Improving Teams - Insights or Intuition?

Improving Teams - Insights or Intuition?

Perhaps you have identified that you want to focus on how your team is working together and the results and impact the team is achieving in your organisation.  Perhaps you want to shift the reputation that the team has within the business or move away from siloed working to a more collaborative approach. Maybe you need your team to collaborate better together in a context where you have hybrid ways of working and working from home practices.  It could even be that you want more engagement and buy-in from everyone in the team given the schedule of work you have ahead of you.  Regardless of the motivation to see a shift in how your team is currently operating, what's a more useful approach, using Insights or our Intuition?

My Dad was a great 'do it yourselfer' and I was often his helper, whether it was building a fence, a deck, or any of the other numerous building projects he undertook. I always remember his words of wisdom, 'measure twice, cut once'.

When I was younger I don't think I really understood what this meant, it was just something Dad would say. As I got older I realised that if you wanted to minimize errors and be more precise in what you were doing,  then there was value in measuring at least once!

It didn't always mean things turned out perfectly, but what it did do was prevent some of those silly mistakes we can make when we just rush into working on a solution.

Couple this upbringing with 22 years of working with engineers, scientists, researchers, etc. it's fair to say that part of my DNA is making sure we are really clear on the problem, challenge, or opportunity we are trying to solve, and then measuring to get well-validated data so we know exactly where we are now - our starting point. It's from this data about either ourselves or our teams, that we get Insights.

Oxford Languages defines Insight as - the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something.

When it comes to increasing our awareness either about ourselves or our teams, we inherently have blindspots and we often run on automatic pilot which means we aren't always conscious about 'how we do what we do'. Given that humans are sense-making machines, we often 'make stuff up' when we don't have a full picture by calling on previous experiences and overlaying that information onto the current situation. The problem, of course, is the two situations aren't the same. In these situations we have relied on intuition and made assumptions about what is really going on.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines intuition as - (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts.

You can see the problem with starting a leadership or team journey just based on intuition right? There will be many different feelings and emotions about what might be going on and all of those perspectives will be different for each individual who offers them. This is because their perspective is based on their own experiences and emotions and not all of that might be relevant to the current situation.

So, for me, doing the work I love with leaders and their teams will involve getting clear on the problem, challenge, or opportunity we are trying to solve. We will use an evidence-based approach to get our insights. Then we will make sure we are investing in the solutions that will give us the outcomes and impact you truly want.

We all have finite resources in the areas of time, energy, and money so let's go for Insights first to get clarity on the current situation.  Then, we can call on our intuition to help us navigate the best path forward given our experiences and ideas. 

So, when we want to shift the performance and impact of our teams, both Insights and Intuition have a place - and there is also an order.

We want to gain insights, to take action, for greater impact. So let's measure and diagnose first. Then we can be sure that we are investing in programmes and solutions that will actually make a difference.

Need some help?

If you would like some help to decode your team’s performance and create more team impact in 2024, then let’s have a no-obligation complimentary chat to see if my approach will work for you and your team.