Category Archives: Team Building

Micropost: Asset Based Staff Development

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Ok, so i’m vaguely in the middle of writing up a post about Asset Based Community Development. It’s going in a strange direction so i’m not completely convinced it will work yet! Anyway, I was in the middle of writing about ABCD when I had this idea, and going back to my earlier blog post about lightning talks I thought hmmm, this should be a micropost.

Essentially it goes like this

Asset Based Community Development is a community building process where you take a neighbourhood, you actually talk to the people 1 who live there about the things they care about, the things they can do, the things they care enough about to actually use their skills to change. You build up this knowledge into an asset map of the strengths and opportunities within a community. That asset map then forms a basis for connecting skills, people and assets together to do more than they can do on their own.

The aim is to build up agency and connectivity within the community to a point where people actively start joining together to be more than they can be as individuals.

Build more connections

This is a great idea. There are hundreds of examples of this approach improving and strengthening communities. These range from neighbours sharing gardens right through to communities forming youth groups to actively reduce anti social behaviour.

Which led me to thinking about whether ABCD can be used within different kinds of communities, for different purposes perhaps. Could it be used within workplaces? What if I just substitute the word community with organisation? or with staff 2?

Enter Asset Based Staff Development

So with a simple twist of the words we have a slightly different concept. Nothing revolutionary, just a reframed vision.

So now, when it comes to organisational development, we stop thinking about the needs of the organisation, the skills gaps and resource deficiencies. We start thinking about the strengths of the organisation, the key skills and the joint working opportunities.

How do we do this? We ask Staff some simple questions:

  • What do you care about in our organisation? (What do you love, What are you concerned about? What are you interested in?)
  • Which of those things do you care about enough, enjoy enough 3 to actively do more of?
  • What skills could you provide to help do more of them?
  • What do you need to help you achieve this?

And to be fair these are examples – the aim is to start from a point of appreciative rather than critical inquiry.

We use this to build a map of the opportunities – groups of shared interests who want to join up, projects needing multiple, complementary skills, ideas without a team to lift them off the ground.

And finally – we just make those connections happen. Maybe its through innovation days, maybe its through free afternoons or maybe it’s just a chat over coffee 4.

I think the result of this could be a stronger, more resilient, more connected workforce. A workforce which builds on the strengths it already has, rather than tries to infill the weaknesses.

Its an easy process to twist

I suppose we don’t have to stop at staff. You could perhaps widen it to circles of any interest, though for me staff communities (especially in local gov) have a lot in common with neighbourhood communities. The range of interests and focuses is very diverse, the skills and strengths of individuals are often hidden behind the day job, and most of all, it’s very easy not to connect with the people outside your service.

What do you think? Could it work? Could we build better organisations just by mapping our assets before our deficiencies? The answer, for me, is yes 5 – and in some ways I have already experienced it via things like unconferences and ABCD workshops.

 

Notes:

  1. Really! Talking to people! How Novel! ↩
  2. the plural ↩
  3. yes there will always be the unfun work to do too ↩
  4. tea in my case, or it just isn’t on! ↩
  5. yes yes yes yes damn yes ↩

Packtypes: Just another dog in the pack?

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So as part of ongoing change in the Policy and Transformation team that I work in, 1 the old team Tinker 2 has arrived and rolled up with a ‘let’s build a new team, let’s transform the way we work, let’s get to know our colleagues‘ cart. I actually always welcome tinkering with an open mind as it usually presents an opportunity to move in a potentially new, innovative direction 3 and to contribute thoughts usually held at the back of my head!

Packtypes Logo

Packtypes logo

One of the opportunities we’ve identified for developing the teamwork side of things is to consider how well we know each other, what our personalities are like and how we might communicate with each other better. It’s the typical Myers-Briggs ‘understand yourself, understand your colleagues‘ type scenario.

We’ve chosen to use ‘Packtypes‘ for our team which is an approach to personality assessment / emotional intelligence that promises a lot 4 and delivers it all through a tiny deck of cards.

Essentially instead of going through a detailed psychometric questionnaire, the cards themselves are used to determine the type of person you are, expressed via the dazzling metaphor of some rather haggered looking dogs. I think it’s based on Jungian psychology (though the book never really explains the science – therefore failing to reach at least one of the ‘packtypes’ it promotes).

Step out of the curtain for second

I should probably say here that I don’t have any clue about copyright here 5 so I may be stepping on the wrong strand of the web by discussing it but hey, I only plan to discuss the process and my own results and I certainly don’t plan to completely criticise (or praise) the approach so i’m hoping they might let me off a little! 6. I also won’t go beyond the surface detail of the profile just in case.

Back to Packypes.

The deck of cards contains 64 positive words describing a personality trait like ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘challenging’. Each word is associated with an image of a specific breed of dog, printed on the reverse of the card. Each breed or ‘packtype 7‘ is associated with specific personality traits. The deck comes with a book on how to make sense of it all.

