The Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile

Organizing Teams for Maximum Effectiveness

The Team Management Wheel is a registered trademark and is reproduced by kind permission of TMS Development International Ltd. (See www.tmsdi.com.)

What's your Team Management Profile?

Good teamwork is fundamentally important in many organizations. All too often, however, team members are chosen simply because they happen to be available for a particular project. So, have you ever been part of a team of hard-working and talented people, which has failed to achieve its goal?

This may have been because people were assigned roles that didn't use their strengths, or because the team didn't have the range of abilities needed.

We're not talking about technical skills here – it's usually easy to make sure that your team includes individuals with the necessary knowledge and experience. But it's harder to make sure the team has people who are good at the more general aspects of work – such as brainstorming, problem solving, decision-making, planning, implementing, and fact-checking. When a team includes members who are good at each of these different roles, it is far more likely to be effective.

If we assume that people tend to be better at doing things that they enjoy, managers need to understand each individual's preferences. They can then bring together a group of people who have the "right" strengths – strengths that complement and balance one another – and they can put people in the best position to use these strengths.

One way to do this is by using the Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile, developed by Dr Charles Margerison and Dr Dick McCann.

The Team Management Profile

The Team Management Profile is a psychometric tool (measuring things like aptitude and personality) that has been used in personal and team development for over two decades. The profile consists of 60 questions that explore how an individual at work prefers to:

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