Amplifying your Team’s Advantages (Financial Industry)

AMPLIFYING YOUR TEAM’S ADVANTAGES

Understanding diversity in the financial industry and making it work for you

Financial institutions are pillars of society, secure and reliable institutions that take care of money transactions. Of course, the foundations of financial institutions are their employees, and these types of companies are extremely careful about who they recruit to positions within their organisations.

When we talk about financial institutions we are most familiar with banks, as we do business with banks almost on a daily basis. In doing so, we meet mostly with their sales departments. Far fewer people understand what else is needed in a bank’s inventory to perform safely and reliably. Hence banks employ a wide range of different team members who need appropriate qualifications in order to perform their work well. Staff members are provided with constant training, as banks are continuously evolving to offer their clients the most advanced and reliable services. As a business coach, I have worked with several banks operating in international markets and have trained heads of various departments, giving me the opportunity to recognise different ways of working, different ways of communicating and, of course, different thinking styles.

In my work, I use one of the best performing and effective profiling tools – MindSonar® – which allows professionals to identify their own ways of thinking and their most likely responses in specific situations. In this way, they are enabled to gain self-knowledge and to recruit team members who have different ways of thinking in specific contexts, which leads to creativity and the ability to solve even the most demanding challenges. Of course, an added benefit of knowing each other in this way is that they can more often avoid conflicts and resolve problems.

It is also true that understanding the diversity of team members gives the organisation, its leaders, teams and individual employees the responsibility to develop and strengthen their competences and thus enable each other to achieve the highest level of efficiency in communication, relationships and operations, provided, of course, that they are also suitably professionally competent.

We have recently prepared and delivered workshops with an HR department of a banking organisation.  The workshops are intended to strengthen communication and relational skills and raise emotional intelligence.  Analysis of a team’s MindSonar® group profile demonstrated a strong pattern of how individuals, specifically in the positions of sales managers, are similar in thinking styles in specific contexts. This is of course, logical, as a position of a branch manager or a sales manager requires a certain approach, and therefore, it makes sense for the organisation to either recruit or develop a co-worker who will cope with the challenges this position brings. At the same time, we discussed with these leaders how they value different thinking patterns in their teams. Despite relationships that sometimes require more input, it is precisely different patterns of thinking that strengthen and enrich a team, especially in the sense that it can achieve above-average efficiency and when it comes to financial management, appropriate returns.

Recognition that professionals need high-level communication and relational skills for their optimal functioning is crucial for both the development of the individual as well as the organisation. In identifying this, financial institutions, as the most technologically and security-wise advanced companies, are at the forefront of modern corporate operations.

An effective and widely useful tool enabling the profiling of diversity of thinking styles – MindSonar® enables identifying differences in thinking and facilitates guiding the development of individuals. Using MindSonar® means skilled trainers and profiling practitioners – MindSonar® Professionals – can assess individuals or entire teams and show them where and how they can progress, accessing coaching and specialised workshops. Organisations and teams can develop optimally and achieve maximum prosperity.

Improving Diversity in the Workplace

Improving Diversity in the Workplace

Words by Levitha Biji

Leicester business owner opens up about her experience of racism, which led her to start a business based on equality, diversity and inclusion 

Experiencing racism once – in a new business owner’s life – motivated Minakshee Patel to start her own consultancy firm. 

Whilst at a Polytechnic in the mid 1980’s, she stood in an election for the Students Union. She wrote history being the first female as well as the first Asian during the election. However, there were some individuals who believed she didn’t have a place there, she told us: “They used a derogatory term to describe me because I am Asian, I was shocked.” Being the character she is, the experience made her more determined to win the election, which she did. She said, “It was more about them than me.” She eventually started her own consultancy business, Minakshee Patel Consultancy. 

She turned this experience into a positive one and now Minakshee, who has 16 years’ experience, wants to make a difference by adding value regarding equality, diversity and inclusion to other organisations and ensuring their employees have a voice. This business owner’s goal is to be a catalyst in her clients’ journeys to help them reach their goals by using MindSonar®. 

MindSonar® measures cognitive diversity and the insights gained enables staff to perform at their best and improve diversity & inclusion within the workplace by helping to address unconscious bias, leading to a competitive advantage for your organisation.

Cognitive Diversity: a Workforce needs a MindSonar® solution

Only a few weeks ago I was reminded about diverse thinking. I coach Colts Rugby and had, for my sins, agreed to help the under 7s team. Being prepared for herding cats, I planned a session to finish with a game. One 7-year-old explained how I could improve the game. I reluctantly entertained his idea and it was a hit. I had fun, the kids had fun and we were more productive in achieving the same outcomes of evasion, pace and teamwork.  

So let me ask you to stop and think. Yes, stop and think.  How many people do your clients have in their workforce that look like them, agree with them and act like them? The other rugby coaches did not question the game I had proposed. They look and sound similar to me.  

