Design Organizations that Thrive

Making sense of how an organization functions, whether it’s a small team, a large company, or one of its divisions, requires considering all of its constituents, its people—most often starting with those who occupy leadership positions—and their characteristics. In doing so, a handful of the most salient characteristics typically emerge. Sometimes we point out a team member’s past experience in a similar job, the skills they have developed, or the diploma they earned at a top school. In other situations, we may be more focused on the quality of the relationships people have grown or how they met their sales targets. In any case, these behavioral/emotional characteristics can be assessed subjectively through intuitive responses, like “He’s a good guy” and “She stays late every day,” or more objectively with tools like the GRI.

As the organization grows, it becomes more difficult for senior management to assess all the behavioral/emotional characteristics of new team members since recruitment and management has been delegated further down the organization to managers and HR professionals. Yet senior management at the top of the organization has the overall vision for what the organization aims to accomplish and knows best the kinds of characteristics needed to be successful in this pursuit. Thus, how behavioral/emotional characteristics are managed at all levels becomes more and more diluted and challenging the faster and bigger a company scales.

From an organizational and managerial standpoint, a performance-driven company requires individual and group behaviors that can procure a competitive advantage and that typically cover a broad spectrum. Teams and organizations display different overall behaviors depending on their expertise, industry, and maturity. The larger the organization, the more types of behaviors that are distributed among distinct teams.

By reviewing an organization from the top down to all its employees in all departments, teams, and levels, the opportunities to improve a company’s recruitment, management, and development become evident. Most personality assessments provide information on individuals that is objective, reliable, and relevant to the workplace, but they do little to solve the organizational challenges of hiring and managing people and implementing change from the top.

Working with small and large organizations in different industries and cultures over the years has given us further opportunities to gather knowledge and create unique tools that utilize personality measurements at a group level and can scale up to be used in companies.

The GRI platform helps to analyze individual profiles within teams and the larger company, and can be used for recruitment. When deployed as an enterprise solution, it assists in regrouping individual profiles with a few clicks so that analyses can be run effortlessly. Data and maps based on the profile results can be instantly produced by the platform.

Explore how to design organizations that thrive with the GRI. Read chapter 16 of Lead Beyond Intuition: How to Build a High-Performing Organization. Order the book on Amazon today.