The Smart Collaboration Accelerator

The Smart Collaboration Accelerator is a research-based psychometric assessment that helps individuals, leaders and teams understand their behavioral tendencies and turn those behaviors into ‘catalysts’ for Smart Collaboration.

Our research has identified seven behavioral dimensions associated with Smart Collaboration. Understanding your profile with respect to each dimension will allow you to become more thoughtful about when those behavioral tendencies promote effective collaboration, and ways to flex them dependent on the context, such as the business need, team dynamics, and your role.

The Smart Collaboration Accelerator is designed to help busy professionals collaborate effectively. The actionable insights now include recommendations specifically tailored to groups with remote workers.

What differentiates the accelerator is that it is focused on Smart Collaboration (and hence Diversity and Inclusion). It is strengths based and action oriented to achieve commercial outcomes. All in all it creates the mindset of a process, not an event, because change takes time.

Tools to Enable Your Success

Assessment: A short 10min psychometric self-assessment.

Individualized insights: An actionable, personalized report that identifies ways to leverage your attributes for Smart Collaboration, with specific insights on virtual work.

Team Leader insights: A Leader Insights Report to help understand the dynamics within the team and insights on how to coach, motivate and deploy the team’s collaboration skills.

Prompts: Research shows that repetition drives skill development and retention. To help embed the insights from the report we provide electronic ‘prompts’. These periodic personalized tips will help you deploy your strengths over time and remain aware of blind spots.

Training: Team-based training coupled with individualized support is the best way to embed insights from an assessment and translate those insights into action. We have developed a network of expert Smart Collaboration practitioners who can deliver the Smart Collaboration Accelerator and work with you and your teams to implement more effective collaboration.

The Seven Dimensions of Smart Collaboration

The Accelerator identifies and quantifies an individual’s ‘behavioral tendencies’. These are not immutable aspects of an individual’s personality but their natural ways of behaving. There are no good or bad behavioral preferences. No matter where a person sits on each dimension, this strength can be used as ‘catalyst’ to improve collaboration when used with intentionality.

  1. Wary / Trusting: The level of inherent and contextual trust in others
  2. Complex / Concrete: Attraction to more complex problems and innovation
  3. Risk Spotter / Risk Seeker: Captures a person’s innate beliefs about the balance of risk versus opportunity when working with others
  4. Close / Distant: The frequency and nature of communication with others
  5. Hands on / Hands off: Level of need for control of one’s environment / work
  6. Responder / Initiator: Taking the initiative and anticipating events
  7. Individual / Group: Prioritizing working in groups on one’s own

The Individual Accelerator Report

Through the online portal, individuals take the 10min survey and instantly have access to their individualized report. The report graphically displays the individual’s tendencies across the seven dimensions, for example Wary/Trusting. For each dimension, the report explains the dimension, summarizes their overall tendency, provides concrete recommended actions to drive collaboration, and a set of “watch outs” to help people avoid anti-collaborative behavior. The report also provides a one-page summary, a take-away you can pin to the wall, showing the highest priority actions and watch-outs to focus on.

The Leader Insights Report

The Leader Insights Report aggregates multiple individual Accelerator assessments to create a team profile. Like the Individual Accelerator Report, the Leader Insights Report provides specific, tailored and actionable recommendation for driving collaboration (within the team and across other silos) based on its unique profile. It also provides watch outs. When paired with the team leader’s Individual Accelerator Report, the leader will gain:

  • a better understanding of their own collaborative strengths and how to deploy them
  • insights into how to motivate and manage the team based on members’ behaviors and needs
  • practical, actionable recommendations and watch-outs which can enhance collaboration
  • a data-driven, objective way to engage with their team to drive collaboration
  • an appreciation for how diverse styles enhance collaboration, which promotes inclusivity and engagement
  • a shared, behavior-based language that supports a collaborative culture and enhances people’s ability to give constructive feedback

The Leader Insights Report can be debriefed directly to the Leader and it can form the foundation of a workshop session for the entire team.

Individual data is aggregated in the Leader Insights Report so that individual members cannot be identified.

Using the Accelerator to Address Business Change

The insights and practical recommended actions from the Individual Accelerator and Leader Insights Report can be used in conjunction with coaching, workshops and other training situations to address a range of collaboration-related business challenges. The Accelerator helps individuals and leaders draw on the diverse strengths of groups to: address VUCA issues; drive innovation; achieve the value of out post-merger integration; successfully on-board senior hires; drive engagement in distributed teams; breakdown the barriers of organizational silos, functions and geographies.

Benefits for Individuals and Teams

Our research has demonstrated, across industries and geographies, the quantifiable commercial and talent benefits of Smart Collaboration. Building on these concepts, the Accelerator helps individuals and teams realize these benefits.

For the Individual

  1. Understand your strengths – discover your collaborative tendencies and how to use them
  2. Enhance your impact – deploy your strengths to increase your collaborative effectiveness
  3. Engage your clients – identify needs and develop novel solutions through collaboration
  4. Grow revenue – provide unique solutions addressing complex higher-value issues

For Teams

  1. Differentiate – bring together deep functional and industry expertise to drive unique insights
  2. Innovate faster – identify novel solutions by accessing and combining cross-domain ideas
  3. Engage your leaders – drive strategy and execution by enhancing collaboration across silos
  4. Retain talent – engage staff, which makes them more productive and likely to stay
  5. Grow revenue – address the complex needs and deliver the higher value solutions
  6. De-risk the business – institutionalize clients through deeper and broader relationships

Ask for access to this crucial tool for your teams and leadership. please contact us using the Contact Us page.