Personal Maps for Teams

Working in teams, or at least in good teams is a great privilege. You share a goal with friends and co-workers and get to work on that goal together. You're not alone in your efforts and you're part of something bigger. You get to learn from others and perhaps teach others. 

From an organizational and a personal level, teams also provides more flexibility. Individuals can bring their strengths to the table while have their team members help with their weaknesses. Without a team, an individual must be able to perform all tasks he owns on his own.

But, to get to work in good teams we need to first form / build good teams. And, teams are made of individuals so we need to start with looking at each person that is in the team (or may be in the team).

In previous post [Personal Maps] - we looked at using Personal Maps for evaluating individuals. However, Personal Maps are also important when forming a team. We can create a Personal Map for the team (as a team) - what is the role and what are the responsibilities for the team, what skill set does it need and have. We look at the Personal Maps of the individuals in order to see if the team of individuals satisfies the team's needs.

By working in teams - we get a lot more flexibility compared to having individuals work on their own. When defining the "Role" circle for the team's overall mission or responsibility, we can break the role in more than one way into individual roles to match individual needs and abilities. Also as a team we have the ability to develop new skills in individuals.

Overall, the team environment provides us with flexibility regarding which people we can bring into the team in order to make both the individuals and the team successful and happy.

The "Personal Map" concept can also be used at a higher level - forming teams into larger organizations. As the organization grows, we have even more flexibility - we can look at teams as individuals within larger teams - and continue to do so recursively.