Promoted
Out-behave your competition in 2023
January 2, 2023
With challenges on the horizon for businesses in 2023, we’re all looking for ways to increase productivity and performance. Here, Laura Weaving, founder and chief executive at Duo Global Consulting, shares insight on a key area to have on your agenda – behaviour.
Why does behaviour matter?
In business and at work, we’ve all heard about out-performing our competition.
But how about out-behaving your competition?
Whether you’re part of a large business with a long-established strategy, or a growing organisation with ambitious plans, understanding human behaviour could be the key to elevating your business in 2023.
At Duo Global Consulting, we are experts in human behaviour and have developed our own signature behavioural mapping tool.
Our methods have resulted in accelerated growth of more than £100 million for clients.
Behavioural insight allows you to understand people on a deeper level.
It goes beyond personality types, to indicate how individuals think, communicate and act, and gives you key insight into what motivates and drives them.
This level of understanding benefits a business because whatever you do, people are involved at each stage – employees, leadership teams, investors, vendors, customers and clients.
Understanding their behaviour is like a secret key to unlocking growth; it will help you motivate your team, influence your customers and solve business challenges.
Overall, behavioural understanding allows you to create a high performing, results-driven culture, without neglecting wellbeing.
Or, as we like to say, it allows you to out-behave your competition.
Solving 2023’s challenges with behavioural understanding
Coming into 2023, two of the biggest universal challenges for businesses to face are recruitment and retention.
In a candidate-led market, businesses must develop a high performing team, while keeping top talent, to deliver the results they need.
With the cost of hiring one person averaging anywhere from £30,000 to six figures, getting recruitment wrong is a costly mistake.
During the recruitment process, more traditional methods of assessing skills and competencies do not give a complete reflection of how an individual will fit within your culture, or how they will perform against your expectations.
However, embedding behaviour into your recruitment strategy means you can recruit more intelligently and better predict the success of each person prior to hire.
Firstly, identifying the dominant behaviours needed to excel in a role and complete your team means you can craft a job description and person specification that speaks directly to your ideal candidate.
Then, using assessments and interview questions, which give an insight into a candidate’s dominant, natural behaviours, means you gain a true reflection of how a candidate will perform in the role, seeing beyond the smoke and mirrors of rehearsed interview responses to understand what truly motivates them.
Once you have recruited new people into your business, the next challenge is retaining them.
A crucial part of retention is effective change management.
While change is inevitable, successful change management is not.
We know from experience that keeping employees engaged during change can be one of the biggest hurdles for businesses to navigate.
Regardless of whether the change you are experiencing is forced due to factors outside of your control, such as the current economic climate, or planned, for example, through the launching of a new product or service, knowledge of your employees’ dominant change behaviours and motivations will help you successfully engage them with change.
Understanding the behavioural make-up of your team from a change perspective allows you to adapt your change management strategy, put necessary initiatives and training in place and create an environment where individuals and teams are aligned.
In turn, you achieve employees’ buy-in to retain high performers and embed the change for long-term success.
A tool for measuring and understanding behaviours
With an understanding of the importance and applications of behavioural insight, how can you practically implement it in your business?
At Duo, we have developed a signature behaviour mapping tool: The Duo Behavioural Map.
The map uncovers eight key areas of behaviour, underpinned with 18 separate behavioural patterns.
It gives you a deep understanding of the behavioural make-up of anyone taking it, with an accompanying action-focused, simple to apply, set of recommendations and report.
What’s more, organisations can cut and layer their behavioural data in a number of ways – from individual insight to team or even company-wide behavioural overviews.
This means leaders gain a complete toolkit for communicating and leading, which is tailored to the dominant behaviours in their business for increased impact.
If you’re finding it difficult to recruit the right people for your team, have high turnover levels, struggle to engage employees with change, or can’t influence your prospects to convert to clients, then chances are you are missing behavioural indicators, which will help you turn all of these situations around.
Leading with a deeper behavioural insight will transform how your business operates and addresses challenges.
If you’re aiming to positively impact people, performance and profit in 2023, add out-behaving your competition to your objectives.
