A foundation of Conflict Leadership is Self Awareness and the deep knowledge that people’s personalities, and therefore their behaviour, differs, and that can lead to unintended and misunderstood conflict. We need to understand that one person’s acceptable assertiveness is another person’s aggression, and the best way to appreciate those differences is with the Facet5 Personality Profile. This is especially effective if you are dealing with productivity defeating conflict within your teams.
Facet5 examines an individuals personality and uses that as a basis to predict behaviour that is relevant to success, challenges or failure in a professional setting. If you want to be convinced of its usefulness for you, check out the Sample Report here and consider how useful that information would be for you, partially when presented in a coaching conversation about your dreams and challenges.
Effective teams are the foundation of an effective business. Team development is important, but is more likely to be successful if you start with scientific data describing the individual members personalities and how they are likely to work most effectively together. And, of course, how they are most likely to get in each other's way, leading to frustration, conflict and low morale. Check out the Teamscape Sample Report here to see how this can be facilitated by Facet5.
Personality drives behaviour, and behaving is what we do in life, some of it effective and productive, some of it less so. If we want to turn up at our best in all aspects of our lives, then some foundational self awareness is essential. Fortunately the science of personality has developed massively over the last 50 odd years, and scientifically informed insight into our personality and behaviour is now available. Of the tools available to facilitate this insight, I have been using Facet5 for over 15 years and trust that it remains at the forefront of professionally oriented assessments based on the Big 5 Model.
For a detailed description of Facet5 and its research underpinnings, and extensive application in business and professions since the early 1980’s, see Facet5global.com
I personally found the insights gained from understanding my personality a profound and transformative opportunity to be really aligned with who I am and to present myself confidently with full acknowledgement of strengths and challenges and how they apply to the task at hand. I wrote about that transformation and its professional impact on me here.
Facet5 measures individuals on five factors, or ‘facets’, based on the Big 5. Each individual has a certain amount of each of the following factors, and it is this pattern of scores which gives the overall picture of their personality.
Will - determined, assertive, independent;
Energy - enthusiastic, sociable, involved;
Affection - open, sincere, warm, generous;
Control - structured, orderly, self-disciplined;
Emotionality - this interacts with the other four factors and affects stress tolerance, confidence and emotional states.
This will give you an overall picture like the one on your left, which is my profile:
You can see that the High Will means that I am very Determined and Independent, and would be even more so except that my ease with Conflict is quite low. Low Energy means that I am quite Introverted, so the ability to speak publicly with confidence and ease is a learned ability, not part of my personality. I shouldn’t be your first choice to be doing social networking for the business. It also means that I am likely to find High Energy people potentially distracting and annoying. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Once you understand the system, you will immediately be able to say of this person that they combine a task focus get the job done, but unusually that is coupled with a people focus, he won’t mind working alone and he will need to be watched to make sure that he is inclusive of his team, and note that he is a very creative thinker who may not follow or even respect rules and traditions.
But, Facet5 will allow you to dig deeper as it also takes a deep dive into the subfactors, as described here:
David has an extreme score for Will components Determination and Independence, but very low for ease with dealing with Conflict - (remembering the the mean is 5.5 and all scores are only meaningful in reference to a norm group with which you are being compared). In every case I will display the Strengths, but the risks will also be very real. With less extreme scores, the behaviour is more situational or contextual and the Risks are lessened.
Similar detail is provided for each of the Facet5 Subfactors.
This information is then used to generate a number of reports:
With Facet5, there are 1,000,000 possible combinations of scores that would give noticeably different profiles. Facet5 have divided up this vast number of possible patterns into 17 different ‘families’ of similar profiles. For example, a person may be a ‘Supporter’, ‘Specialist’ or ‘Controller’.
In my case I am an “Idealist” and parts of that report will include a Word Picture:
This is a guide that specifies where a person’s strength will lie and identifies things to watch out for against a list of behavioural dimensions that affect job performance. These include leadership, communication, interpersonal style, analysis and decision making, initiative and effort, as well as planning and organising.
Part of my report tells me:
This report identifies a person’s core drivers and shows which elements of a role can motivate or demotivate them. It covers the degree to which a person wants to influence events and the people around them, how much they need to be surrounded by people, whether they are more process-oriented or prefer less structure, and how much they need to feel like what they do is of value to others.
Again, the advice from Facet5 for me is:
Specifically designed for the workplace
Based on sound psychological theory
Recognised by the British Psychological Society (BPS)
Provokes people to be the best version of themselves
Helps individuals to understand who they really are
Explains behaviour in non-judgemental ways
Works quickly
Highly re-test reliability
Delivers clear results that are easy to understand and interpret
MetaSkill clients for Facet5 include the National Australia Bank, Australian Red Cross, Islamic Development Bank and Bahrain Institute for Banking and Finance.