Teams work better. Explore the impact of personality differences on team effectiveness. Experience making decisions individually and by consensus; compare the outcomes. Use The Acquisition and any personality assessment tool or Change Style Indicator.

The Acquisition and any personality assessment tool such as MBTI® or
Change Style Indicator®

• session is 2-3 hours
• works well with 5 to any number of participants, even large groups
• pre-work is optional for scoring any selected personality assessment

Here's the Discovery

• Participants acknowledge the frustration of working with people who may think differently from them and they acknowledge confronting real barriers to effective team decision making.
• Use The Acquisition to create a common experience through which participants explore teamwork and consensus building with persons of different personalities and perspectives.
• Help participants learn the superior value of team decisions compared to individual ones.
• Help participants experience the need for good communication in presenting ideas persuasively.
• Help participants learn how personality differences and preferences can contribute to team success or failure.
• Facilitate participants practicing both giving and receiving feedback with team members.
• Help participants explore how to be effective members and contributors in a team process.

This coordinated design combines an assessment and a simulation.

After assessing and discussing personality differences using any model such as MBTI, facilitate participation in the experiential learning simulation The Acquisition.

Challenge each participant to make individual decisions on a course of action he or she would recommend for his or her company to grow through acquisition. Divide the participants into groups of five (the ideal size) and have each group discuss the same challenge with the requirement they reach consensus on a recommended course of action. After reconvening all the groups, ask each group to share its recommendation and the group’s experience reaching that collective decision. By comparing their individual and collective decisions to those of experts, the participants discover that the collective, consensus decision is far better than the decisions each participant made individually.

Enrich the debrief of The Acquisition by using in the dialogue the language and concepts revealed through use of the personality assessment.

More Information

For more specific information about the simulation part of this training design, see The Acquisition.