In December I described the "ropes exercise", which can be used to illustrate the different Myers Briggs personality types, and their opposite nature, in a team.  Over the next few days I'll describe some more exercises that can be used to explore 'oppositeness' in teamwork.  Today, I'll look briefly at why oppositeness is important in teamwork, and how it can be exploited to become a high performing team.

Oppositeness is a very powerful force than can have a significant impact on teamwork.  A simple example of 'oppositeness' is where two team members want the team to make different decisions - eg: one may want a business team to move into a new market, the other may want to move away from that market.  If the team members handle their differences badly they can get into irreconcilable argument and either prevent the team from making progress or even cause it to become dysfunctional or break up completely.  Alternatively, they might compromise for compromise's sake and the result may be a rather ineffectual solution.  However, if the differences are handled well, then they have a creative and constructive dialogue, and produce a solution that is better, overall, than either of their own original suggestions.

Therefore, handling the dynamic of opposites within a team well or badly can make the difference between success and failure, and various shades in between.

Some teams naturally handle difference and oppositeness well, often as a result of the mature attitudes of the team members.  However, just because a team gets on well, and just because the team members individually seem mature, it doesn't meant that they handle difference well as a team.

One problem might be onesidedness in the team.  That is, some team members have a natural rapport because everyone who has been recruited to that team is of a similar mind.  Difference or oppositeness has been removed from the team by the selection process, which means the team is losing out on the powerful creative force that can improve their performance.

Another problem might be that a team maintains a veneer of cooperation but genuine difference is suppressed.  This can happen when a team is in the grip of an Eggshells complex.

Another problem might be that the differences between team members are unconscious.  When a team conflict is unconscious then it becomes a driver of that team's behaviour, but the team have no control over it.  The team may be lucky and find that their behaviour happens to be successful, but more often they may find themselves unable to stop getting into unproductive arguments, or find that they can only 'get on' by deciding not to meet or interact.

The exercises I am going to describe over the next few days are all aimed at helping a team to recognise their differences and manage them better, to interact more constructively and to make use of opposite viewpoints to synthesise better quality team decisions.  The presence of differences in a team can be a creative driving force that has the potential to help the team become high performing.  The key to becoming a high performing team is learning to harness those differences constructively.