If a company is orientated towards achieving high performance and a positive work environment, it is also important to have the right mix of people in their teams. At Cognisess we have developed Cognisess Team Fit: a tool to help organisations create diverse and high performing teams.
Whilst we all work well on our own a lot of the time, and with more and more people choosing to work remotely – it does not negate the fact that we are all still part of a larger team and don’t in fact work in isolation. Therefore it is crucial to understand the working dynamics of the team we are part of, and how communication and information processing styles are mirrored and opposed positively or negatively within any team environment.
What is Cognisess Team Fit?
Cognisess Team Fit is a specific feature of Cognisess Pro’s assessment platform. It collates and maps an individual’s results via a user-friendly graph against the attributes of others in any defined team or group. It is used primarily by managers to observe the dynamics within their teams in order to analyse and compare what ‘good team performance’ looks like. The data is divided into two disciplines:
- Social cohesion – this shows us how people prefer to work and communicate. Attributes such as collaboration, leadership, people skills and psychological safety are measured by the tool to give us an insight into any team.
- Cognitive fit – this reveals how individuals make sense of the world around them. Traits measured include: critical thinking, how result focused they are, how adaptable the team can be and how creative and innovative they are. This allows us to understand the group’s dynamics in terms of prevalent thinking and decision-making styles.
One of the key games used for Cognisess Team Fit is our Lens Pro personality assessment that is based on psychology’s ‘Big Five’ personality factors. This tool incorporates large amounts of research that stems both from our own data and numerous studies around teams by very well respected Google research groups, Harvard Business School and many others.
Dr Boris Altemeyer, our Chief Scientific Officer, notes that: “We do not have a prescriptive ‘best fit’ for a team. Instead, we encourage the users to compare the abilities and preferences against other team members, as well as the overall population norms, to gather intelligence on what makes each person uniquely suited to their role in the team. In overall terms, we are not looking for a conformity mindset in a team. Diversity and balance are key factors to achieve in putting together a high performing team. And these are not that obvious to decipher in standard assessments”
The benefits: save time, become more productive
Team composition can greatly impact on performance. A Bandran Hall Group survey reported that 72% of all organisations viewed team performance as having a positive effect on overall productivity. Therefore, Cognisess Team Fit can support managers with the evaluation of high performing teams. For instance, if a sales manager notices one of her teams is not working well together she can use the Team Fit feature to diagnose the imbalance and apply an informed solution.
Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Boris Altemeyer, comments that: “Companies who use Team Fit are generally interested in understanding what makes a particular team great in the first place at performing their project related tasks. Those team dynamics can vary greatly whether we are talking about a project team, a sales team, an account team or an innovation team. Once the composition of each of these is understood, then it is easier to focus on making the correct decision when adding a new person to that team or starting a new team”.
Diversity is strength in depth
A strong team will collectively have a varied skill set, for instance, if one team member’s weakness is creativity it will be another’s area of expertise. If the team’s abilities are too similar problems may start to occur. For example, if all these employees have a low leadership score there wouldn’t be a clear leader and no individual will be prepared to take charge of the group.
With this innovative feature available, managers are more able to reveal how an individual will fit into an existing team dynamic. This is ideal for a HR manager wanting to see how a new recruit will fit into a team or deciding which office to transfer an account manager to. This also saves time, as the team and individual don’t need to meet for the HR manager to understand whether a person would fit well into that team. This not only increases resource efficiency for managers, but also prevents any loss in productivity derived from the wrong individuals working together.
Based on our analysis of self-reports from employees we have observed that teams that have gone through a guided Cognisess Team Fit exercise tend to communicate in a better, and more constructive way. This is due to individuals gaining a shared understanding and insight into how their fellow team members process and express information. Such insight and knowledge enables teams to come together in a more positive and supportive way,
Creating stronger teams for our clients and partners
Cognisess Team Fit has been used very successfully by many of our clients including the world’s largest brewer, AB InBev, and by specialist executive search consultants, Perpetual Insights.
Dr Boris Altemeyer has helped many of our clients and partners enhance their understanding of teams using the tool “A particular example that has stuck with me was a high profile team who had been working together in high pressured corporate environments for a long time. When first shown the Cognisess Team Fit results, the team burst out in heartfelt laughter and commented on how this ‘explained it all’. They could sense the character and behavioural preferences that were at play and they had already had a ‘gut feeling’ about, but had never been able to verbalise these in a constructive or meaningful way. It was overall a very positive experience that brought the team closer together and encouraged them to be more open in their communication. It also highlighted that some of their colleagues are naturally more aligned to particular business areas, and therefore resource-allocation can be made in a much more ‘naturally-fitting’ way.”
Cognisess Team Fit is a scientifically backed solution designed to get the best out of your organisations’ teams. It is a tool that helps a manager intricately understand an individual’s abilities and how they can impact on the wider team. Cognisess Team Fit is one part of Cognisess Pro, the most advanced People Analytics and Assessment Platform on the market today. To try Cognisess Team Fit or experience any of Cognisess Pro’s innovative features – contact us for a FREE demo today.
