This canary has often wondered about what makes a team perform to the best of their ability. Reams of tedious management books offer insights – but they mostly seem to dissolve into broad generalities or, worse still, dull cliches.
Focus is so often placed on the ‘leader’ – a word now applied to pretty much every management level in the corporate pyramid. But look at team sports: is the ‘manager’ always to blame when games are lost, or is it truly down to team dynamics?
No manager can step right into the mind of their players to work out exactly how they will work with the other team members. Instead, what these leaders do is often to rely on data as the solution. They ‘wire up’ (well more ‘wireless up’ actually) their players – see how far they run, how many times they tackle, or throw, or kick (or punch in some sports, though rarely the team ones you hope) and then crunch the numbers to give incremental advantage over their opponents. But no manager looks into their minds. No tech can truly work that out – or can it?
Meeting Canary provides all the data you can imagine for online meetings. We pride ourselves on ‘real-time’ gentle interventions – a raised eyebrow here, a goggle eye there, an indication of cost or a show of time spent. But what about the way people think in that meeting? That’s where our friends at Ned.ai come in. We’ve been working away for the last year or so to integrate Meeting Canary with Ned.ai, which provides ‘a cognitive layer to show which of 4 Whole Brain® quadrants are active based on individual-level cognitive insights backed by Herrmann HBDI® methodology ‘
Well, let’s unpick that a little. Each of us thinks in different ways. To trivialise matters – let’s imagine people are extroverted or introverted; perhaps they are strategic thinkers or intuitive ones. Either way data will only show parts of those characteristics. Perhaps Meeting Canary shows that Jane speaks little in a meeting but when she does energy levels rise after her interjection. But what if thinking styles could be mapped using Ned.ai across a whole meetings and all users can see how they ‘turned up’ to that meeting. Now that would be fascinating right?
And, I’m very pleased to say, that is exactly what we can now do, so what follows is an example of what you might receive:
So if you are serious about working out what High Performance Teams really means – a combination of ‘external’ data with added ‘internal’ insights into thinking styles may well be a game changer for all those leaders out there. Me included, and I promise to stop interrupting people! Honest.