Building Your Team: Fantastic Four

Diversity plays a vital part in the corporate world. Organizations that don’t embrace a diversity of employees, experiences, values, and capabilities will be unable to generate a variety of ideas, options, and experiments. One team in the Marvel Universe that has a diversity of personalities and at the same time works together to accomplish the team’s goals, is the Fantastic Four.

With the Invisible Woman’s vision, The Human Torch’s artistic innovation, Mr. Fantastic’s realistic approach, and The Thing keeping the team together, these four really show us that different personalities can bring different ways of finding solutions.

The best teams are the ones that actually consist of a variety of personalities. However, one of the most challenging tasks for a manager is overseeing a diverse team in the workplace, and finding ways for them to be as productive and efficient as possible.

Getting the most out of your team is a matter of finding out the motivations of different team members and balancing one personality against another. That means finding ways to manage innovation and realistic organizational tendencies and getting them to share ideas efficiently. Different personalities can be challenging; we offer some insight on how to effectively manage each one.

Invisible Woman - Visionary
Visionaries are able to predict trends and spot future problems. There is always someone in the team who has big visions, which can sometimes be a bit unrealistic. But every manager needs a visionary in their team because they see the bigger picture, they don’t let setbacks demotivate them from achieving their goals and they have the courage to take risks.

Managing this personality
As a manager, you need to encourage this person to use more detail when explaining their ideas to co-workers. If you want results from this employee, make sure you are as strong and confident as they are. Whenever possible, assign individual projects whenever you can rather than a group one. Also, visionaries articulate where a group is going, but not how it will get there so as a manager you need to guide the process on how they are going to execute the project.

The Human Torch - Innovative 
Always looking for the next challenge! This persona is goal-oriented, with lots of ambition. They are full of high energy and need variety, or else they will get bored with everyday tasks.

Managing this personality
Because challenges are what drive them, always have a project for this person to start with instead of waiting on them to finish a current project. Managing this individual will possibly take up more time compared to the other team members, so make sure you have a list of projects to keep this personality busy.

Mr. Fantastic - Realist 
This is an introvert who prefers working alone. They are very analytical and logical, detail-oriented, and before handing in a task, they can go through it multiple times.

Managing this personality
If you have someone like this in your team, you can hand them mainly difficult tasks to solve and they’ll have no problem simply sitting down and figuring things out. However, it is important to give them enough time to do so.

The Thing - Team player
Every team has its mascot, a nice guy, and possibly the most sincere person ever. When the team is on a bumpy road, the team player is there to keep everything smooth. He ensures that everybody gets along, and tries to avoid office politics.

Managing this personality
This person works very well with a team but works even better with a group that wants to get the job done. They can be a little impatient but this only fuels their ability to get things done and requires often oversight from management.

If you think about it, the Fantastic Four are just like any team, they are individuals with their own set of challenges and fantastic abilities that must learn to work together to achieve a common goal.

Finding the right person to complete your fantastic team can be tricky. Firstly, scanning through all the CVs to find the fit can be time-consuming, wondering if the person you chose is the right fit, can be stressful, and finally hiring that person can make you wonder whether this was the right decision.

With over 35 years experience in the recruitment industry, we can take away all the stress and time wasted trying to find your next employee. Get in touch with us now to discuss all your recruitment needs.

Or if you happen to be in the market for a new job opportunity, visit our vacancies pages and apply now.