One type of Packtypes pack

One type of Packtypes pack

With that in mind, the process of determining the ‘type’ of person you are works like this:

  1. Take the pack of cards with the words facing towards you.
  2. Select 12 words that best describe you in your chosen role (e.g. the ‘work’ you, the ‘home’ you, the ‘blogger’ you.)
  3. Turn the cards over to find the 12 pictures of packtypes with their corresponding breed.
  4. Sum the packtypes by breed (e.g. 4 hounds 8, 4 retrievers, 4 mongrels 9)
  5. Interpret your horoscope reading using one 10 of the helpful books.

I jest with that last point. I found that the process really is quite interesting to do, and unlike a horoscope it was uncannily accurate. I’m sceptical by nature, so I became a little suspicious that the pack was designed in a way so that every reading will result in that uncannilly accurate feeling. However, it turns out you can also ‘packtype’ other people 11 so we tried this in one of the team meetings.

I packtyped my colleague and somewhat surprisingly, despite choosing a completely different set of words, the profile turned out very similiar. He did the same to me and again, a broadly similiar result to my own self assessment. Perhaps not so easily dismissed then.

I know you are, you said you are, so what am I?

So i’m sure your now itching to know 12: what type of person was I? That, my friend is a story for another day though…

Ar, ok go on then. Having followed the process I came out with the following 12 words: analytical, imaginative, enthusiastic, resourceful, caring, considered, original, rational, principled, genuine, understanding, trusting. I turned the cards over 13, and was quite surprised with the initial results. The book says that numbers are important, so in order of size I came out with 3 Coachdogs, 2 Retrievers, 2 Pointers, 2 Hounds, 1 Mastiff, 1 Terrier, 1 Sheepdog. A very varied mix!

But what does it mean?

A good question! The book suggests you ignore the 1′s (At least to begin with). So in order of relevance:

  • Coachdog (my dominant influence): Relationships, empowerment, consensus
  • Pointer (lesser influence): Analysis, facts, working out the right answer
  • Hound (lesser influence): Creativity, ideas and unearthing new opportunities.
  • Retriver (lesser influence): Process, Principles, Trust and continuous improvement

The book also comes with a neat diagram reflecting where these breeds lie on an axis of facts and certainty through to new ideas and risk taking, or people and emotion through to results and action. You can use it to map where your personality supposedly sits as each dog lies in a given position. I sketched mine on my phone.

Packtypes Me

That blob is the me inside of me

Surprising to me, I spanned a wide range on the diagram. It suggests that the people element is really important to me, that I ground myself in facts and certainty but that I am still open to new ideas and risk taking. If you want to communicate with me you should go with the benefits to people first, though it helps to be a new idea, and be grounded in robust research.

The risk taking / new ideas side is relatively new to me. I will secretly admit to having done packtypes before and previously I very much fell in the bottom left corner. So it has changed since that time. I wonder how much the new aspects have come from my recent attempts to grow?

 

This is the great thing that I like in packtypes. You are free to redo it, to learn new things, to change yourself and redo it. Want to be more results/action? Feel free to make your way there. So long as ultimately you remain honest to yourself when picking the cards it should be reflective.

Overall this time I do think it’s feasibly accurate assessment of my broad personality. I look forward to doing it again at some stage.

A few extra thoughts

In discussions with my colleague we agreed that there was a lot of subjectivity in choosing the words. I interpreted ‘challenging’ in an entirely different way for example. There are also complexities around priming (what happened before you packtyped?), avoidance (would you really call yourself ‘inspirational’?), and team pressures (do you want to pick words in front of your colleagues?).

So that is packtypes in a very brief nutshell

I’ve purposely avoided getting into the depth of it in this post. I think that its only fair that packtypes get to keep their hard earned copyright. At £40 a pack on their public facing store though, it’s there to try and it sort of fits to me in the very nice – ‘cheap enough not to dissapoint if it’s a gimmick, but if it does deliver then it will pay itself back the world over‘ area. Do you really need a pack of cards to transform your relationships? Probably not. Is it fun and interesting to try? Yes, it is! Will it help me in my work? Most definitely. I’ve already got my manager begging for his dinner 14.

Notes:

  1. Soon to be Corporate Development & Engagement Team though that’s unconfirmed and may change (I actually like it more I think) ↩
  2. “A tinker’s debt is always paid: Once for any simple trade. Twice for freely-given aid. Thrice for any insult made.” – Patrick Rothfuss ↩
  3. innovation doesn’t happen without space ↩
  4. actually it promises an awful lot – like transforming your entire existence from it’s clearly boring one to your potentially awesome, better, one ↩
  5. any weekly blog clubbers want to take up a challenge to lay out the rules? ↩
  6. Seriously – if you are a copyright terrier you are welcome to contact me if discussing this is not allowed. I will amend, obfuscate, remove or otherwise! ↩
  7. it is just a metaphor so associations with real dogs should really be avoided ↩
  8. If you get 12 hounds, Elvis appears to sing a classic ↩
  9. Not really a packtype ↩
  10. yes, there’s more than one! You can get books specifically for parenting, teaching too ↩
  11. You can packtype anything apparently. Like a block of tasty cheese ↩
  12. either that or fleas ↩
  13. a little apprehensively to be honest, there’s always the worry that your results might disturb you I think. ↩
  14. come on! it had to end with a bad dog joke! ↩