I’ve worked as a freelance product manager for most of my career, allowing me to work on various products in a wide range of companies. Each opportunity allowed me to help a new team form and grow.

Through my work with all of those teams, I’ve developed a first-hand, in-depth understanding of what it takes to make a team work and the specific steps to take as you form teams to maximize your effectiveness.

If you were to ask me what I know now that I wish I had known when I started working with teams, I’d be quick to say, “Apply Whole Brain^® Thinking.”

Thankfully, Stop & Think - Herrmann’s new Whole Brain^® Thinking app in Microsoft Teams - provides powerful insights and application tools that have helped me create new teams and add new members to existing teams in a way that ensures that teamwork actually makes the dream work.

Here’s a look at what makes an effective team and how I’ve used Stop & Think to instill those characteristics in teams I’ve started and grown.

For most of my professional life, I’ve worked with software product development teams, as a business analyst and product manager. That means I get to collaborate with several different people to accomplish anything.

As a result, I’ve built a love-hate relationship with meetings:

I love meetings when they help my team build products and customers solve problems.

I’m not a fan of meetings that don’t make progress toward those outcomes, which seem to be most of them.

I suspect a lot of you can relate, so here are some thoughts on meetings, why they’re important, what challenges they present, and how you can make your meetings work with the help of Herrmann’s Stop & Think app in Microsoft Teams.

Diverse, cross-functional teams are more likely to accomplish the most impactful work that organizations perform these days. 

When you’re part of such a team, you have to figure out how to effectively leverage your various approaches to collaborating, solving problems, and making decisions.

Whole Brain^® Thinking provides great insight that can help your team figure out how to make the most of your team’s diverse thinking preferences- but those insights are only helpful if they’re readily available.

That’s where Stop & Think comes into play. If your team spends most of its workday in Microsoft Teams, the Stop & Think integration provides you easy access to the key information from your team member’s shared HBDI^® profiles. It also provides guidance on how to take advantage of all the insights those HBDI^® profiles provide.

Here are five common scenarios when your team can use Stop & Think to maximize your effectiveness.

Throughout my career, I’ve found that one of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of the work I do is the people I work with.