Tools to Cultivate a Culture of Candor and Feedback

How MODintelechy uses HIGH5 to enhance onboarding, planning, retrospection and mutual understanding

“HIGH5 is a powerful tool that I, as a People Operations/Experience leader, am deeply passionate about. It’s a worthy investment I highly recommend.”
—Evangeline Carpenter, Head of People, MODintelechy

Who is MODintelechy?

MODintelechy is a data-driven, creative B2B lifecycle marketing and technology activation agency.

Our teams conceive, execute, and optimize customer-obsessed growth strategies that encompass the entire customer lifecycle, from initial purchase to long-term retention.

We apply this same philosophy internally within their own teams to create employee-obsessed strategies and work styles.

Hear from their Head of People, Evangeline Carpenter, on how HIGH5 became more than an easy strengths assessment.

Why MODintelechy chose a strengths assessment?

We had positive feedback from a Myers-Briggs assessment in the past, but that hype faded and the initiative fell to an “Okay, what’s next? Is that it?” phase.

For our agency, there was no long-lasting effect.

I wanted:

• An easy lift for my teams with a test that would grant variation thus allow better self-expression
• Insightful and unique results
• Long-term value
• Affordability

While there are still features that can greatly elevate HIGH5’s offering, what they provide far surpasses their competitors’ offerings, and it’s been instrumental in our internal shift of cultural transformation.

“Easy. Insightful. Long-term value. Affordable . . . HIGH5 checked all those boxes.” – Evangeline Carpenter, Head of People

How does MODintelechy utilize HIGH5?

For a quick overview of the assessment, HIGH5 sorts 20 strengths into 4 categories (Thinking, Doing, Feeling, and Motivating).

The 20 strengths that fall within those categories range from an Empathizer (my top strength) to Strategist to Focus Expert to Commander, all unique characteristics that display varying strengths required to make a team/company run successfully.

While your top 5 strengths may be similar to another on your team, having the exact same grouping of 20 strengths in a profile is as rare as one person in the entire world. Everyone is unique, so your results should be, too.

Understanding Ourselves

Looking at my personal results and at common feedback from my teams, the results were surprisingly accurate, and, as a People Operations/Human Resources leader, matched up quite well to my personal core values!

Your HIGH5 Top 5 go into great depth, giving:

• Thoughtful definitions to understand how our strengths connect with ourselves and others.
• Plenty of tips on how we can effectively lean into our strengths.
  • Example: A tip I have as a Coach is: “Encourage a culture where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities. This approach helps team members to take risks and experiment without the fear of negative repercussions, which is essential for growth.” Couldn’t have said it better myself!
• Opportunities for self-reflection to understand blind spots your strengths may cast.
• And a good check to see if you’re in the right profession and the traits of a role that will suit you best.
  • I obviously don’t want my employees to up and leave (we’re blessed with an incredible team of folks), so we use this more to identify if your current role has the listed traits within the “Career Applications” section. If so, great! If not, then how can we better integrate these traits that speak to you to ensure you’re bringing your best self to the table each day?

Your Full Profile is the initial long-term value you receive after taking the test. There is so much personal and professional development that can be harnessed here . . . if you take the initiative to take advantage of it.

I suggest encouraging your managers to sit down with their direct reports during performance conversations and look through these two sections of each Top 5 strength: “How To Use More Effectively” and “Watch Outs”.

“Nothing about HIGH5 is meant to be negative. Everything is an opportunity.” – a MODintelechy employee

Understanding Others – Foundational Conflict Resolution Tool

One of the core factors in conflict is lacking an understanding of the other person and their way of thought/action.

HIGH5 offers a great tool for this by allowing 1 v. 1 profile comparisons. In these profile comparisons (for a single individual or comparing against a team), you can get a quick sense of your compatibility with your Fit Score. I praise Fit Scores between 50-75% to give team members a healthy dose of friendly relationship potential and diverse thought that will propel them to make better decisions and produce better work together.

I have found this 1 v. 1 tool to be immensely helpful for identifying the “why” when two employees are struggling to see eye-to-eye. The accuracy is startling when looking to see why Employee A and B aren’t getting along. These individuals usually have a lower Fit Score, and then their top strengths have stark differences.