A lot has been written about diversity in the past 25 years and much has been concerned with demographic diversity. That is, diversity which is based on colour or race, sexuality, gender, age and culture.  Rightly so.  Demographic diversity is a must. It has been proven many times that an organisation that does not actively engage in diversity can limit ability and productivity. Organisations with a diverse workforce have the ability to be more productive. The Royal Academy of Engineering identified research into culture and inclusion in engineering and found that ‘inclusion benefits the performance of individual engineers, with 80% reporting increased motivation, 68% increased performance and 52% increased commitment.’

Failure to engage with people who are diverse has led to well documented disasters such as the 9/11 bombings in the USA. The CIA at the time was populated with highly intelligent men, ‘the best of the best,’ white, Ivy-League educated men. They overlooked the warning signs of a terrorist attack. Why? Because they could not perceive the threat or signs of build-up in terrorist activity. Despite the high entrance examinations and psychological assessments to become an agent for the CIA they lacked diversity and reference experience beyond their world. They lacked understanding of an impending problem. Their perception in the context of attacks in the USA was: it will never happen, they cannot win.  The CIA agents were all from a similar mould and this had served the CIA well. 

However, while the agents lacked demographic diversity and reference experience to a problem, it has also been argued they lacked understanding and had little cognitive diversity within their group. As MindSonar® professionals we can explain the measurement of others against ourselves as thinking differently or being cognitively diverse.  We know this in simple terms as how you think and what you value, what drives or motivates YOU is different to ME. Neither is good or bad, it’s how that style serves us at that time in a specific context.  Our cognitive style, as we know, is not our personality. Our style is not fixed but it is flexible.   

Let me give an example that might prove helpful for clients.  You know when you have experienced a problem and you have contacted a friend or called a wise parent who has provided new insight to your approach because they experienced the same or a similar problem before?  I suspect you can recall how grateful you were for their input and how much time it saved you. Imagine doing this always in the work environment.   Imagine if the CIA had access to MindSonar® measurement for building a team of diverse thinkers?

So back to our problem: the skills of MindSonar® can help – instead of dialling a friend or colleague, why not advise a client to dial internally and ask some questions about what approach would be more helpful from referenced experience? What options or steps could be useful here? What could go wrong or what do they need to solve this? By using the opposite of your meta programmes you gain access to a range of new answers. Jaime Leal uses this approach with teams by leaving them with a MindSonar® coach in the room poster – a set of questions that a team can ask of themselves to manage their blind spots. 

It would be fair to say fostering demographic diversity gains different views, but it is not targeted at thinking differently.  Yes, we may gain some advantage if we have people from different backgrounds but if they attended the same school, and the same training programmes, they are likely to act like each other.  So demographic diversity only partly meets the world of change we face with artificial intelligence which poses many challenges to our work. 

With complex problems we need a variety of views on how to approach and understand information or to solve problems. Price Waterhouse Cooper identify that we are living through a fundamental transformation in the way we work. Automation and ‘thinking machines’ are replacing human tasks and jobs and changing the skills that organisations are seeking in their people. These momentous changes raise huge organisational, talent and HR challenges – at a time when business leaders are already wrestling with unprecedented risks, disruption and political and societal upheaval. 

Now we know the problems, it is fair to say we have one of the best solutions available: MindSonar®.

If we are going to meet the demands of the future, we need to share how we can develop understanding of  a workforce in others so that workforce can be more productive, solve problems more effectively and challenge each other to gain results. Perhaps we need organisations to develop a change in what they ask when seeking the right people for the roles they have. Instead of asking: who do we need? Perhaps we could encourage organisations to ask: what do we need in terms of thinking style and values against our long-term needs and gaps in the organisation?

Organisations by their nature in these unprecedented times and rapid development want success regardless of their motivators and the quickest way to gain success is by harnessing the right workforce to do the right job at the right time. The workforce that understands and harnesses different styles through understanding will be the workforce that lasts and WE  have the key to unlock their success.  

After over 20 years of coaching rugby, a diverse, uninhibited thinker, aged 7, brought fun and energy to my coaching. Cognitive diversity in the workplace to meet future demands is so important because #thinkingmakesitso when we use MIndSonar®

MindSonar Benchmarks for Project Teams – I wish I’d known about Them!

In my previous role I was responsible for managing a major programme involving multiple project teams. Part of the programme management involved regular risk management and “lessons learned” meetings. During these meetings, representatives from each of the project teams would discuss any issues that had arisen since the last meeting, and what steps had been taken – or needed to be taken – in order to rectify the issue and prevent it happening again.

The aim of the meetings was to ensure that the systems and processes we had in place were adequate to minimise the risk of problems arising and to enable a rapid corrective response when needed. However, at times these meetings could become quite tense because there was a fine line to tread between good risk management and problem resolution on one side and the development of a blame culture on the other. This was clearer to some members than others. Some members would always want to attribute all problems to individuals, rather than to consider the more common situation of them arising from system weaknesses. Tthe result was that friction would arise between those individuals with a “name and shame” approach and other members of the programme board. This created risks to the programme itself as it could result in people being reluctant to raise issues when they spotted them in fear of being blamed.

