about an hour.
- Lay the styles on the table. For each candidate, note their working style from Understanding Styles: Accelerator, Analyst, Harmonizer, or Pragmatist. Line them up so you see the whole group at once.
- Balance the mix. If no single style is more than half the group, it's balanced, so go on. If one style is more than half, the group shares its blind spot, and you close the gap the first way that fits. Add a candidate whose style covers it, if one is available. If none is, name the blind spot on the roster and assign a standing outside check, a review gate or an outside reviewer.
- Bridge the pairs who'll work closest. Pick the two or three people who'll actually work side by side on this project. For each pair, open each person's "Working with [each style]" in Understanding Styles and note the one friction to watch and what the report says helps. The report carries the specific move for each pairing, so you don't guess which combinations grind.
- Cover the work. Name what this project actually needs done. New ideas are Creative, a system run well Operational, people won Influential, pieces connected Integrative, the answer found Analytical. Lay each person's primary and complement from The Five Types of Work against that list, and fill any kind of work the group is missing.
- Land the roster. On one page: the line-up, the shared blind spot and its cover, the friction to watch on your close pairs, the coverage gap you filled. Write the one line you'll open the kickoff with, naming how the mix is built to pull together instead of grind.
