Understanding what we want from work as employees is as important as knowing what our workplace expects from us.
Some people want structure and direction, while others thrive without it. If a manager knows, for example, that someone not only performs 3-4x better w/ rigorous delegation but that they’re also much happier being delegated to, they’ve uncovered a powerful alignment that’s good for both business and employee. Likewise, some people are wired to roam where they’re needed most, so the style of management they need is more akin to opening doors than explicit direction.
The challenge for employers is finding the right alignment for each employee without grinding the business to a laborious halt doing so. The challenge for employees is to to figure out how we’re wired to work, and working candidly with employers to make our jobs as fulfilling as possible.
Moving beyond job descriptions
A simple, effective tool that’s helped us figure out how people are wired is a short character assessment called Thinking Wavelengths. The assessment places people on a spectrum ranging from task master (the assessment actually calls them “Grinders”) to conceiver and, with the entire company plotted, we can get a full picture of how to tailor management style on both the individual and team level.
Task masters, for example, get fulfillment working on clearly defined assignments and bringing closure. Conceivers like blank canvases and high-stakes decision making. There’s a range of archetypes between the extremes as well and every company requires a unique mix of people and corresponding management tactics.
We use other tools as well (DiSC, Strengthsfinder), but just as important is good old fashioned conversation and, ultimately, a document (we’ve begun referring to ours as canvases) for each person that speaks to their unique strengths, missions, and objectives at work.
Explicit insights make explicit work
Once we understand how an individual is wired (at Kin, we share these insights across the company) and what their unique mission is with us, we can get more explicit in communicating and managing one another, which saves time in a few ways.
When something just isn’t working well with a team member, we first look to whether they’re well aligned with type of management and work they’ve been receiving. Are we being too vague with our expectations? Likewise, are we delegating too much detail to someone who finds fulfillment in connecting the dots?
We also can cut to the chase in one-on-one employee reviews. A helpful side effect of knowing what people want from their employer lays the runway for meaningful work objectives and troubleshooting challenges together.
Intra-team communication thrives too – knowing who will work well in which types of situations (think quick fire problem solving, or long term design planning) helps keep meetings short and people focused.
Exhibit A: me
I’m a conceiver (I’m a Di in DiSC, another assessment we use) and I’m also the company founder – it means my words carry a lot of weight with the company but that I tend to speak in broad, sweeping terms. At times, that’s led to our company being full on strategy and ideas (the what and why of a company’s mission), but short on operational clarity (the how) which is frustrating for the task masters on our team.
So, in our case, knowing how I’m wired has taught me to be mindful of how other’s perceive my ideas and broad visions, as a lot of people on our team will understand it, but spin their wheels figuring out how to operationalize it all, which leads me to the second insight. In terms of what I want to get out of work, I’m happiest when I’m helping my team see big challenges, creating futures for our product and business and, naturally, optimizing our team’s culture.
All of the work that’s gone into learning how I’m wired and letting others know about it has shined a light on our need to staff people wired to operationalize strategies plans and schedules which, in turn, keep our task masters productive and fulfilled. I’m happier, they’re happier, and work gets easier.
Finding baselines for humans working with humans
There’s no fail-proof recipe for getting a team resonating perfectly. What we reach for at Kin though is a baseline to describe each individual’s strengths, challenges, and needs in relation to everybody else. It’s made us quicker to the punch in figuring out what works and what doesn’t on a per-employee, team, and organizational level. In a company wholly dependent on the quality of the people we have building our business, any extra time it takes to individually tailor each employee’s role and contributions is time more than well spent – it’s critical to our business succeeding.