Are you constantly striving to maximise your performance within your chosen marketplace, but find it difficult to gain competitive advantage? Ensuring your organisation is at the forefront of your current and potential clients’ minds, has never been more difficult. Constant legal changes and economic burdens from a turbulent economy, including the unknown implications of Brexit, mean balancing future investment in your business with ROI is a difficult decision many organisations are facing. You may invest in new technology, processes or products, to then find that your competitors have also invested, but bigger and better than you have!
Constantly staying one step ahead is a huge challenge. The question you should be asking yourselves, is what is the one thing I have that my competitors cannot compete with? The answer is obvious, as Patrick Lencioni states, “Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and because it is so rare.”
If you are a sports fan, you know the most successful teams are those that play together, complimenting each other’s skills and balancing their own weaknesses, individuals working in tune with each of the other members of the team, to overshadow the opponents and ultimately achieve an overall goal.
Having a team with the relevant skillset to do the job is hard enough, but how do you then create and maintain healthy teamwork? The first step, would be to understand the dynamics within your existing employee teams. An analysis of each individual team members’ priorities, motivators and stressors need to be identified. A simple way of doing this would be to utilise a model of human behaviour such as the DiSC® model. Trusted worldwide, DiSC® is the leading personal assessment tool developed by Wiley, and used by over 1 million people every year. DiSC® is an acronym for the four primary dimensions of behaviour that make up the model.
- Dominance – direct, results-oriented, strong-willed and forceful.
- Influence – outgoing, enthusiastic, optimistic and lively.
- Steadiness – even-tempered, accommodating, patient and humble.
- Conscientiousness – analytical, reserved, precise and systematic
Everything DiSC® provides you with a family of the latest generation of psychometric tools to understand “why people do what they do” throughout your entire workforce. Research shows, that when employees understand each other better and appreciate, instead of judge others behavioural work styles, communication is improved, conflict and misunderstandings are reduced and a more harmonious workplace environment exists. This then has a direct correlation with higher productivity levels.
You wouldn’t think twice about investing in developing better working relationships with your clients, so why not apply that same investment to develop better internal working relationships between your current employees? If your employees are happy, your organisation will certainly remain ahead within a competitive marketplace and reap the rewards.
