Quick Guide for Managers: Facilitating a Team Discussion
Updated
by
Sean Welch
Talent Insights is all about supporting people and enabling teams to thrive! When your team completes the Criteria’s personality assessment and join Talent Insights, they can understand what truly energizes them and where they contribute the most value. For managers, these insights provide the basis of powerful conversations with your team to help them understand where the team shines and how to adjust team dynamics to work more effectively together.
In this practical quick guide, let’s explore how you can use these insights to enhance self-awareness of team members’ work styles and preferences, and to prepare them for potential challenges they may face. It provides you with a guidance on how to prepare and lead a discussion to facilitate a great team development session!
Tips to remember
Remain curious
Show interest in your team’s success by asking questions and seeking input to facilitate a meaningful discussion. Listen to their concerns and provide feedback and ideas.
Avoid assuming
Remain sensitive and neutral when explaining behaviors. Remember there are no good or bad traits.
Be aware
Be aware to involve less extroverted and assertive team members. Ask for their input and make them feel heard.
Follow up
Demonstrate to your teams that they take priority. Build and embed trust by following up on any agreed actions and continuing to keep them informed.
Before the meeting: Prepare
1. Dig into the rich insights
Set aside time to review the insights available in Talent Insights so that you can be best prepared.
What to review:
- Team Personality Profile
This report is valuable for understanding how your team members work according to ten different behavioral traits. Look at where your team is positioned on the scales and view the team personality average diagram to get a holistic overview of the team dynamic.
- Collaboration Guides
Take time to review your personalized Collaboration Guide for each team member. See how you compare in communication style, work style, and thinking style and consider how you may engage the various individuals in the team during the discussion.
2. Schedule your team session
This can be a 60-90 minute in-person or virtual session. Kick off with a calendar invite to invite your team members to the session. Here’s an example message that you can use to introduce them to the team session:
Thank you for joining Talent Insights and completing your personality assessment! We’ve invested in Talent Insights because how we work together is critical to our success, and we want to provide you with the best tools available!
The purpose of the session is to clarify our goals, connect as a team, and better understand how our personality and preferences can impact how we collaborate. As an outcome, I would like our team to identify:
- Our team’s strengths
- Our team’s potential gaps or challenges
- A practical plan of action to support us achieving our team goals
I am really looking forward to the session!
During the team session: Discussion points
1. Introduce the session
When introducing the session, ensure to:
- Reiterate the purpose of the team session
- Communicate that everyone’s ideas and reflections are important
- Provide context for the session – clarify the team’s strategy, goals and objectives and key metrics that the team is striving to achieve
- Explain the purpose of the session
For example:
The purpose of the session is to clarify our goals, connect as a team and better understand how our personality and preferences can impact how we collaborate. Based on this knowledge, we will develop a plan of action that will support us in achieving our team goals.
- Explain how Talent Insights helps the team
For example:
Talent Insights uses the science-based insights from Criteria’s personality assessment to provide teams with deep insights into their natural strengths and work preferences. After completing a short assessment, teams can access high-personalized insights within the Talent Insights platform, along with practical advice about their own work style, their strengths and potential opportunities for development.
2. Kick off the discussion
Great managers are brilliant at discovering, developing and celebrating the value their team brings to an organization. Below are some sample discussion points to kick off the session: with your team:
- Here is our team personality report. Let’s take a closer look at this keeping in mind the purpose and goals of our team. What do you notice? What stands out?
- Generally, how would you describe our overall team dynamic?
- What are some of our strengths as a team?
- What are some of our gaps or challenges?
- Let’s consider our notable traits as a team.
- What impact do you see these having on our overall success?
- Do you think these will support or potentially hinder what we are striving to achieve?
- As a result of what we have discussed, what should we agree to:
- START
- STOP or;
- CONTINUE
- How can we hold each other accountable to this change?
