This Q&A with Anita Kropacsy from Corporate Challenge Events will explain how profiling can lead to successful teams.
Q: What is profiling?
A: Simple speaking, profiling is about the greater understanding of yourself, your staff, how your team can work more effectively as a unit and what else you may need in your team.
Q: How can a profile help an individual?
A: Profiling will help individuals understand what makes themselves tick. It will highlight what motivates people in their work, how they are most likely to behave in different situations, how they prefer to communicate and diffuse conflict and how they are likely to react to change.
It’s a great tool for self-awareness and emotional intelligence as people will discover which behaviours maximise their effectiveness in their work and which behaviours hinder their effectiveness.
These are insights which are valuable to know as part of teams and for an individual’s own professional and career development.
Q: How can a profile help a team?
A: Profiling enables the formation of a team that has an effective balance of profiles. It provides team members and leaders with an understanding on how to apply each other’s strengths and qualities to the best effect and when to involve different people in a task or project.
Team members will value and respect each other for what they bring to the team and how each person is critical to the balance of the team. They will know when they need to offer more of themselves and when they need to let someone else who is better suited take the lead.
This develops trust, accountability, delegation and teams performing at their optimum.
Q: How does profiling take a team to another level in performance?
A: When team members gain greater self and social awareness, such as understanding how they fit and are valued within a team, it will lead to greater motivation, accountability, productivity and efficiency. This will take the team to another level in performance.
Plus, knowledge is power right? It makes sense that a team with this knowledge will perform better than a team formed purely on skillset and qualifications.
Q: Why is Belbin team profiling a good choice?
A: I believe one of the best models used today for profiling is Belbin. It has a simple structure to equip people with the knowledge on how to maximise each other to become a high performing and effective team.
Belbin uses simple language and symbols to make the theory easy to remember and enables people to quickly understand and apply it to everyday tasks.
I find Belbin extremely effective in quickly identifying who is needed on a team to get a specific outcome in the fastest possible time with the right amount of people.
It is proven to boost not only team development or creation but also people management capabilities, staff retention initiatives and change management practices.
Q: What does a basic Belbin workshop involve?
A: Prior to a workshop, participants complete an online self-perception profile as well as the option of having a 360-degree profile submitted. This is where each person would get up to six people to provide feedback on their working style.
At the workshop, which takes about three to four hours, our coaches review the personal profiles and lead a discussion on how the way that each person prefers to work fits with everyone else.
We then map the team to identify where it is strong and where there are weaknesses or blind spots in performance.
A plan is then made as a group to manage the team for optimum performance. You have speed dating, this is speed profile matching!
Q: How can this workshop be maximised?
A: Whilst the results from the Belbin workshop can be applied immediately, I strongly recommend that coaching is undertaken to maximise its application.
Team and individual coaching is available on how to leverage the results to take your team to a whole new level of performance, maintain its application well into the future and work on the leadership of the team.
Anita Kropacsy, Corporate Training Manager, Corporate Challenge Events
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