Why did you finish the project management book or do you not have a team?

We believe that each of us is eager for the team we are in to collaborate better. Today's technology can undoubtedly help us to do this better, but we also know that tools are not omnipotent, they can only be part of it, and ultimately can make a major change in the use of these tools.

The problem is that these tools are growing too fast for people to learn to use them at a speed that can't keep up. So what can we do to fill the gap? A year ago we began to try to find the answer to the question. We will give our answers in this article by drawing on the collective experience of dozens of collaborative communities and research organizations.

Most of our companies have a range of standard tools to help us with team building, leadership, and management. For example, character testing, the establishment of skills files, set up team roles and so on. When you want to build a team, we need to consider these aspects of each member:

• Characteristics: Is this person introverted or extroverted? Is it adventurous or is it steady? Is it a thoughtful type of thinking or do you like to make a decision by making a head?
• Skills: in which direction are they specialized? Are they only experienced in this area or have they become experts in this field?
• Role: What role does the member play in this team to contribute to the team?
  In the past, our understanding of the role was a member's title, which meant that the member was "doing what", such as team leader, project manager, researcher, etc. When something needs to be decided, you'll find the team leader, and when you need to get the latest project status information, you'll go to the project manager, and when you need to study a problem, you'll find the right researcher.

But in today's market, the smartest ones are often not the ones that want to win through these management tools, but those that go beyond the way that team members think. The market is flooded with tools to help us quickly understand what team members are dealing with, but these tools don't tell us how these members think about these issues. Research shows that a team's way of thinking plays a decisive role in the team's performance.

So here we suggest that a team, in addition to giving the team members the traditional "What to do" role, also gives members the role of "How to think." Understand how other members of your team are thinking, and also let others know how you think, so that the whole team can become more collaborative, creative, and more efficient.

The meaning of the so-called collaboration is, at some point, an agreement between what you do and what your team goals are. But there is another point of view that is to make everyone's way of thinking and team goals agree.

So how do you assess the way you think about yourself and your team? We can find some frameworks to evaluate your personal way of thinking or how you affect others on a single-order basis. But we can't find any simple way to help you connect, communicate, and collaborate on your own way of thinking. So after a lot of hard work and trial-and-error, we developed a three-step approach that will provide you with practical and meaningful results.

• The first step: Find out the focus of your mind. The first thing you need to do is to find the point of focus that you think about in a particular context or environment. Are you more inclined to focus on new ideas, processes, actions, or people-to-people relationships? For example, every morning when you think about the day, you tend to think about the problems you need to solve this day, the plans you need today, the actions you need to take today, or the people you need to visit today? This is not to say that we can only choose one of the possibilities in real life, and here we just want to find out where the focus of your way of thinking falls. It's like saying when you think about going to a movie or reading a book, are you more inclined to see action, romance, drama, or sci-fi?

• Step two: Find the way to think. The next step is to find out whether your way of thinking is macro-oriented or microscopic, whether it is for the big picture or the details. One of the best ways to do this is to look at the meetings and what you find most annoying to you. Do you usually complain about meetings that are often bogged down in detail, or are you complaining that the meetings are too general and vague enough to be specific?
  These dimensions are a complement to the characteristics, skills, and traditional roles of the members. Some project managers tend to focus on workflow management, while others pay more attention to member management. Some outward-looking project managers are more inclined to think about the big picture, while others are more concerned with the details.

• Step Three: Consolidate two dimensions. Take a holistic look at the two dimensions above to find out how you think about working in any context or environment.

For example, in the direction of thinking about bigger picture:

• The Pioneer's way of thinking is to produce creative ideas.
• The planner's way of thinking is to design an efficient process system.
• The motivating person's way of thinking is to think about how to motivate others to take action.
• The way of thinking of an adhesive type of person is to think about how to build and strengthen a team connection.

And in the direction of attention to detail:

• The expert's way of thinking is to think about how to achieve the goal and how to understand the problem thoroughly.
• An optimized person's way of thinking is to think about how to improve productivity and improve efficiency.
• The producer's way of thinking is to think about how to get the job done and boost momentum.
• The coach's way of thinking is to think about how to train people and potential talent.

When you figure out who you are in that way of thinking, you'll understand what motivates you, understand why certain types of issues can make you feel challenging or make you feel dull, and also give you a clear idea of what important aspects you can improve to achieve your goals.

After you have figured out your way of thinking, you should share it with others, and let others share their own ways of thinking. In this way, the way of thinking can be a very useful tool for a team. For example, when you're building a team to start a new project, don't you want to know which members are easily motivated by the discussion of the big picture, and which members are completely at risk for this discussion? Don't you want to know which members like to delve into the details? Don't you want to know which members are easy to get through team dynamics (the term "team Dynamics" is the first concept proposed by K.lewin in the 1930 's, the main purpose of which is to explain all the interaction and behavior of group members within the group, and the motivation of the group means that the group itself is also a process of motivation and development) To be motivated by management?

As an example of the real world, if there is such a company, its entire leadership team will be the type of manager and leader of their own way of thinking. When viewing a heat map (heatmap-heat Map is a two-dimensional representation of the data in which the values are represented in color.) A simple heat map provides an immediate visual overview of the information. More sophisticated heat maps let viewers understand complex datasets. As a result, they found that they had a large number of members with a bigger picture way of thinking, as well as a large number of members (motivational and producer) who had a lot of thinking about action, but only a small number of members (planners and optimization) who were thinking about the process. So the team is very powerful in generating great ideas and motivating people to take action, but not in the details and efficiency of the work.

When this information is in hand, they begin to make more noise to the details of the members, and in the past the voices of these members tend to make the bigger picture-minded members of the pioneers and motivational people feel as if flies were flying in their ears.

Let's look at an example of an individual, such as a leader who has been working in an idea-flying department, such as a consultant team and a marketing department. By analysing his own way of thinking, he finds himself more susceptible to human relationships rather than ideas, and his way of thinking is more of an adhesive-oriented person than a pioneer, and more about using ideas to nurture relationships than to nurture ideas through relationships. This insight allows him to begin to move his focus from the original business development to customer relationship management, so that he is more energetic and cooperative spirit in the work.

The pace of change in today's business world is changing, and we have to find newer and better ways to connect and communicate. We all want to be able to collaborate better, and the challenge here is how to put it into action. Understanding how to collaborate more efficiently from a mindset rather than a "what to do" approach will be a viable and powerful step forward.

Note: public number: Techgogogo; blog http://techgogogo.com. This paper is compiled from HBR by Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder,

Why did you finish the project management book or do you not have a team?