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Millennials and Gen Z are not a disconnected group of people who only have their sights set
on fulfilling their own needs. They are passionate, adventurous, team-oriented, and socially-minded. They grew up learning and studying in teams and expect to work in teams. By understanding group dynamics and using teaming models such as FourSight™, companies such as IBM, NASA, USBank, L'Oréal, Nike, and many others have unlocked latent team power. Employee potential, creativity, innovative thinking, and productivity have significantly increased. FourSight™ is also the #1 team structure for multi-generational teams.
A tragedy in traditional business management is that many organizations still employ top-down, command and control, "I'm the team leader, I say, you do,” management. They assume this how teams work. This style of team leadership creates an atmosphere that makes subordinates feel inferior, discourages idea sharing, limits those who are talented, and breaks almost every rule of high-performance team leadership. And BTW, Millennials and Gen Z hate it. If they wanted to work under battle-field style leadership they would have enlisted in the armed forces or gone to work on an assembly line. Resorting to command and control, top-down management, or using negative power sources is a sign that a company's leadership style has failed.
"The FourSight four-step framework—clarify, ideate, develop and implement—is both universal and instinctive. Intuitive language makes it “sticky” for groups and organizations that want to transform the way people work together to solve problems" [1]. The model marries employees thinking preferences towards each step with team collaboration and cooperation methods. The trifecta of joining together of group dynamics, FourSight's™ communication strategies, and employees' natural workplace preferences create unprecedented team synergy.
As leaders learn to apply these three legs of effective team management corporations, governments, and non-profit organizations are experiencing amazing results. The FourSight™ strategy identifies the way employees think and places them into four categories of thinker types; Clarifiers, Ideators, Developers, and Implementers.[2] Armed with this knowledge, leaders can intelligently assign roles within workgroups. The FourSight Creative method is proving to be a game-changer in problem-solving and team performance management.
If you want to become an expert at unlocking the creative and innovative potential of your teams, I encourage you to become certified in either CPS or the FourSight Creative method. As business schools and corporate training programs update their leadership curriculums, they cannot afford to ignore the scientifically proven strategies we’ve discussed. If you choose to obtain an undergraduate degree, postgraduate degree, certification, or graduate certificate in leadership, make sure to choose one that is innovation, creativity, HRM, or OD-oriented.
To learn more about the past 65 years of research that backs FourSight™ and the creative problem-solving process go to: https://www.creativeeducationfoundation.org/
[1] FourSight, 2020, www.FourSightonline.com/about-foursight [2](FourSight, 2018)