As a business leader, I’ve seen firsthand how the dynamics of a team can significantly impact an organization’s success. One of the key strategies I’ve employed to enhance team effectiveness is the use of behavioral and personality assessments.
Understanding your team’s unique personalities, behaviors, motivations, and strengths is not just nice to have; it’s a crucial component of building a cohesive, high-performing team.
Why do assessments matter?
Enhanced Self-Awareness: Personality assessments provide individuals with insights into their own behaviors, strengths, and areas for improvement. This self-awareness is the first step toward personal and professional growth, enabling team members to leverage their strengths and work on their weaknesses.
Improved Team Dynamics: By understanding team members’ behaviors and personality types, leaders can better manage interactions and relationships. This knowledge helps in resolving conflicts, improving communication, building relationships, and fostering a positive work environment.
Optimized Team Composition: When forming teams, knowing each member’s personality can guide the assignment of roles and responsibilities. This ensures that tasks align with individuals’ natural tendencies and strengths, increasing efficiency and job satisfaction.
Enhanced Leadership: As a leader, understanding your own personality and how it complements or clashes with others can improve your leadership style. It allows for more effective communication, motivation, and influence, tailored to the individual needs of your team members.
Cultural Fit: Assessments can be invaluable in the hiring and onboarding processes. They help determine if a candidate’s behavior and personality align with the company’s culture, which is crucial for long-term retention and team cohesion.
At Carew, we utilize the Core Strengths® Strength Deployment Inventory 2.0® for our team and our clients. This assessment helps to objectively and quantitatively understand why and how the individuals and teams within our organization and our clients’ behave and relate to each other the way they do.
The Core Strengths® Strength Deployment Inventory 2.0® is not a traditional personality assessment. Instead, it is a relational and motivational assessment tool. While personality assessments typically focus on identifying and categorizing traits or behaviors, the SDI 2.0 goes a step beyond and is designed to understand the underlying motives and values that drive an individual’s behavior, particularly in the context of relationships and conflict.
The output is personalized Relationship Intelligence (RQ) models that provide insight into how to make interactions more effective, build trust, and forge mutually productive and positive relationships.
The SDI 2.0 Assessment:
- Identifies an individual’s core motives and values, which drive their behavior.
- Helps individuals understand how their motives and behaviors change during conflict. It provides insights into how they can manage conflict more effectively by recognizing their own and others’ conflict sequences.
- Generates a personalized portrait of an individual’s strengths, highlighting how they use these strengths in relationships and teamwork.
- Identifies strengths that can become overdone or counterproductive under stress or in conflict, helping individuals to be more self-aware and adaptive.
- Provides ways to enhance team dynamics by improving communication, reducing conflict, and fostering collaboration. It helps teams understand the diverse motives and strengths within the group, enabling more effective teamwork.
- Gives a framework for ongoing personal and professional development, offering strategies for leveraging strengths and managing weaknesses in various contexts.
Carew’s training programs are built upon the foundational elements of positive relationships and effective communication skills, essential for cultivating high-performance cultures in sales and leadership. Through our Excellence in Sales Leadership® training program, participants gain access to the Core Strengths® Strength Deployment Inventory 2.0® assessment to help them crack the code of communication styles based on understanding individual motivations, response to conflict, strengths, and weaknesses – adding science to the art of accelerating positive relationships and productive communication.
Implementing Assessments in Your Team
Integrating personality assessments into your team requires a thoughtful approach. Here are some tips for effective implementation:
Communicate the Purpose: Clearly explain to your team why you’re using behavior and personality assessments and how the results will be used to improve team dynamics and performance.
Ensure Confidentiality: Assure your team that their responses will be kept confidential and that the focus is on positive development, not judgment.
Facilitate Team Workshops: Use the results of the assessments to conduct workshops that help team members understand each other’s personality types and how they can work together more effectively.
Apply Insights to Real Situations: Incorporate the insights gained from the assessments into everyday team interactions, conflict resolution, and decision-making processes.
Review and Reflect: Regularly revisit the assessment results and discuss how the team has evolved. This encourages continuous development and adaptation.
Understanding the personalities within your team is more important than ever. Assessments offer a structured way to gain these insights, leading to improved team dynamics, enhanced leadership, and ultimately, better business outcomes. As a business leader, investing in these tools is a testament to your commitment to your team’s growth and your organization’s success.
