It’s almost the end of the year. You’ve just been assigned a major project that will have global impact and visibility in 2014. You’re in charge and everyone is counting on you. The first thing you’ll have to do is assemble a Dream Team that can knock this project out of the park.
So, where do you start?
Don Fornes of Softwareadvice.com came up with four distinct psychological profiles for assembling the best and brightest. These are the types of personalities you should be looking for to make your project a success:
• Giver
• Champ (with a Chip)
• Matrix Thinker
• Savant
Here are the positive traits of your new team, as well as the challenges they will face based upon their unique skills:
The Giver
What Makes Them Great | Challenges They Face |
|---|---|
Loyalty to their company | Difficulty with confrontation |
Always giving 110 percent | Burnout from giving too much |
Team-player mentality | Unrealistic expectations of others |
Strict followers of the rules | Potential passive-aggressiveness |
The Champ
What Makes Them Great | Challenges They Face |
|---|---|
Optimistic and positive salespeople | Overconfidence and narcissism |
Confidence in their abilities | Clashes with authority |
Strong drive to succeed | High job turnover |
Great interpersonal skills | Resentfulness, based on the Chip |
The Matrix Thinker
What Makes Them Great | Challenges They Face |
|---|---|
Creativity and artistic expression | Distraction and disorganization |
Great problem-solving skills | Tendency towards conflicts |
Ambition and visionary capabilities | Information overload |
Connect the dots between ideas | Confusion amidst ambiguity |
The Savant
What Makes Them Great | Challenges They Face |
|---|---|
Become experts in their chosen field | Clash with authority |
Extreme perfectionism | Extreme perfectionism |
Love to learn, and learn easily | Social anxiety and awkwardness |
Focus and determination | Focus can be too narro |
The key to putting your team together will be in understanding that these are only psychological profiles, not real people. Most successful people have a number of overlapping skills and behaviors that could fall into multiple profiles. This also means that their challenges may be more complex than presented in each category.
The moral here is that profiling will give you a great starting point for assembling a Dream Team. But in the real world, you’ll have to determine the right mix and cultural fit for each team member.
And that is the hardest thing to do.
