Bonchek and Steele's Thinking Styles

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Which thinking styles do your team members use?

If you had to define your perfect team, where would you start?

You'd likely want each member of it to be smart, honest and positive, and it goes without saying that you'd want them all to be highly collaborative. However, you can probably recall teams that looked promising on paper but which didn't fulfill their potential.

Teams can underperform for many reasons, and mismatching people with positions and responsibilities is a common one. Teams are about more than just what people do, though. How people think is also a powerful indicator of group performance. But managers and team members alike often overlook individual thinking styles when working with one another or when recruiting.

Using Thinking Styles, a framework developed by authors Mark Bonchek and Elisa Steele, is an effective way to gain an understanding of people's thinking skills, abilities and preferences, and how these can help your team.

In this article, we'll explore how you can use Bonchek and Steele's model to understand how you and your team members think and interact, so that you can improve your team's effectiveness.

Understanding Thinking Styles

Bonchek and Steele's Thinking Styles is a simple framework for assessing how you think, and for matching your style to your group's purpose. It's an alternative to models that look at how team members behave, and it provides a way to focus on the often-overlooked aspect of personality in the workplace.

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