Leadership Development: How An Insights Assessment Will Help You Lead
Insights Assessment Tool Helps You Lead A Diverse Team of Personalities
All great managers should have the skill set to lead and build an elite team. But the ability to do this doesn’t always come as second nature to us. In order to excel as a leader, you need to be committed to a consistent pursuit of leadership and personal development.
When it comes to being able to manage your team’s dynamics effectively, there are numerous tools and skills that you can leverage to ensure that you are being an effective leader. You may have already heard of tools such as DiSC or Myers Briggs. Yet, there are other psychometric tools that are much more reliable. These are insights assessments tools.
Insights assessment tools such as Insights Discovery are influenced by the work of Carl Jung. Similar to that of Myers Briggs. However, what makes these personality assessment tools stand out among the rest is how effective they are in the workplace setting. These tools keep their categories and ways of assessing people’s personalities consistent. This ensures validity and reliability when analyzing a person’s dominant personality traits.
The reason that these tools are becoming more highly sought after by company leaders is due to the fact that they adequately analyze body language, verbal style, strengths and weaknesses, and communication style. All in the workplace environment. Unlike DiSC and Myers Briggs, the Insights Discovery tool is also highly regulated and managed meaning that you will always get an accurate representation of your personality type.
Below, we highlight some leadership communication skills and insights assessment tools that will help you with your leadership development journey.
Great Leadership Isn’t Possible Without Next-Level Communication Skills
This is quite the statement to make but it’s true. If you don’t have great leadership communication skills then you can guarantee that it will be difficult to lead a diverse team. Communication is a core leadership function after all.
Leaders need to be effective communicators in many relationships at the organizational level. You need to have the ability to think with clarity, communicate ideas clearly and share information with a vast array of team members on a daily basis. This is especially true when you are leading diverse teams.
According to a Gallup report, actively disengaged employees cost the United States between $450 billion to $550 billion in 2014 alone. And what is one of the leading causes that lead employees to become disengaged? Poor communication levels.
Nowadays, the problem in many companies is that employees and leaders alike, are only carrying out communication through a sole medium channel: email. We all know that email can be easily misconstrued and misinterpreted. When this happens it heightens the risk of your employees wasting time resources trying to find clarification or potentially experiencing low morale. If this continues on an ongoing basis, employees get frustrated and are more likely to look for other career opportunities.
Your team is made up of a huge variety of personalities, preferences and communication styles. As a leader, you need to be efficient at having conversations with your team across various mediums of communication. You also need to have the correct skills to know how to communicate with employees who have different styles of communicating. Mastering this is what next-level communication is all about.
Insights Assessment Tools: What Are They And How Can They Help?
One step you can take to become a communication powerhouse is to use an insights assessment tool. Insights assessment tools have become very popular among leaders in business, politics, the military and many more industries. This is for the mere fact that these tools provide you with the insights you need to know how to effectively communicate based not only on who your employees are but also, who you are.
Now you may have already heard of companies using these kinds of assessments on potential hiring candidates but they are also extremely valuable in terms of leadership development. But what exactly are insights assessment tools based on?
Insights Discovery: Increasing Self-Understanding And Self-Discovery
Many insights assessment tools are based on the Insights Discovery methodology. As we mentioned earlier, this is a psychometric tool that was developed from the learnings and psychology of Carl Jung. This methodology was built to help people get a better understanding of themselves and others in order to improve self-awareness, communication skills and workplace relationships.
The Insights Discovery psychometric tool uses a color model that allows you to visually get a better understanding of your management style, strengths, communication abilities and the value that you bring to an organization. It is used as part of assessment tools with the intention of giving you actionable insights that you can implement in your everyday work life.
The Benefits: It’s More Than Just A Color Profile
You may be thinking how is a simple color model going to be beneficial to me as a leader? And you are perfectly entitled to that thought. However, the fact of the matter is that these insights are truly invaluable and when used in interacting with your team, highly impactful.
Communication is more than just knowing how to speak with an employee face-to-face or over email. Communication dynamics also involve listening skills and knowledge of verbal and non-verbal styles. The personal insights that you receive from a leadership assessment tool allow you to understand how to communicate better with your team while also building better relationships. This, in turn, will create a work environment where team members can work harmoniously and productivity will flourish.
Understanding how your own style of communication impacts those around you also prepares you a number of different responsibilities that you have as a leader. For example, negotiation and conflict management are two functions that most managerial roles will face in a company. Insights gained from a leadership assessment tool such as Insights Discovery will help you expertly adapt your approach when managing interpersonal team conflicts.
What Else Does It Take To Lead A Diverse Team
In addition to next-level communication skills, there are a number of other skills that you will need to lead a diverse team efficiently. One of these is emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand the emotions of those around you. A leader who does this effectively creates a safe environment for their team where employees can voice their opinions and concerns without judgement. Whereas, leaders with low emotional intelligence tend to unravel in stressful situations creating an uncomfortable and unproductive work environment.
Building upon this skill as part of leadership development is another reason why you should consider using an insights assessment tool. As these tools provide you with insights into your ability as a communicator, it will also tell you how you process and identify emotions as part of workplace relationships.
When emotional intelligence is used with great communication skills, there will be nothing stopping you from creating a workplace environment for your team that encourages productivity, creativity and professional growth.
Learning How To Become A Communication Powerhouse
Learning how to lead your team the right way doesn’t have to be complicated. We don’t believe that professional training should be uptight and boring. Instead, we like to make sure all of our training includes the right mixture of fun blended learning content and engaging delivery.
With courses on advanced communication, negotiation and conflict management you will learn how to be the best leader you can be.
Stop putting off upskilling yourself and your team. Request a free LMS demo today.