The Margerison-McCann team Management Wheel is an individual and team development tool focused on defined roles and personal evaluation.

Understanding the Margerison-McCann team management wheel

The Margerison-McCann team Management Wheel was developed by Dr. Charles Margerison and Dr. Dick McCann. 

Margerison – an author and psychologist – partnered with scientist and organizational behaviorist McCann to determine why some teams were effective while others with a similar skillset were not.

The framework for which they are named is the result of countless interviews with managers and team members around the world. It is comprised of two components:

• The Types of Work wheel – which defines the nature of work in a team, and
• The four work preference measures – scales that represent key aspects of how individuals within teams prefer to operate in a workplace environment.

By adding the work-centric wheel to the people-centric scales, Margerison and McCann’s team management wheel clarifies what types of work people prefer to do (and the roles they prefer to play) whilst part of a team.

The Types of Work wheel

Nine factors were identified as key to successful teamwork in all types of industries. These segments, which are illustrated as segments of the wheel, include:

1. Advising – collating and dispensing information based on best practices to make superior decisions and deliver results.
2. Innovating – this means challenging the status quo.
3. Promoting – teams must persuade upper management of the merit of a project to secure the necessary resources to perform their work. Promotion also encompasses the marketing of products to customers and clients.
4. Developing – where ideas are molded and shaped to meet the needs of the user with respect to organizational constraints.
5. Organizing – with a core focus on action and goal-setting that is on time and within budget.
6. Producing – this involves delivering a product, service, or other output at consistently high standards.
7. Inspecting – to ensure these high standards are achieved, regular audits are necessary. This factor also incorporates various security, safety, and legal aspects.
8. Maintaining – where team performance is routinely reviewed to ensure effectiveness, and
9. Linking – a process where team members work collaboratively to become an effective and efficient team. Linking may involve people, tasks, or leadership.

The four work preference measures

Since it is not always obvious, four work preference measures provide clarity for employees on how they prefer to work.

Margerison and McCann adapted these measures from the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

Let’s look at the measures below, remembering that every individual exists along a scale between two opposing extremes.

Questionnaires can be handed out where employees score themselves based on how they like to work.

1 – How you relate to others

• Extrovert – talks out ideas, enjoys meeting other people, can be impulsive.
• Introvert – tends to think before speaking, dislikes interruptions, does not have a need to socialize with colleagues frequently.

2 – How you gather and use information

• Practical – likes to work with tested ideas, is detail and fact-oriented, and prefers clearly defined problems.
• Creative – becomes bored with routine work, is future-oriented, and tests new ideas.

3 – How you make decisions

• Analytical – develops objective decision-making criteria, is often construed as clinical or logical, and prefers analysis and clarity.
• Beliefs – develops subjective decision-making criteria, is resistant to change that contradicts beliefs, and may become over-committed to a particular point of view.

4 – How you organize yourself and others

• Structured – loves order and will stick to a plan, is time conscious, and has a tendency to rush decisions before consulting available information.
• Flexible – may procrastinate in search of information, is open-minded, can tolerate ambiguity, and can change their mind if new insights present themselves.

The team management wheel

To create the team management wheel, the results from the employee questionnaire are matched with the nine key factors to successful teamwork.

Margerison and McCann named each match to describe a specific preferred role:

1. Creator-Innovators – those who enjoy innovation also describe themselves as creative and enjoy the ideation process.
2. Explorer-Promoters – similarly, those who gravitate toward promoting the merits of a project tended to be always on the lookout for new opportunities.
3. Assessor-Developers – employees who enjoy developing plans and processes to suit the end user have a preference for testing the viability of new ideas.
4. Thruster-Organiser – natural leaders who like to organize individuals and resources and throw themselves into scheduling. They also readily define objectives.
5. Concluder-Producer – these are employees who work systematically from a plan to conclude projects.
6. Controller-Inspectors – detailed-oriented employees who like to audit processes and procedures by exerting control.
7. Upholder-Maintainers – employees who possess strong beliefs or principles and consider it vital to uphold or adhere to them at all times.
8. Reporter-Advisors – lastly, those individuals who enjoy sending or receiving information naturally fall into a reporting role in teams.

Key takeaways:

• The Margerison-McCann team management wheel is an individual and team development tool with a core focus on defined roles and personal feedback.
• Margerison and McCann identified nine factors that were key to successful teamwork in all types of industries. These include Advising, Innovating, Promoting, Developing, Organising, Producing, Inspecting, Maintaining, and Linking.
• Four work preference measures also provide clarity for employees on how they prefer to work with each adapted from the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. They relate to employee relations, decision-making, organization, and information gathering.

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