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Charles Margerison & Dick McCann: Team Management

Charles Margerison and Dick McCann developed one of the leading tools to help managers with team performance.

When you want your team to perform well, there are two approaches you can take:

  1. Manage them well
  2. Select them for a good balance

There are tools available for each, though there are fewer to help with selecting a balanced team. Of those there are, without a doubt, Meredith Belbin‘s Team Roles is the best known by far.

But it is not the only game in town. You might choose it for its simplicity. But for sophistication, let’s look at the work of Charles Margerison and Dick McCann.

Charles Margerison and Dick McCann
Charles Margerison and Dick McCann

Charles Margerison

Charles Margerison grew up in the 1940s in the UK. He studied economics at the University of London School of Economics, securing a BSc. He remained to research a PhD in educational psychology. In 1967, he moved to Bradford University, and in 1971 was awarded his second PhD, in social science.

Some time after this, he moved to Australia, and joined the staff of University of Queensland. He was Professor of Management from 1982 to 1989.

From 1982, he worked with Dick McCann to research team management. And, in 1985, they co-founded Team Management Systems. He remains a part of the business, as well as being a director and President of Amazing People Worldwide.

Charles Margerison has written many books, including one with Dick McCann.

Dick McCann

Dick McCann also grew up in the 1940s, but in Australia. From 1961-5, he studied for a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, at the University of Queensland. He followed this with a PhD. In 1969, he moved to England, to work for BP Chemicals. There, he worked as a research engineer, and also trained as a certified accountant.

In 1974, he returned to Australia, to become a research fellow at the University of Sydney. In 1982, he started his collaboration with Charles Margerison.

In 1985, Dick McCann became the Managing Director of Team Management Systems in Australia. At the same time, his co-founder focused on European and US expansion.

Dick McCann stepped down from his director role in 2015, but remains involved in research. He is author of four books. They include Team Management: Practical New Approaches, which he co-wrote with Margerison.

Margerison and McCann’s Contribution

Margerison and McCann have developed a fair number of interconnecting models. There is too much to attempt to describe them here. They include work on:

  • Workplace values
  • Influencing skills
  • Opportunities and Obstacles

We’ll focus on their most widely used model, the Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel. But before we can get to it, we must first understand the work that underpins it: the Margerison-McCann Types of Work Wheel.

Types of Work

Margerison and McCann interviewed with over 300 managers. They wanted to find what made a difference between good and poor performance.

When they assessed the team members’ activities, their data fell into eight work functions. They describe them as:

Advising
Gathering and reporting information

Innovating
Creating and experimenting with ideas

Promoting
Exploring and presenting opportunities

Developing
Assessing and testing the applicability of new approaches

Organising
Establishing and implementing ways of making things work

Producing
Concluding and delivering outputs

Inspecting
Controlling and auditing the working of systems

Maintaining
Upholding and safeguarding standards and processes

From their work, they suggest that different jobs have different critical functions. These need people with the right skills and competencies, to perform them well.

Margerison and McCann present these types of work in a trade-marked Types of Work Wheel, which we present here with a link back to the TMS website.

Margerison-McCann Types of Work Wheel
Margerison-McCann Types of Work Wheel http://www.tmsdi.com

Critical Work Functions

Let’s compare two examples that they offer. For each, they give three ‘critical work functions’. These make the difference between good and poor job performance.

Finance and Accounting
The critical work work functions are: Organizing, Producing and Inspecting.

Design/R&D jobs
The critical work functions are Advising, Innovating and Developing.

Team Management

From here, it isn’t hard to see how Margerison and McCann relate their work functions to individuals’ work preferences.

This creates their concept of ‘role preferences’. These are the roles in a team that people are most likely to enjoy. When people’s critical work functions match their work preferences, they are likely to:

  • be happier in their job
  • perform better

Team Role Preferences

The role preferences are:

Reporter-Adviser
Supportive. Enjoys collecting and sharing information. Knowledgeable and flexible.

Creator-Innovator
Imaginative, creative, and able to embrace complexity and uncertainty. Enjoys researching new ideas.

