It goes without saying that tracking and evaluating the success of your team members is a time consuming process. Yet, having accurate insights into your team’s strengths and weaknesses is by no means a waste of time. In fact, it’s vital, because you can only really unleash the true potential of your team by knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the members of this team.
Why is this, especially for young companies, so important?
Scaleups and SMBs, which I consider to be the young companies here, are in the middle of their team building process. The first foundation has been laid, and once that foundation seems to be relatively steady, the next step is to enrich this foundation. As financial resources are always limited for these companies, the broadest possible (soft) skill set should be captured with the least amount of team members. In other words: Hiring for (soft) skill gaps, rather than existing (soft) skills/strengths only. And that requires insights in not only the current team, but also the desired (soft) skill representation of this team.
This is how Equalture can help
Revealing your team’s strengths and weaknesses requires you to have insights into:
- The current representation of (soft) skills in your team;
- The desired representation of (soft) skills in your team.
We help you get insights into the current representation of your team’s (soft) skills by letting your team members complete our neuroscientific games. Consequently, we help you compare your current representation to the desired representation, by comparing your teams to similar teams. We call this our Industry Benchmark.
Now, let’s explain this in more detail.
Step 1. Team Analysis
By using the Team Analysis feature you will be able to analyze the representation of (soft) skills within your team. These include: independent problem solving skills/critical thinking; ability to handle heavy workload; ability to prioritize tasks; cognitive flexibility and adaptability; control over emotions and behavior; risk taking and assessments; and so on.
For example, how your team scores in a game that measures problem solving skills can tell you a lot about to what extent your team is capable of independently finding solutions for business problems or complex issues.
- If your team scores low, they have some difficulties with critical thinking, and might prefer a more trial/error based approach to problem-solving rather than planning thoroughly.
- If your team scores high, they can think critically and can independently identify and plan the steps that are necessary to take when presented with a problem.
Once all of the team members have completed the neuroscientific assessments, these results can be compared to other teams within the same industry that are linked to this department (Sales/Customer Success/Engineering/Etc.). This way generating an Industry Benchmark. Which brings me to my next point.
Step 2. Industry Benchmarking: identifying the strengths and weaknesses
In a blink of an eye you will be able to see whether your team scores below or above the industry benchmark. How do we determine whether those scores signify strengths and weaknesses? If your team scores above the industry benchmark then said skill or personality trait is a strength of your team. Whereas, for it to be a weakness, your team has scored well below said industry benchmark.
Information like this is especially important to a manager of the team, because these insights can not only help you get to know your team, but actually enable you to understand also your future hiring needs.
This is an example of what a team report of strengths and weaknesses looks like:
As you can see, we provide detailed descriptions of your team composition in terms of skills and personality traits. You can also see the comparison of your team score with other teams within the same industry:
Now that you are familiar and aware of both strengths and weaknesses of your team, through comparing your team to similar teams, you can have a crystal clear idea and understanding of what to look for in a next hire! Based on this data, you can now evaluate and decide whether in future hires you want to focus on (i) training people in the skills you’re missing or (ii) hiring someone who can fill these skill gaps.
To conclude
So, to wrap up this blog, I’d like to mention that our teams feature also allows for identification of culture and top-performer indicators, stay tuned for new blog posts in which I’ll explain these further!
Want to find out more about how to use gamified assessments to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your team? Get in touch with us and we will be more than glad to help you take your team to the moon!
Cheers, Anete