The comparison tool talks through:

• Characteristics each individual is likely displaying
• Validating thoughts, actions, and work/communication styles
• Why the other individual may act differently
• How you can shift your perspective to work better with the other individual

Onboarding

Our People team sits down with new hires to review HIGH5, using this time to discuss their results, answer questions, and then utilize the beforementioned comparison tools.

One of the hardest aspects of a new job is navigating new relationships and finding a way to effectively insert yourself into pre-established dynamics. Most are not set up for success, but HIGH5 allows us a dedicated space to let employees start off on the right foot.

We take time to look at other employees they work closely with to see maybe why they work so well together or why they are experiencing friction before first-month assumptions turn into habits. This immediately sets the precedent that, when faced with a difficult situation, we seek first to understand before placing blame.

We then shift to look at them and the teams they’ll be working with, to the organization, to small client teams and/or their department.

Something I greatly appreciate about the Group Analytics is that it shows Unique Contributions, which is essentially a tool against alienation.

If you have one individual on a team who has a strength unique to others on their team, it’s easy for that individual to be outcasted, feel frustration, or not be properly utilized. This individual can sometimes be a person that doesn’t click with a new hire or others on the team, so the Unique Contributions section discusses the kind of work/tasks that match this strength the best, how you can best depend on them, and how you can work best with that individual because their thought processes are likely quite different from your own.

In agreement with HIGH5, this should not be a tool to deem a candidate worthy of receiving a job offer—nor any other kind of assessment tool.

Planning

When putting together a team, such as a client project team at an agency or a delivery team, etc., putting forethought into the structure of the team can make a difference.

We seek to use HIGH5 to test team dynamics by selecting individuals who fit the skill/experience and availability requirements we need, and then seeing what their makeup is when put together. We check their Team Strengths Culture, their Unique Contributions, and we look to see where the group falls within strengths that are Motivation, Doing, Thinking, and Feeling.

We can then start off a team on the best possible foot by allowing the group/account leader to address these findings and opportunities to best support one another and achieve goals during kick off calls instead of wondering what went wrong 4 months later.

“This Reflections functionality has allowed us to not take things too personally, and we’ve gotten more candid with each other. This is letting us truly reflect and is an opportunity to push the uncomfortable.” – a MODintelechy employee

Powerful Retrospectives

Utilizing HIGH5’s Reflections tool quickly aided our company’s mission of fostering a stronger culture of candor and feedback.

There are many ways to harness impact from HIGH5, but how can you implement that long-term value?

Our answer was turning the Reflections tab into our Retrospective Powerhouse.

Whether it be for quick bi-weekly syncs after sprints or more dedicated time on a monthly/quarterly basis to conduct deeper reflection, our teams took this section beyond just our strengths and soft skills to additionally assess our processes, our synergy, efficiency, and recognition.

Reflections is a section that introduces a SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results) model, which I believe is a terrific introduction to the tab where immediately users are asked to shift into a positive, constructive, and solution-oriented mindset. Retrospectives are quick to turn negative, but HIGH5 frames this process in a completely different light.

Our teams find the most value from the Team Actions section where they come together regularly to discuss what they should start, stop, and continue doing as a team. This has become a terrific opportunity for candor and collaboration in an assessment that goes beyond focusing on being a Coach, Deliverer, Catalyst, or Strategist. Instead, our teams are analyzing their bandwidth and meeting efficiency, how they can better partner with their clients, encouraging each other to maintain their strong team health, and different processes they seek to optimize or implement.

The most impact from this section is found by having teams submit feedback beforehand, and then join a meeting where all members can review feedback and perspectives, discuss opportunities/wins/obstacles, and then take action by submitting Individual Commitments or taking to a project management tool to set their goals into motion.

Business & Team Impact

“It gave us a platform to really push on people’s strengths” and have those tougher conversations in a “safe place” where we need to be quite clear on our strengths and opportunities for improvement/growth/delegation that we see, as shared by a MODintelechy employee.

“This helps us lead our fellow team members towards leaning into their strengths” and delegating the ones that are better suited to others on the team.

HIGH5 has improved our ability to navigate tricky relationships, increase engagement and constructive collaboration, and provided a safe space for feedback. It has helped us leverage strengths, fill gaps, and boost job satisfaction across our agency.

MODintelechy is stronger for its clients and now even stronger for its team.

Read the original article here.