Maximizing Your Team's Superpowers

Karen's career has taken her through various roles within the extractives industry, with a heavy focus on managing and executing projects involving the characterization and mitigation of environmental risks and opportunities. She offers strategic direction, consulting, training and implementation services in the realms of embedding sustainability goals and environmental assessment requirements into business operations, strategic plans, decision making processes, and project plans and execution.

  Leadership   Resource Management   Talent Management  

As project managers or team leads, we should quickly get to know what our team members are good at, and what they are not. Their characteristics and working styles may vary, but each will have his or her own way of getting things done. There will definitely be environments in which they excel, and other situations that they would love to run away from.

It is interesting that your industry or organizational function doesn’t really matter; patterns will emerge based on people’s interests and styles. But are you really taking full advantage of your team members’ individual strengths? If not, you should be.

Many behavioral, working style and personality-type tests that have been developed to attempt to categorize personnel (MBTI, DISC, EQ, etc.). I have taken many of them over the years, sometimes for work, and sometimes out of curiosity. I like to see how accurate they really are, and if I’ve really changed anything over time. I’ve found some that are quite amazing, even with the limited number of questions asked.

I’ll mention three of my favorites here, since each of them provide information after on how you might go about shifting in the direction you would prefer—as well as how you might recognize patterns in others:

1. The Gautrey Influence Profiler gives you an indication of the ways in which you influence people, and …

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