Behavioural Profiling: How it Can Create an Astounding Team

“Our behaviour is more honest than our words”.

We all want a productive, functional and fire-breathing team of A-Players within our organisations.

But how exactly do you create one?

There are many ways – but behavioural profiling is one of the best ways to achieve it.

This secret little tactic is a surprisingly effective way to understand both yourself, your team and how you can call work your best as a group.

So what is it exactly? Let us explain.

What is behavioural profiling?

Behavioural profiling refers to the identification of traits and preferences of an individual, and then using that information to the benefit of an organisation.

This may involve placing that individual in a particular job role, into a team or into a position where that person can develop to their fullest potential.

Behavioural profiling will often be undertaken through a psychometric or ‘personality test’. An individual will usually take an online or paper-based examination where they are faced with a list of preference statements and are then asked to rank them.

Once that examination phase is complete, a ‘behavioural profile’ of the individual is created.  This report will usually identify an individual’s style of behaviour, including their work preferences.

This goes well beyond assessing whether somebody is simply an ‘introvert’ or an ‘extrovert’. Rather, it assesses how somebody would behave in a particular professional situation. For example, a behavioural test might assess how an individual would:

• react around strangers (like clients)
• solve simple or complex problems
• manage stress
• make professional connections (such as quickly or slowly)

An example of a behavioural profile assessment is the DISC system. This separates individuals into four different behavioural types:

Dominance – these are individuals who are competitive, fast and focused on achieving results. These is the most aggressive type of behavioural style.

Influence – these individuals are outgoing, social and love meeting new people.

Steadiness – these people are very chilled out and laid back. They’re more conservative, reserved and aren’t as outgoing as the ‘Influence’ behavioural type.

Compliance – these are highly analytical individuals. They’ll focus on the details, the facts, the evidence and the information.

In putting together a team, a manager may decide to have:

• D-style individuals act in the position of team leader, who have the overarching result at the forefront of mind
• I-style individuals focus on handling relationships with external parties, such as suppliers or clients
• S-style individuals work on less time-intensive tasks, given their natural personality type of being more ‘chilled out’
• C-style individuals focus on the ‘grunt work’, such as collecting and analysing data.

This is just an example – and may not work necessarily for every team.

When to create a behavioural profile

There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ time to create a behavioural profile. However, one of the best times to create one is when you are employing people in your business or starting a new project – particularly a project that could be incredibly involved or time-consuming.

By creating profiles at the start of somebody’s employment, or even before the person joins your company, you can assess their profile against the role that they have applied for. You can look at the data closely and observe any risk factors that may indicate they are not suitable for the role.

By creative profiles at the start of a project, you can also assess whether somebody is fit for a particular role in the project or if somebody is even cut out for the project at all.

The benefits of creating a behavioural profile

Creating a behavioural profile is a challenging exercise. You’ll be faced with data that digs deep into an individual’s personality and emotional responses, and make critical decisions based on that data.

Some of the benefits of undertaking the process of behavioural profiling include:

• Creating confident recruiting practices. Having easily accessible behavioural profiling data can help you improve your company’s hiring decisions since you’ll be able to identify the most suitable candidate for the job.

• Identifying cultural fit. You’ll be able to identify whether a person can comfortably fit within the culture and dynamics of a team as you’ll dig deep into the way they make decisions and conduct themselves.

• Retaining the best employees. By identifying a person’s strengths, weaknesses, and motivations, you can identify who the high performers are in your team and develop a robust retention strategy to keeping those employees working for you.

• Identifying leaders. Through behavioural profiling, you can identify who the natural leaders are. This will give you a unique opportunity to ensure that individual is properly coached to their full potential.

• Building an effective team. Through learning each person’s behavioural differences, you can identify how people will communicate, resolve conflict and motivate one another. This will allow you to place certain people into particular positions within a team so they can work together in the best possible way.

Consider an example: one person may communicate positively but can take ages to get to the point. Another person may not be able to tolerate this. A clash is probably inevitable. If each person understood each other’s behavioural profiles better, then this would enable them to work together much more effectively than if they didn’t.

• Preventing conflict before it happens. By understanding an individual’s preferences, you can diffuse dozens of problems before they even happen. You’ll discover how people prefer to be managed and what structures they work under the best. You won’t be experimenting your way through their personality or figuring out through guesswork what management style works for them and what doesn’t.

Concluding remarks

Knowledge is power. By knowing the ins and outs of the people in your organisation, you can actively create an astoundingly effective team.

Behaviour profiling allows us to dig deep into somebody’s personality – and truly understand a person’s motivations, behavioural tendencies and preferences. This in turn allows us to allocate the right work to them and place them with other people with whom they can work effectively.

The result? A team that works incredibly well – and can help lead your company to the success you are striving to achieve!