Bonnie Gloris: What if you can’t choose your own team?

Building an Unbeatable Management Team is the topic of week 9’s readings. “The Team” describes a core group of five individuals with equal stakes, including an entrepreneur and four cornerstones: the technical innovator, the delivery specialist, the sales specialist, and the financier (from the Beermat Entrepreneur). We also read about the key questions one must ask while forming a winning team, to ensure there is alignment of values, purpose, and expectations between co-founders (from the Social Entrepreneurship Resource Hub). These considerations are perfectly logical, but left me wondering – What if you can’t choose your own team?

Those of you working on a Systems Synthesis project, Social Innovation start-up, or other team endeavor at school are likely wondering the same thing. Of course, most students who have made it this far at Heinz are intelligent, competent people, but that doesn’t mean our personalities always mesh well. I looked to the blog post Winning over the team you didn’t choose, by Drew Doggett, for guidance.

Doggett quotes Ron Ashkenas, Senior Partner at Schaefer Consulting and a HBR contributor: “Senior managers and members of the team absolutely do not have to all agree on things. I mean in fact, it’s good if they don’t. They should come with different perspectives and good opportunities to share those perspectives and look at things through different lenses and come up with more robust and better solutions.” Here are a few other suggestions I gleaned from the post:

-Learn how to be personable (even if it doesn’t come naturally) in order to do business

-Avoid being passive-aggressive

-Making an example out of a team member is occasionally helpful, but don’t publicly embarrass people (if it’s personal/emotional, discuss the issue in private)

-Have empathy when it comes to recognizing different working styles – appreciate and honor the diverse ways people contribute

Hopefully these insights will help to fortify our project teams moving forward, and make them as ‘unbeatable’ as if they were hand-picked. Does anyone else have tips for leading a team with distinctive personalities?