What happens if a team doesn’t have enough implementers?

Not Enough Implementers?

The Team

A medium-sized European manufacturing company strategically hired a new managing director to help the company find a needed breakthrough product with the hopes of bringing it to the market. In doing so, the managing director held the responsibility of assembling a team that used their skills to develop an exciting new product concept. Despite his hard working efforts, his team was not being reliable and frequently missed meetings suggesting that nothing important had to be done.

With a successful business comes a healthy, balanced team with many different skill sets. Unfortunately for many businesses that have specific roles, there tends to be an overload of one skill set which definitely occurred in this case. Let’s investigate!

What the Profile Scatter Diagram Shows

At first glance The Basadur Profile shows this team, although light on people is particularly weak when it comes to implementers. This could affect the ability for the team to execute.

Our observations:

To explore what the team was missing in order to be successful, the managing director suggested that the team take the Basadur profile test and its results spoke meaning on how their team worked.

The final analysis exemplified that all of the team members selected by the managing director were generators or conceptualizers. The overload of these skills resulted in a team that was biased towards utilizing knowledge for ideation, making it strong for developing new ideas.

Unsure of what Conceptualizers and Generators are? Let us briefly outline the characteristics of both of these concepts.

Conceptualizers tend to:

• Like coming up with problems and defining ideas
• Like to see the big picture
• Form quick connections, see opportunities and benefits
• Don’t like to move forward until situations are funny understood and problems are well defined
• Want theories to be sound and precise

Generators can be characterized as:

• Get things started, gather information, ask questions
• Sense problems, imagine possibilities, see opportunities
• View things from different perspectives
• Prefer generating new ideas rather than evaluating existing ones
• See relevance in almost everything

After identifying the characteristics of conceptualizers and generators, you can see that these individuals excel at generating new ideas and seeing future opportunities; however, they do not want to move forward with a project until situations are fully understood. This can really help to explain why their ideas were never fully completed.

Unfortunately, the team lacked optimizers and implementers. If the managing director trained their team on how to develop some of the traits that implementers and optimizers have, they will be able to successfully develop the new businesses product concept!

Things to consider:

In this case study, the managing director came to realize that in order to bring a new product concept to the market, he needed to improve the team’s orientation towards utilizing knowledge for evaluation.

Why does he have to do this?

Its simple! When change frequently starts and stops, it may mean that there is an incomplete team. Since this team was lacking implementers and optimizers, there was a tendency to stop completing the project at hand rather than generating more ideas to successfully complete the project. It is crucial for ambitious leaders to anticipate and build the best possible teams to move innovative thinking all the way into effective implementation. 

If this happens to you, what can you do?

One of the best pieces of advice for a business that may be struggling with the same issue is to train existing employees on how to become better at optimizing and implementing! Now you may ask yourself, how do we do this? You can either incentivize people for optimizing and implementing OR you can add people onto your team who tend to characterize the traits of optimizers and implementers.