Interpersonal Communication: leadership

Group Leadership: McCann

McCann: The Team Management Wheel

Dick McCann is a management consultant, who, together with Charles Margerison developed the so-called Team Management Wheel in 1984. The aim of the Team Management Wheel is to place at the centre of management teams the fundamental insight that people like to work in different ways. It tries to make explicit what those different preferred styles are and to show how they relate to one another. Thus, McCann's ideas, which derive from 'neurolinguistic programming', do not in fact constitute a theory of personality types, but a theory of people's working preferences. However, you should find similarities between it and Albrecht's model as well as trait theories of personality.

Preferred working styles

According to McCann and Margerison, there are essentially four sliding scales which indicate how people prefer to work. They are:

• How people prefer to relate to others
  INTROVERTED <===> EXTROVERTED
  Some people will have an extroverted approach, talking things through with others and enjoying a wide variety of different asks; others will prefer to think things over and won't have a high need to discuss things with others.
• How people prefer to gather and use information
  PRACTICAL <===> CREATIVE
  Practical people prefer tried and tested ideas, paying attention to the facts and details; creative people will be less constrained by tradition, will be future-oriented, won't mind ambiguous situations and will enjoy looking at possibilities.
• How people prefer to make decisions
  ANALYTICAL <===> BELIEFS
  Analytical people will gather the information and then set up objective decision-criteria, trying to find the solution which maximises the pay-off; others will be more constrained by their beliefs, principles and values.
• How people prefer to organize themselves and others
  STRUCTURED <===> FLEXIBLE
  Some like a structured environment, where everything is neat and tidy and decisions are made quickly; others prefer to be more flexible and make sure that all possible information has been gathered before decisions are reached - they'll tend to put off 'concluding' until they have gathered all the information they can.

The Wheel

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The Wheel provides a visual representation of the key differences between people. Generally people show a preference for one of the key positions on the Wheel and two related 'backup' rôles. For example, they might see themselves as a 'creator-innovator' with related backup rôles as 'thruster-organizer and 'concluder-producer'.

You can see fairly easily how the positions on the Wheel relate to the working styles outlined above. For example, the 'explorer-promoter' is the result of an interaction between the extrovert and creative dimensions, giving people a preference for selling ideas and generally being entrepreneurial.

Distribution of rôles

McCann's and Margerison's work has produced the following data on a population of 3730 managers from the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South-east Asia:

Team rôle	Proportion(%)
Creator-innovator	9.2
Explorer-promoter	8.7
Assessor-developer	17.5
Thruster-organizer	26.5
Concluder-producer	26.7
Controller-inspector	7.5
Upholder-maintainer	1.7
Reporter-adviser	2.1

71% of the sample falls on the right of the Wheel since they have a common preference for organizing. However, as McCann points out, these people do not always have a natural capacity for listening and their general weakness in communication is responsible for failing to achieve a truly high performance. Further, a company which fails to listen to the creators and innovators can find itself in trouble in the long run.

Finally, it's well worth taking a look through the characteristics of the people on the Wheel, if you haven't done so already. See if you can recognize yourself and people you know.

From McCann (1985)

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