Building a high-performing, productive team can be a challenge. Creating programs to challenge their thinking and behavior styles once they are on the team can be quite valuable.
One of the great perks of having created a solid team is that they each bring something different to the table. With unique backgrounds, personalities, and opinions, a team that works well together can create incredible results. This is why understanding their thinking/behavior styles is crucial to successful team management.
Many know about the common assessments used to analyze employee’s strengths and needs, but what about understanding their unique behavior and thinking styles and what motivates them! Each employee falls under one of the 16 personality types, which is unchangeable. Knowing their personalities is essential to understanding them and how to train behaviors in employees for team optimization.
Not sure where to start? We have five tips to impact employee’s behavior, plus an assessment tool that will help you understand them. Let’s dive in!
Five Big Tips to Impact Your Employees’ Behavior
Work style thinking/behaviors can be tricky to adjust, but you can crack the code on managing attitude and behavior for a smooth-running workplace with the right approach.
We recommend that you be the example! Here are five work behaviors that you can model for your employees. The effect will show a positive impact on your team’s behavior.
1. Focus on Attitude During the Hiring Process
Managing employee behavior in the workplace starts with the hiring process. You can get a pretty good feel of candidates in interviews by perceiving their attitudes to ensure they are good, positive, and ideal for teamwork. If you hire someone that’s a good culture fit, both in terms of attitude and values, you can improve your employees’ behavior from the get-go. Once they’re on the team, you can use assessment tools to make best-fit assignments for projects and tasks.
2. Leadership Style Affects One’s Actions and Behaviors.
When working to improve work behavior style, it’s essential for your team to understand the style for which you’re looking. Some will excel as they continually set examples and establish precedents for the type of employee behavior you support. As a leader, your goal is to increase the percentage of employees who excel!
3. Take Notes of Behaviors
It’s easy to get caught up in the hustle-bustle of a busy workday, but taking note whenever you can of employees’ behavior will be key to managing and creating success early on. As a leader, it’s your job to ensure that everyone’s behavior meets expectations and aligns with company values; and it’s important to hold your team accountable. Plus, your team’s success reflects well on your role as a manager.
4. Praise the Ideal Behavior
Acknowledgment is powerful! By praising and rewarding ideal workplace behaviors, you reinforce good, positive behaviors and thinking while simultaneously pushing other team members to improve their behaviors for similar reinforcement. Be sure to handle any unwanted behaviors with constructive criticism.
Pay attention to the gender, generational and cultural differences that can add to the richness of the workplace.
5. Be Inspiring
Encourage employees to maintain good, positive thinking and behavior to inspire them. This can be done with motivational stories about other successful employees at the company or sharing enthusiasm and passion for a project. This kind of positivity is contagious!
What Is the Key to Understanding Your Employee’s Behavior?
Many employers, managers, and those in leadership roles know there are many behavior style assessment tools to help better understand employees and improve the workspace. But do they all work the same? Not quite.
Two of the most commonly known tools are the DiSC and Myers-Briggs systems. DiSC looks at four key behavior styles, and Myers-Briggs looks at four key thinking categories.
Many assessments provide insight into employees’ thoughts or behaviors. Core Motivation Analysis (CMA), developed by the Trust Well Network experts, takes an even deeper dive beyond Thinking and Behavior Styles. CMA examines peoples’ Motivations - the underlying drivers of one’s personality. This analysis affords a deeper understanding of your team, allowing you to enhance their performance and foster good workplace practices.
Behavior style and much more are answered by the CMA results. You’ll gain actionable methods for team-building and ultimately achieve business success.
By gathering a deeper understanding of your team’s personalities, how they think and behave (which are trainable factors), you will gain the necessary insights into your team’s preferences and motivations to create positive change.
CMA utilizes a scale of personality traits to define peoples’ work thinking and behavior styles. It uses ranges such as: “withdrawing to outgoing,” “anxious to asserting,” “dissenting to conforming,” and “yielding to controlling.” The “A” in CMA should stand for “Amazing” since the assessment takes only 12-15 minutes to complete, and the results give managers actionable insights with which to work.
- Withdrawing is someone who leans towards the quiet side and isn’t overly emotional, while outgoing is someone who thrives off social stimulation
- Anxious is someone who is sensitive and tends to prepare for social interactions while asserting is someone confident around others
- Dissenting is someone that’s independent and confident in their person while conforming is someone who does well with authority figures
- Yielding is someone who does more for others than themselves while controlling is someone that seeks to assert authority
CMA is the new front runner - acting as a much more information-rich and affordable option compared with other dated assessment tools. It is a fully automated system that allows you to be in control - something no other, including MBTI or DISC offers.
How Does Leadership Style Affect One’s Actions and Behaviors?
As a leader or manager, you’re the one everyone is looking to lead, and it starts with model behavior. You have a significant impact on the decisions that are made, the change that occurs, deadlines, and innovation. Your behavior in the workplace also can impact the way employees act as they look to you to set an example of what’s expected of the team.
For this reason, those in your leadership roles must analyze their work behavior styles. Thinking and behavior can be trained to represent the organization better and create a more positive, well-running team. The Core Motivation Analysis can help management take a look inwards to better optimize their internal placements.
Why Is the CMA the Right Tool for You and Your Team
With a 66-question test, the comprehensive Core Motivation Analysis allows you to look at which of the 16 personality traits your team members fall under - diving deep into their key motivations, thinking, and behavior styles.
Sounds like a lot, right? As mentioned, this test only takes 12-15 minutes to complete and shares a lot of information on employees’ work style behaviors, as well as providing actionable ways to team-build, mentor, and coach your employees, to not only improve behaviors but enhance the overall work environment. Plus, it will help ensure you have everyone placed in the best roles for them.
The insights are truly endless, but the root of the Core Motivation Analysis is about People telling you who they are, making it the new frontier tool to manage employee positioning within the workplace.
We Have You Covered All the Way Through
On top of the easy-to-use, fully automated functionality of the Core Motivation Analysis assessment, our team at Trust Well Network will never leave you hanging with the results.
There’s a lot of data that can be interpreted from the CMA. Trust Well Network is composed of qualified humans who can help you fully understand your team’s results so that you can optimize behaviors and guide employees to achieve successful outcomes. In short, we’ve got you covered. Or, if you prefer, you can utilize the CMA tool and implement solutions by yourself.
For help interpreting your results, or if you have any questions about the assessment tool as a whole, contact us at 312-919-1676 today.
