Team Awareness 

Building High-Performing Teams with Strong Adaptive Capacity 

If your goal is to build a high-performing team with strong adaptive capacity, one key ingredient is understanding—not just of your goals and strategy, but of the individuals who make up your team. A clear, accurate understanding of each team member is essential for enabling agility. With this understanding, you can adapt predictably to challenges and opportunities; without it, success becomes no better than a roll of the dice. This understanding spans both professional and personal aspects of your team members, empowering managers to maximize potential and performance while fostering a positive work environment. 

 The Foundations of Understanding: Skills and Competencies 

Team leaders need a clear grasp of each employee’s capabilities, expertise, and behavioral tendencies, including interpersonal skills, communication style, and other key "soft skills." By identifying each person’s strengths and weaknesses in these areas, managers can: 

  • Coach more effectively. 

  • Deploy team members to tasks that align with their strengths. 

  • Steer them away from areas where they are less effective. 

This strategic alignment leads to greater productivity, higher engagement, and a more cohesive team dynamic. 

 Understanding Preferences and Natural Tendencies 

To achieve this deeper level of insight, we strongly recommend using a predictive behavioral assessment. This tool provides valuable insights into team members’: 

  • Long-term aspirations. 

  • Motivators. 

  • Learning preferences. 

  • Task preferences. 

Unlike traditional personality surveys that categorize individuals into types (e.g., letters, colors, or labels), predictive behavioral assessments focus on measuring individual attributes with more precision. By accurately assessing the intensity of traits, these tools reveal key drivers of behavior. For example: 

  • They identify how someone navigates paradoxes (e.g., candor vs. tact, stability vs. experimentation, long-term vs. short-term focus). 

  • They highlight stress responses and key behavioral competencies. 

Such assessments minimize misunderstandings, help better understand sources of conflict and help ensure that team members' strengths are fully utilized. 

 The Impact of Stress on Performance 

Stress profoundly impacts behavior, often causing temporary shifts to the opposite of a person’s typical tendencies. For instance: 

  • Outspoken individuals may retreat into themselves under stress. 

  • Diplomatic, accommodating team members may suddenly become blunt or confrontational. 

These stress-induced behaviors can lead to unpredictability and erode trust. Managers often respond to these shifts with ineffective advice because they fail to address the root cause: stress itself. A good behavioral profile can provide insights into stress triggers and strategies for addressing them. 
 

Consistently Applying Insights for Greater Impact 

Understanding your team is not a one-time activity—it requires consistent application of insights in everyday interactions, such as: 

  • Frequent one-on-one meetings. 

  • Active listening during conversations. 

  • Periodic 360-degree feedback. 

  • Performance and goal-setting discussions. 

  • Employee engagement surveys. 

  • Post-mortems after major projects. 

  • Mentorship and coaching sessions. 

When managers consistently leverage behavioral insights in these contexts, interactions become more impactful and foster a culture of continuous learning and growth. 

 Key Benefits of Team Understanding 

With a deeper understanding of your team, leaders can: 

  1. Improve employee engagement, fulfillment, and overall experience. 

  2. Tailor management and communication styles to suit individual team members. 

  3. Address concerns directly and support career growth. 

  4. Build trust and mutual respect, creating a more positive workplace culture. 

  5. Align tasks with individual strengths to enhance team performance. 

  6. Create an adaptable team that thrives in the face of opportunities and challenges. 

 Conclusion: The Power of Understanding 

Building a high-performing, agile team requires deliberate effort, ongoing commitment, and genuine interest from managers. By investing time in understanding your team members—through their strengths, tendencies, and stress responses—you gain the predictive capability to respond effectively to threats and opportunities. This level of awareness allows your team to remain agile, engaged, and aligned with your organization’s goals. 

In short, a deeper understanding of your team unlocks the potential to create a high-performing, adaptive, and resilient workforce.