The RIGHT People in the Right Role
There are many attributes that underlie the success of individual contributors and leaders including EQ, IQ, adaptability, critical thinking, resilience, stress management, effective communication, decision making…
Understanding comes from data- both subjective and objective. Turning that understanding into results and realized potential comes largely from process. Helping organizations get the optimal data to achieve this understanding and then implementing with that understanding optimally has been our focus for 20+ years.
Self Awareness
Those who overestimate their competence often forge ahead with misguided confidence, blind to areas where they need improvement leading to embarrassment and failure. Conversely, individuals who are truly skilled in an area may lack the self-confidence to use the skills and show up as themselves.. This disconnect between perception and reality holds them back from realizing their potential.
Accurate actionable self-awareness is the key to bridging this gap. When this happens, individuals experience greater fulfillment, effectiveness, and impact in both their professional and personal lives.
Accurate self-awareness is also the necessary foundation for effective team awareness and leadership effectiveness. Have you ever seen a truly effective leader who wasn't accurately self aware?
Many people either overestimate or underestimate their abilities, often due to a lack of self-awareness.
Key Considerations
Many people work really hard at achieving things, but as they do that, they raise their stress level greatly, causing not only potential health issues, but in the moment, behaviors inconsistent with high performance. Stress changes your behaviors; in fact, you tend to flip to the opposite of many of your strongest normal behaviors under a lot of stress. High diplomatic, pleasing types tend to flip to bluntness. Patient, permissive types, blow up and get harsh, extremely cautious people, also often become impulsive under a lot of stress... Not being aware of your stressors and your flips, especially for managers is costly.
Many use personality or work style profiles as a primary method that put you into different categories - ENT… High DI… Or Low B/extraversion or Patience… For most people beyond those very early in their career, it tells you what you likely already. More importantly the way they all collect data leads to either/or conclusions and NOT both/and. Human nature is BOTH/AND. Let's say you are a High D and are very direct, decisive, risk-oriented, focused on outcomes/goals, very independent and assertive. The problem is that there are a lot of High D's but only a tiny percentage have all of these, most are very strong on two and often the opposite a couple others... Can over-generalizing be negative? Of course, overgeneralizing leads to misleading insights and oversimplification which in turn lead to ineffective strategies, wasted resources and missed opportunities.
The Knowing-Doing Gap
When we are acutely aware of a significant fear, such as public speaking, it tends to occupy a prominent place in our consciousness.
This self-awareness is often accompanied by a strong emotional response, making the fear difficult to ignore. But if it's not major like this- things like avoiding conflicts, being too direct, not providing clarity (or the opposite), it takes extra effort and reinforcement to close the knowing-doing gap- and research shows only a very few do it.
Key Considerations
Human behavior is paradoxical, and we've found when you understand and internalize your natural tendencies and your potential stress reactions, you gain a more lasting insight that impacts behavior more. In addition, when addressing soft skills and leadership competencies, it is crucial to integrate the behaviors in to meeting major current challenges through some form of action learning- ensuring the learning is applied through deliberate practice in the weeks after it is acquired and then try learning outcomes to performance metrics. It is important as well to focus the knowing on what's contextually important in the current work environment. Third, there needs to be a system of reinforcement including 360 feedback before and after and action planning with behavioral nudges
Being Influential
We believe a goal of every organization is to have each person be influential.
Employees who keep their thoughts to themselves or refrain from
sharing their ideas can have a significantly negative impact on an organization. Especially with processes involving AI, automation, and flexible work teams, this puts even greater limits on innovation, problem-solving, and adaptation. Organizations are of course, advised to address any fear of reprisal, lack of psychological safety, or a belief that their input won't be valued. And they should. When team members feel disempowered or disengaged, the organization misses. Problems or errors aren't pointed out. Innovative ideas never get said....
Key Considerations
What should be considered? You can address overall engagement and understand your organizational culture to address issues- as you should. Quite often, the nature of the problem doesn't lend itself to a buzzword program. Its individualized.
What we've found especially with technically oriented people, in many organizations, the majority score low on Frank and on Certainty of opinion. What does this mean- no matter how psychologically safe or valued they feel, their nature is to keep their true thoughts to themselves and their true opinions. These scenarios need to be addressed differently. One part of doing that is to emphasize that everyone in the organization needs to be influential and then to address how each individual can do that.