2．
Just as team members today have assigned doing roles, there should also be thinking roles. Knowing how other members of your team and organization think — and others knowing how you think — can help promote efficiency. So how should you evaluate how you and your team think? After a lot of trial-and-error, we developed a three-step method that delivers practical and meaningful results.
Focus. Do you tend to pay the most attention to ideas, process, action, or relationships? For example, in the morning as you think about the day ahead, do you tend to think about the problems you need to solve, the plans you need to make, the actions you need to take, or the people you need to see? This isn’t about picking one to the exclusion (排除) of the other. It’s about where your focus naturally lands.
Orientation (方向). A good way to identify your orientation is thinking about what tends to bother you in meetings. Are you more likely to complain about getting dragged into the weeds or about things being too general and not specific enough? These dimensions are complementary (补充的) to personality, skills, and traditional roles.
Combination. By combining these two dimensions you can know about the thinking style at work in whatever context or setting you chose. When you know your thinking style, you know what naturally energizes (激发) you, why certain types of problems are challenging or boring, and what you can do to improve in areas that are important to reaching your goals. Once you know your style, it helps to share it with others, and have others share theirs with you. In this way, your thinking style becomes a useful tool — a kind of social currency — for the team. Imagine you put together a team to work on a new initiative (行动). Wouldn’t you like to know who is energized by big-picture strategy discussions and who finds them frustrating? Who likes to work on the details of the execution? And who is energized by managing the team dynamics?
The landscape of business is changing rapidly, and we have to find new and better ways to connect and communicate. We all want to work better together; the challenge is actually making it happen. Understanding collaboration (合作) through the lens of thinking rather than doing is a practical and powerful step forward.
What Kind of Thinker Are You? |
Introduction |
◆ Both assigned doing roles and thinking roles are (1) important among team members. ◆ Team members knowing how each other think can be more (2) . |
Three steps in (3) thinking styles |
◆ The first step is to identify the (4) of your thinking in a particular context. ◆ It is not about making a (5) , but about finding where your focus naturally lands. |
The next step is to notice what you really complain about, the general things or the (6) ones. |
◆ The third step is to (7) these two dimensions and see your thinking style at work. ◆ Knowing your thinking style contributes to the (8) of thinking styles among the team members. |
Conclusion |
◆ To work better, we have to strengthen connection and (9) . ◆ Understanding (10) we think can help us work better together. |