Flashcard: Task and Relationship
A quick team assessment tool
We seem to love ways to sort and categorize ourselves. Horoscopes, numerology, Meyers Briggs, Enneagram – we are constantly sorting ourselves. Some of these are fun and interesting, some are useful, any of them can be used to increase our understanding of ourselves. Even if the tool is flawed, if I read through a list of characteristics that I’m supposed to have because of how I am sorted, then I’m essentially doing a self-assessment.
These sorting exercises are particularly useful in teams or groups. I think the greatest value of them is that they remind us that other people think and see things differently than we do, that’s normal, and we should be less judgmental and more curious about the differences.
I took a class once where we had to sort ourselves based on a classification system that was named after animals. The entire class was instructed to go to the corner of the room that corresponded to our animal. I don’t remember what they actually were (Hedgehog? Beaver? Crane?) but I remember that one other classmate and I were in one corner of the room and the rest of the class – fifteen or so people – were in the opposite corner. Two Seals to fifteen Robins. It concretized something I had sensed – that my fellow Seal and I had very different approaches to the world than our Robin classmates. We Seals came from demanding corporate environments, and the Robins were from helping professions. I remember what it felt like to see the cluster of calm folks look across the room at my fellow corporate hack and me with a kind of curiosity and relief, glad to be safe in the middle of their Robin pack.
Maybe that’s why I don’t use assessment tools often, because I am usually an outlier, the odd one, the one that has the assessor muttering something like “that’s unusual.”
But for group work, one tool I do like is pretty simple, and binary. It’s more like handedness than anything else – are you right-handed or left-handed? I use this with groups and individuals, sometimes as a warm-up in team exercises. It’s useful because it gives us a framework with which to understand stylistic differences; that they exist and that they can be beneficial.
The frame is this: Are you focused more on Task or Relationship? What about the people you work with closely?
Task people are primarily focused on getting the job done.
• Organized, goal oriented
• They are often efficient and good with process
• Less concerned about how others feel, more concerned about what they do
• Strong in operational, finance, project management roles
Relationship people are primarily focused on building and sustaining relationships.
• High emotional intelligence
• Prioritize employee and team growth and support
• Highly effective in client service, consultative sales roles, or community organizing
Most of us can do both, and shift seamlessly between orientations, just as I can type effectively with both hands, even though I write with my right hand. But I am right-handed. Which means if I’m sitting at a dinner party next to a left-handed friend, we’re going to bump elbows. I’m not going to have a judgement about the lefty, or come up with a narrative about how they are purposefully being difficult because they keep bumping my arm. Because I understand that some people are left-handed and others are right-handed and I’m used to that frame.
Here’s an example.
A Task person runs operations and needs to change a set of processes to save money. Her task is to reach financial goals and increase effectiveness. She outlines the new processes and explains how each team will need to change to implement them.
Her peer, who is a Relationship person, balks. He talks about the impact on the teams of learning new processes; how this will be challenging for the client because it will mean a change in how billing is processed.
Ms. Task holds a meeting to explain the new processes, and how they will roll out. She’s frustrated when Mr. Relationship takes over the conversation to talk about the feelings his team may have when he brings this to them.
Ms. Task is going to be focused on end results, KPIs, deliverables.
Mr. Relationship is going to be focused on the personal emotional impact; how will people feel? How will this impact how they work together?
Both are important. Functional and effective teams who do this exercise realize that they don’t really pay attention to who is Task and who is Relationship because they’ve learned how to co-exist and work to each other’s strengths. I’ve had teams start laughing when one of the team members self-identifies as the Relationship person because of course he is, he’s always the one talking about how people will experience change. There’s also little surprise with the people who are very Task – they are the ones who get things done and drive projects to completion.
This tool is most useful when teams are in conflict and they don’t understand why. Using the above example, Ms. Task might say something like this about Mr. Relationship. “Meetings take forever. He has to hear from every single person in the room, I wish he’d just make the decision. He’s really resistant to any change, there are so many obstacles to doing something different. He’s a people pleaser; he can’t have hard conversations. He’s not focused on our revenue goal or our margin.”
Mr. Relationship could say about Ms. Task. “She doesn’t consider how her actions impact other people. She just pushes her ideas through without explaining or building consensus. She’s arrogant and we’re at risk of her damaging morale and potentially losing people if she can’t change how she implements new initiatives.”
What if these two better understood the frame of Task and Relationship? What if that helped them reframe their narrative to stop thinking that their colleague was doing something “at” them? What if they could see the strengths each can bring to the table and how they can, ideally, balance one another out? What if they considered the other’s point of view as valid and constructed rationales and roll out plans that focused not just on their primary focus but on the other’s as well?
When I was in college, I lived in a cooperative house my senior year. We all shared chores, and we made decisions by consensus. House meetings went on for hours as everyone discussed their point of view, and worked to come to a consensus agreement. Since I’m a Task person, I got incredibly impatient with this process. I have two papers due this week, I can’t sit here for three hours and discuss the relative merits of which plant-based burger substitute we want for dinners.
I could not comprehend the people who happily participated in all three hours, sitting with their legs crossed on a cushion, deeply engaged in the process. Because they were Relationship. They found the meetings to be a way of engaging in community that was one of the reasons they chose to live here rather than a dorm. I was just there for the two rooms doubles.
Now that I’ve worked with, studied with and coached people who are both Task and Relationship, I realize that everything makes sense to the person doing it. If another person’s actions don’t make sense to me, then I can get curious about why it makes sense to them. It’s really that simple.