How can you build the next Dream Team within your organization? A strong team understands each members work style and expertise and leverages those skills to be successful. I’m starting to see more and more companies educating their employees on different work styles through the use of personality profiles and other assessment tools.

The ability to understand how others work on your team is important. Learning how to flex to others' work styles is becoming even more important. Understanding your team and how to work with everyone on it ensures that there is a productive environment and positive interactions within your team. Flexing is a way of getting in sync with the other person by adjusting your behaviors to others' wants and needs.

This doesn't mean you have to change your work style. Flexing means you adjust your approach with each individual to make them more comfortable when working with you and each other.

Personality assessments are being used more and more with employees and building strong teams/work groups. Some of the more commonly used tools for assessing personality and psychological characteristics include: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Instrument, Kolbe System, and DISC Personal Profile System

These tools primarily assess and measure character and personality traits required for continued success on the job. These traits can include persistence, coping with stress, handling rejection, need for approval and sociability. It is a measurement of the whole person and how they will handle the job, as well as interpersonal relationships with coworkers.

The goal of any team is to be productive with members that enjoy their work and working together. A team begins to become a team when employees see their jobs not merely as what they are supposed to do, but as contributions to the group's overall success.

Effective teams are productive and are able to work out ways to resolve problems when they occur. They are efficient because their managers make sure to leverage each member's skills and insights, rather than letting the team be dominated by the most verbal, most aggressive or most popular personalities.

Here are 11 helpful steps in building a Dream Team:

1. Share the team's common goals and purposes.
2. Clarify each person's role in achieving the common purpose.
3. Share the needs of the team's external or internal customers or clients.
4. Work out effective ways to resolve conflicts based on the needs of the specific team.
5. Make sure you are still the manager by holding employees responsible for meeting goals or helping
to solve problems.
6. Make sure team meetings aren't a forum for your team. This allows for the development of team
synergy.
7. Allow team members to provide input into their jobs by encouraging them to make suggestions.
8. Make sure there is room for minority or unpopular views.
9. Reward the team as a whole.
10. Reward each employee individually and include a review of their teamwork. .
11. Celebrate team milestones and successes.

Understanding your own work style and the styles of your team members; not only helps you to work better together, it can also help you leverage the teams’ knowledge and insights as a whole.