Receiving your Insights Discovery profile doesn’t signify the end of your psychometric testing journey. It’s the point at which the real work to enact change within your organisation begins.
So, you’ve completed the psychometric questionnaire and received the results. Each of your team now knows their unique colour and has a deeper understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and personality. Now what?
At this point you could be excused for considering the exercise complete; however, nothing could be further from the truth. While it’s great that each employee in your organisation is now armed with an-depth understanding of how they operate, the true value to undertaking Insights Discovery is only harnessed when you apply the results to make actionable changes within your business.
As Heidi Wadsworth, Head of Learning & Development and Insights practitioner at Reality HR explains: “Insights Discovery is a great way to understand the unique personalities that exist within your team, but to get the most out of the process you have to use the extracted data to enact positive and lasting changes.”
Making Insights Discovery Psychometric Testing Actionable
Communicating more effectively
In business, communication is key. Ensuring that everyone understands the drivers, goals, and objectives of your organisation – and the role they play in achieving them – has a significant bearing on team morale, productivity, and wellbeing. This, in turn, has a direct impact on your business’s performance; fundamentally its ability to meet projected turnover targets.
Being able to enhance and improve upon the various communication styles within your team is one of the main benefits of the Insights Discovery programme. After all, not everyone responds to or receives messages in the same way. This is one of the first things you’ll come to realise when you receive your teams’ Insights Discovery profiles.
“Understanding how each unique colour absorbs information or prefers to communicate can greatly enhance your ability to ensure key messages land equally well with each of your employees” says Heidi Wadsworth “For example, a sunny yellow personality motivated by ideas and possibilities is unlikely to be as interested in facts and figures as a fiery red persona who is naturally results-oriented.”
Adjusting your communication style to accommodate all four personality types – yellow, red, green, and blue – therefore, will make each of your employees feel seen and valued, as well as helping you to ensure that important information resonates equally with everyone in your organisation. “
Creating a change-oriented culture
For a business to succeed over the long-term it has to expand, evolve, and grow, and for that to happen it has to change, but if there’s one thing that risk-averse humans hate more than anything it’s change. However, not everyone shares this same aversion to change. For others, change is an ordinary fact of life; something to be embraced and appreciated rather than feared.
So, how do you manage change in an environment where some of your team will find it unsettling and others will only see the upsides?
The key, says Heidi lies in open and transparent communication that engages your team at every step of the process. This, again, is where Insights Discovery can make a profound difference.
“Those who are more likely to perceive change as a threat, such as earth green personalities, will require a great deal of reassurance during organisational change.” Greens tend to exhibit strong moral values with an emphasis on fairness, so if you have a high representation of greens in your team you will need to carefully manage how you communicate proposed changes.”
Greens, however, aren’t the only personality type who are likely to find change challenging. Cool Blues will need to be convinced that the changes being actioned will achieve the results the business is aspiring to, while fiery reds will need to feel that they play an active role in process.
Similar to blue personalities, sunshine yellow team members will need to understand how any proposed changes will feel and look, but they can be very susceptible to change, providing it is presented to them correctly.
The key to achieving team buy-in when organisational changes are afoot, therefore, is to present the concepts in a way that appeases all four core personality types in your business, whilst ensuring that plans are communicated in a manner that resonates across the board.
But Insights Discovery isn’t only useful for communicating change from the top down. Being aware of your employees’ colours can also improve cross-collaboration between different departments as well as individual teams, helping to foster an environment where everyone brings their best selves to work.
