Last week, Javier Bajer paid us a visit by phone from Argentina, where he is on a speaking tour. When not in his native country or talking to us, this well-known consultant helps the senior management teams of such global giants as HP and Shell to become more effective.

We might have waited for Javier to come back to London (and we will meet him there in person soon, to repeat the exercise). But given that we only have six months, we needed his help fast – to speed up the process of turning us into an efficient team (which, as the Lego exercise clearly showed, we are not yet).

Javier is not a fan of personality assessment tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). He doesn’t think that people are as set in their ways as these tests suggest, but that their belief systems, for instance, can – and should – change.

It is crucial for a team to avoid members’ beliefs becoming set in stone, he argues, particularly with respect to each other. “If beliefs such as ‘he is too technical’ or ‘he doesn’t know anything about marketing’ become a pattern, a team is bound to get stuck.”

Getting team members to talk openly about themselves, thus reaching a higher level of trust, is not just a way to avoid such blockage, but to help teams under high pressure to produce results. As a kind of catalyst for openness, his company, Possibilate, has come up with a tool called Leadership Alignment Tool (LAT), which looks rather like a child’s wooden toy.

Its purpose is to help team members find out whether they are out of whack, or “misaligned” in Javier’s words. First he made us jot down our “beliefs”, “intentions”, “promises” and “actions”. Then we had to move the four blocks of the LAT (each representing one of the above categories) in such a way as to show any perceived misalignments between them. Finally, we explained the blocks’ positions and come up with ways to get them better aligned.

Without going into details, the LAT is not easy to use, as Javier had warned us before. Some of us are still not sure whether we have actually understood what we are supposed to do. But by the time we finished running through everyone’s “misalignments”, we had definitely achieved, at times very emotionally, a heightened sense of understanding about ourselves, other team members and the project.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Innovation, Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.