A client asked me whether inflexibility is always a positive trait. I said no. These quirks are like pepper - spectacular when used right, ruinous when overdone. Every strength has a limit. This is the part of strengths-based leadership and teamwork that most people skip.

Just refreshed this article on my Framer site - new structure, FAQ, same pepper.

We think we know ourselves. Do we?

Out of 78,000 Belbin profiles, only 17.7% showed a coherent match between self-view and colleague feedback. Most people believe they know themselves well. The data says otherwise — and that gap is where every serious team development project should start.

There are two Kinds of Self-Awareness

Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich distinguishes between internal and external self-awareness. Internal self-awareness is understanding your own motivations, energy sources, stress responses, and preferred ways of contributing. External self-awareness is recognising how others experience your behaviour — where their view matches yours and where it does not.

Interested? Read more at

I have opened my own site a few hundred times. I still can't see it properly.

While I was designing it I didn't like the colours or the layout at all. My business partner and my clients said it was clean and modern. I got used to it. Now I like it very much. Their eyes were right and mine were not.

Now I have a different problem. I nudge things left and right, change bits and bolts, endlessly. Let's make it a bit better. But does it really matter? Probably not. Same with the words and sentences I use - you can always write it differently, in a slightly better style.

The question is not what I do to it. The question is what creates value for the reader, for the client. That is when business becomes possible.

You chose every spacing value in the thing. By the time it ships, your eyes no longer arrive at the page. They arrive at your memory of building it. Which is why one stranger looking for six seconds will tell you more than your last six weeks of adjustment.

My day job is team behaviour, and there is a number from that world I keep carrying back here. Across 78,000 Belbin profiles, only 17.7% of people held a view of themselves that matched what their colleagues actually saw.

The rest of us are doing what we do with our own sites - judging something from the inside, with the only pair of eyes that cannot be surprised by it.

Self-perception is a first draft. It needs an editor.

Where the number comes from: Self-Awareness: What Your Team Really Sees | Soomre Newsroom

#TeamCoachingBySoomre

Three doctors of science in a hotel room. Then the ceiling lamp burned out. What follows is true enough to be worth telling.

The mathematician warmed his drink between both palms and asked, nodding toward the table: "Did you know that if you put a lightbulb in your mouth with the base facing out, you cannot get it back out again?"

The two physicists objected. Urban legend. Physically impossible. Mass, volume, geometry - it must come back out. One of them picked up the bulb to prove it. It did not come back out.

What happened over the next few hours involved a taxi driver, a policeman, and a surgeon who had clearly seen things.

I wrote it down because teams do exactly this every day.

Sober. With worse outcomes.

The ending is the best part. I am not going to tell it here.

Read the full story in my Newsroom - if it made you laugh, make your friends laugh too:

I've been thinking ... probably too much ... so I wrote a article ... if you work as a team. And yes, I do use my own photos for cover images.