As the manager of this programme I had to manage the situation and try to cultivate a systems approach in the individuals concerned, most of whom I had no direct line management of.

How helpful it would have been to have had MindSonar back then. I believe it would have been possible to construct a Benchmark Profile to help identify the members of each project team who would be best suited to be the risk management/lessons learnt representative. This Benchmark Profile could have been constructed in consultation with other project and programme managers to provide a narrated estimation (with consultation).

My first thoughts about this are that this benchmark profile might include the following:

Graves Drives: Ideals; Learning;

Meta Programmes:

High: Away From (for risk management); Past (for lessons learnt);Structure (for systems approach)

Low: People (to avoid blame approach)

There are likely to be others and different views which is why I would prefer a benchmark profile resulting from a narrated estimation with consultation.

It would be great to hear from other MindSonar Professionals about their thoughts on this – and about whether anyone has yet used the MindSonar tool in this context.

It would also be good to hear from project and programme managers who have found themselves in similar situations – they could find MindSonar particularly useful when allocating project roles to their team members.

What are your thoughts?  Use the comments box below to share your experiences and views on this.

MindSonar F5 Team Refresh Program – Great tool for Project Teams

Prior to becoming a coach and therapist I was a programme manager responsible for the development and delivery of a complex national programme. This involved coordinating people from teams of very diverse specialties: people who were mathematicians, IT developers, communication specialists and policy developers to name just a few.

On the whole, the programme team members got along well and all were really committed to delivery of the programme. Overall they shared the same end goal and vison for its delivery. However, disagreements and misunderstandings would often arise between different members, some which carried a real threat to the success of one or another area of the programme. More often than not, such problems were caused by the different approaches and priorities of the different areas of speciality. For example, the policy makers hated details and wanted to know that the overall concept was being developed well, whereas the mathematicians were focussed on accuracy and statistical significance. The quality controller was seen as a miserable person, seeing only faults and always raising problems and the communications person wanted simply the good news to communicate to our stakeholders.

If only I had known about MindSonar back then! It would have been a fabulous tool to use with the programme team to enable them to understand their differences better and so appreciate each other’s strengths and see their own blind spots. The Team Refresh programme would have been perfect for enabling each member to see that there was no single right way to approach our programme – that, in fact, it was the range of thinking styles that was the team’s strength.

Within a Team Refresh workshop each team member completes a MindSonar profile in the context of working in that team. Using these profiles, each team member gets the opportunity to discover the “superpowers” and blind spots of every team member (including themselves) and to consider how the different profiles might both cause them stress and be able to help them.

At the end of the workshop the team members have a greater understanding of themselves as well as of the other team members and have also learned how they can work together, complementing each other to the benefit of the programme that they are delivering. As a team they will be able to communicate much more effectively between themselves, and to other teams.

Equally importantly, the MindSonar workshop would demonstrate that in such projects all thinking styles are equally valid, and that each contributes in an important way. In the case of my project for example, the meta programmes Specific, Use and Information were vital for the mathematicians, whereas for those developing the overall policy the meta programmes General and Concept were needed. It was essential that the data quality control individual was operating Mismatching, whilst the communications team needed to be running a Matching meta programme to be able to tell our sector how well the programme was coming along.

Some of these understandings did evolve in my team, but only in a piecemeal way as and when an issue arose. Had I been able to undertake a MindSonar Team Refresh workshop early on in project I believe a lot of the misunderstandings and resulting conflict and delays would have been avoided.

If you lead or coach project teams with a variety of specialisms then do consider arranging for a MindSonar Professional to deliver a Team Refresh programme for your whole team. The improvement in the way the team work afterwards will make it a very worthwhile investment.

Building a New Team: Alignment or Diversity?

A colleague from the US asked me: when profiling for a new team, would I want to see great diversity? In my mind that would make sense, but in reality I might want to see it aligned in some areas. What is your opinion?

In my opinion, the desired meta programs depend on what the team needs to accomplish. A sales team is different from a policy team. So in terms of priorities I would say: first of all you want the team to have the required meta programs and values to be successful at their main tasks. Once that is accomplished, you want to have as much diversity as possible. It is a bit like the relationship between towards (achieving goals) and away form (solving problems) in coaching. You want away from in the frame of towards. With team you want diversity in the frame of alignment.

If you want to put it in a procedure (which I often like to do) it would be something like this:

1. Define what the team’s main task is

2. Define what the necessary meta programs and values are for that task.

3. Make sure some team members have all (or as many as possible) of those thinking style elements.

4. Find additional team members how have some task-critical meta programs but who also have some meta programs an/or Graves drives that are distinctly different.

5. Explain thoroughly to the team why you composed them like this, and what the benefits of thinking style diversity are.

6. Prepare the team for dealing comfortably with conflicts that may arise from this engineered meta program diversity.

Good luck!