Explorer-Promoter
Enjoys exploring possibilities, looking for new opportunities, and then selling them to colleagues. Persuasive, fast thinking, and easily bored.

Assessor-Developer
Analytical and objective. Enjoys ideas, developing and testing new opportunities, and making them work.

Thruster-Organizer
Highly results-focused, Likes to set up systems, push forward and see results. Analytical, but quick to make decisions.

Concluder-Producer
Highly practical. Enjoys systematic planning and work processes. Takes pride in efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of outputs.

Controller-Inspector
Enjoys focusing on and controlling the detailed aspects of their work. Good at checking and enforcing standards, but less skilled with informal influencing.

Upholder-Maintainer
Likes to uphold standards and values. Can be conservative in the face of change, but has a strong sense of purpose.

How Margerison and McCan Identified their Role Preferences

Margerison and McCann worked with four measures related to how people approached work. They were strongly influenced in the choices by Carl Jung’s psychological types. So you’ll see a strong relationship to the work of Isabel Briggs-Myers and Katharine Briggs.

Margerison and McCann’s measures are:

  • How people prefer to relate with others
  • How people prefer to gather and use information
  • How people prefer to make decisions
  • How people prefer to organize themselves and others

These measures lead to RIDO scales (Relationships, Information, Decisions, Organization). And the scales showed a strong relationship to the Types of Work.

Like the Types of Work Wheel, they present their team role preferences as a Team Management Wheel. Again, we present this trademarked model with a link to the TMS website.

Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel
Margerison-McCann Team Management Wheel – http://www.tmsdi.com

The Linker Role

At the centre of the wheel is the ‘Linker’ role. Every jobholder needs this role to be successful in their job. It involves integrating and co-ordinating other people’s work. This is both within the team, and with external players.

This role is particularly important for the team leader, as you’d expect.

Linking comprises thirteen skills:

  • six people skills
  • five task skills
  • for the team leader, two leadership skills

These, however, are the subject of a whole other model, the Linking Leader Model.

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Isabel Briggs-Myers & Katharine Briggs: Type Indicator (MBTI)

Psychologists and, before them, philosophers have spent centuries trying to divide us into types. Whilst their attempts have had somewhat less of the hocus-pocus and downright prejudice to them than the racial typographies of some early ethnographers, many systems have advanced little beyond Hippocrates’ theory of four temperaments based on the bodily humours.

Rigour in Personality Testing

It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists had the statistical tools to analyse and understand personality with any rigour. Even so, the strongest, most widely used personality classification system – the so-called ‘Big Five’ Personality Factors – is still a matter of much research and debate as we reach approach the third decade of the twenty first century.

So perhaps the biggest change that the twentieth century wrought was not in reliability, but in accessibility and application. Personality assessment tools became widely popular and, through the second half of that century, widely used in workplaces to support selection, group development, team-building, personal development, marital counselling, and a range of other uses. Not all of the uses have been endorsed by the developers of these tools. And not all tools are widely supported by the more rigorously trained academic community of psychology.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

And so we come to Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs-Myers. Their tool, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, is very widely used. Every day, trainers and development professionals introduce it to new cohorts of staff and managers. These employees often take full self-evaluation questionnaire and are then told what this means about them and their colleagues.

The moments of insight are a joy to watch. The MBTI certainly seems to capture something of our personality, and explain something of our behaviours. But does it? This remarkably resilient and successful tool started through nothing less than a mother’s desire to understand her daughter’s choice of husband. What mother can’t empathise with that?

Katherine Briggs & Isabel Briggs-Myers
Katherine Briggs & Isabel Briggs-Myers

Katherine Cook Briggs

Katherine Cook was born in Michigan, in 1875 and was home schooled. Her father was an academic. She went to college to study agriculture and stayed on as a teacher and academic. She married prominent physicist and administrator, Lyman Briggs.

