What role you play in a team?

A team is a group that shares responsibility for producing something together. Simply working closely with each other, wearing the same shirts, does not make you a team. Teams are unique because each member cannot complete the work without the work of other members. So the roles of each team member plays are critical for building high-performing team. Especially for dynamic project or new teams, the “role” of the word is more worthy of our attention than “job”. The ability of a role is relatively simple needs. And every successful team needs a mix of skills and roles. Therefore, the project manager should focus on diversifying the team member roles, rather than solely evaluating members on their individual talents. Especially just having a set of individual stars is not the key to build high-performing team.

My former boss is an excellent leader. She is experienced at identify people’s talents, skills, personalities. She can always put the right people in the right position, exert their advantages and compose a diverse team. Usually, she defined the work needed to be completed for the project, recognized the roles and what skills are required, then analyzed the character and team roles of every team member. It is worth mentioning she used FPA (Four-colors Personality Analysis) test as a supplementary tool to better and get a deeper understanding of personality traits and the potential of each subordinate. This approach is according to Dr. Carol Ritberger, a world famous behavioral psychologist and author. FPA states that there are four distinct personality types in the world, and each one has a special color: Red or Orange, motivated by power; Blue, motivated by intimacy; Green, motivated by peace; and Yellow, motivated by fun. Each color with their own unique way of seeing situations, expressing themselves, solving problems, and interacting with people. FPA has been widely used it in recruiting and team management in the companies over the world, it effectively helps manager or employee themselves to find out their personal tendencies, weaknesses, what they need from their peers, how they react to certain situations, areas of personal growth and their ideal work situation. Further, he stresses that human’s character is inborn, people just have one or two main characters and others are influenced by a variety of complicated things, such as grow-up environment, life experience, education and so on. So you can also find a way to develop some personality traits of other colors based on FPA test result.

What color are you

In addition, one of the dimensions for determining whether a team is high-performing is capacity for continued cooperation. That is, team members want to work together in the future after accomplishing a project. They do not feel exhausted from all their resources, but get better at working together, they feel belonging and strive to learn from mistakes or from each other. So they can consistently continue to succeed.

If you are curious about FPA, please check the reference below, it has the test and results analysis.

Reference:

About FPA: https://general-psychology.knoji.com/which-color-personality-are-you-red-blue-green-or-yellow/