An organisation is more than just the sum of the individuals that make it up. The key to understanding its culture and its structure lies in the relationships between those individuals. The ways that they work together as members of a team can be one of the most important factors in determining the success of the organisation as a whole.
The workings of these relationships are rich and complex, and a full explanation of their workings relies on an understanding of individual skills, experience, knowledge and competencies, among many other factors. Axiom's technology, though, focuses on the behavioural element - the common patterns in a person's approach to their life and work. These behavioural patterns are as important to understanding team relationships as they are in an individual sense. Axiom's Discus is a package designed specifically to describe behaviour at the interpersonal level - the ways in which different personal styles interact with one another, and how these interactions can affect the workings of the team as a whole. In this article, we'll look at some of the principles behind automating the team-building process, and some of the solutions offered by the behavioural approach.
Underlying Axiom's range of solutions is the DISC profiling system, which describes a person's behaviour in terms of the four fundamental factors of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. When we interpret a profile for a single individual, we look at the relations between these different factors in their approach - that is, we work on an intrapersonal level. It's just as possible to investigate how factors in the profiles of two or more individuals relate to one another - at an interpersonal level - and that's essentially how Discus works.
Understanding the relationships between team members like this can give a critical advantage, but it is only half the story. A team's members must also fulfil functional roles within team. This gives us yet another fruitful layer for analysis, because the behavioural needs of these roles can be clearly defined, and so the suitability of potential members can be assessed - purely in behavioural terms, of course.
One of the advantages of DISC is the fact that all of these behavioural factors - whether they describe team members, or team roles - can be resolved to quantifiable values. In a typical team, there are huge numbers of different possible combinations of these values, but with a sufficiently sophisticated model, it's possible to analyse them all and create an assessment of the team as a whole, and the relationships of its members. There's a model of this kind lying at the heart of the Discus software, and it can produce detailed team assessments in areas like these:
- Team Keynotes and Summary
Before embarking on a detailed analysis of the workings of the team, Discus provides an overview of the team's style and structure, in terms of its members' behaviour. Because Discus uses the same intelligent descriptive software as the main Discus profiler, the team summary - like all its other reporting features - appears in plain English (or one of several other languages).
- Dynamics
'Dynamics' are a concept unique to Discus - a description of how different DISC factors interact between the members of the team as a whole. There are a whole range of possible dynamics in a team, and Discus can isolate the most important of these, and report on their likely impact on the team's performance.
- Leadership Style and Demands
Where a team has a designated leader, Discus is sophisticated enough to assess that individual's impact on the nature of the team, as well as assessing the style they are likely to display in a leadership role. What's more, it can interpret the styles of the other members to show what kind of leadership approach will be most effective and productive.
- Individual Relationship Assessments
The same tools that we use to assess the team at an overall level can be used to look deeper into the workings of the team, too. It's even possible to look at individual working relationships, interpreting the ways different dynamics drive the relations between any two members of a team.
Discus can deploy all these tools - and more - to describe any existing or potential combination of team members. These capabilities raise yet another possibility, though - if it's possible to quantify the way that a group of individuals work together, then in principle it should be possible to define an ideal combination, and find a selection of members to match that combination. Discus can do exactly that, using its 'Team Profiler' capability to sift through thousands, or millions, of potential combinations and propose particularly suitable combinations of individuals.
Of course, Discus gives you the scope to describe your own teams, too, and also to freely experiment with different combinations of individuals to find the optimum behavioural mix for a team. All of the reporting power we've already seen is available for any selection of individuals you choose to put together.
The Axiom Software site provides plenty of background information about the ideas behind Discus, and about the product itself. Just click the links below to find out more.