As her daughter grew up, Briggs became interested in children’s educational and social development. This led her to create a vocation test for children, which she thought could guide a child’s future well-being. This thinking focused on four personality types: meditative, spontaneous, executive, and sociable. These are still present among the wider set of 16 MBTI types.

Her quest was to find one unifying theory, and she considered ideas from many philosophers, scientists, and psychologists. Her own big breakthrough was when she discovered the work of Carl Jung. He advocated for four principal psychological functions by which we experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. This, along with our orientations to extroversion or introversion, give us the Jungian Personality Types, which Briggs and her daughter developed into their own type indicator model.

Isabel Briggs-Myers

Isabel Briggs was born in 1897, and was home schooled by her mother. Following her mother’s discovery of Jung’s work, Briggs-Myers (now married) became interested in the work too, focusing on how character and personality influence the type of work we might thrive in. Together, they developed their framework and the questionnaire that goes with it. They began a long program of observation and discussion, refining their interpretation of Jung’s work.

During World War II, Briggs Myers wanted to help reduce conflict among people, but more pragmatically also to understand why some people hated their jobs in the military and others thrived.

It wasn’t until 1945 that they did some solid empirical research. With the help of Lyman Briggs, they ran their first MBTI assessment on around 5,500 George Washington Medical School students.   Briggs Myers studied the results for years, searching for patterns among dropouts and successful students.

The Outcome of the Work

Briggs was the primary driving force and inspiration behind the creation of the MBTI from Jung’s original work. Briggs-Myers created the physical test itself, and did the work on validation and interpretation.

The result was one of the best-known and widely used personality tools, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Wikipedia reports that an estimated 50 million people have taken the MBTI. Whilst it is not widely endorsed by the academic community, and is based on largely desk-research and theorisation, rather than empirical trials, the MBTI remans popular. This is doubtless due to the ease of superficial understanding.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – MBTI

The MBTI classifies personality types along four pairs of categories. Briggs-Myers and Briggs claimed that we all fit into one of the 16 possible combinations of personality type, and that we have a dominant preference in each pair.

MBTI - Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - 16 Types
MBTI – Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – 16 Types

The Type Indicator is a test  to assess which personality type offers the ‘best fit’ with the assertion that knowing your personality type that will help you succeed in life. The three original pairs of preferences from Jung’s typology (Extraversion and Introversion, Sensing and Intuition, Thinking and Feeling) are supplemented by a fourth pair (Judging and Perceiving), added by Briggs-Myers.

This is a phenomenally rich model and there are many excellent resources online. So here, we’ll only attempt a very superficial outline of the types.

Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)
This axis refers to where where we get our energy from, and where we direct our attention. This can be  on people and things in the outer world; extraversion. Or it can be on ourselves and our inner world; introversion.

Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)
This axis refers to how we like to deal with information. People with a Sensing preference tend to focus on the basic information, whilst the Intuiting type prefers to interpret the information, and add meaning.

Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
This axis refers to how we like to make decisions. Thinkers like to make objective decisions, using logic and rationality. The feeling style is more subjective, considering special circumstances, and how people feel.

Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)
This axis refers to how we like to dealt with experiences and circumstances. The judging style prefers to make a choice, and stick with it. The Perceiver likes to stay open to new information and options, and respond flexibly.

Assessment of the MBTI

The MBTI correlates poorly with more robustly researched psychological traits or types models, like the Big Five Personality factors. So why do so many people readily endorse their MBTI type? The answer, I think, lies in a combination of two factors.

Firstly, while not a strong correlation with rigorous typographies, it is derived from extensive observation and the factors that make up the MBTI undeniably exist – regardless of whether they are truly the ‘right’ fundamental elements of personality.

And secondly, we have our old friend, the Forer Effect. This is the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements are highly general and could apply to many people. If this sounds worrying, it is. The Forer Effect (sometimes known as the Barnum Effect (after showman and huckster PT Barnum) is also the basis of much mentalism and fraudulent cold reading.

The MBTI definitely has value as a personal and executive development tool. But if the trainers and specialists who deploy it do not make its limitations clear, they are doing your organisation a disservice.

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