How well do you know your teammates? Do you know if they are impulsive?  People pleasers? If they like to cogitate over a proposal before making a decision?  You may know quite a lot simply through observing and working with them over time but what don’t you know?

There is a way to learn more about their preferred ways of working through personal profiling.

Profiling is a behavioural assessment tool. It helps you understand your own and your teammates’ strengths, preferred way to communicate, and it articulates an individual’s working style. It helps you understand yourself better – recognising your own preferences – which in turn, helps teams to work smarter together. Profiling can also support People and Culture departments with employing the right mix of people for a role or team, particularly in a world where educational attainment is often valued more than having the right personal skills for a job.

Popular personal profiling programmes

Profiling comes in many shapes and sizes. You may have heard of DISC profiling or Myers Briggs, Truity or HIGH5. There are many variations of profiling out there including Contribution Compass – which is another one of our favourites. Our good friend John Acton, from Peer2Peer, can tell you more about.

Did you know that profiling first started in 460 BC? Hippocrates suggested that humans had a ‘persona’ that was made up of four distinct temperaments: the dominant temperament being the one that created one’s ‘personality’.  Profiling became really popular during the 1900s thanks to the work of Carl Jung. 

Profiling remains popular today thanks to the insights that it gives. It is believed that over 75% of the UK’s top 100 companies use some form of profiling and psychometric testing. So the Hour Hands team decided that we too could benefit from the insights offered to help understand our own preferences, and make us a stronger team by better understanding each other.

DISC Profiling with Lorna Smith from LJS Elite

Business Executive Coach, Lorna Smith, is working with us to support our internal team development.  She introduced us to DISC profiling, a behavioral assessment tool based on four personality traits. We eagerly completed a short questionnaire about how we feel and react in various situations and waited for our personal report that describes each of us based on our “tendencies”, using the four DISC personality types:

• Dominance
• Influence
• Steadiness
• Conscientiousness

The reports were surprisingly accurate. After reviewing them and sharing relevant details, we certainly had a better understanding of ourselves and each other. Understanding who had similar personalities and who was completely different was really fascinating, as was discovering which personality type tended to work in which function.

“Spending the time to work out how each of us work as individuals has really given a strong insight as to how we collectively work as a team. We are now able to understand not only ourselves but each other more efficiently and therefore we can grow together” Natalie

We are already seeing the benefits of our increased understanding of each other in our day-to-day engagements with each other. We are communicating better as we have adopted ‘speaking in each other’s behavioral language’. This understanding will lead to the adoption of new processes – all for the benefit of our clients, of course! It will also help when we hire new team members to ensure that we bring complementary skill sets into our team.

How the flexible Hour Hands team will flex to support you and your business too

With willing and able bookkeepers on hand, Hour Hands is always available to help you complete those tasks that you just don’t have the time or capacity to do yourself. With our knowledge and experience, we offer guidance as well as hands on support – and can flex our offer to suit your needs be it a one off project or resolving a particular issue, or even delivering long term support. 

To find out more call us on 01727 818262. We will ask how we can support you and offer a solution either on an hourly rate or package cost. The choice is yours – we simply want to help.