Organizations are only as capable as their people. If your team members are competent and work well together then the outcome will be impressive, but if some team members are incompetent and your team is fragmented, then time, effort, and resources will be wasted. As a leader, you want to bring the best out of your team. You want them to realize their true potential, individually and collectively. This is where our role comes in, as we provide you with organizational behavior insights that would improve your team perfomance and increase your organizational impact.

Most teams operate at a suboptimal level of performance. They are less effective and efficient than they actually can be.

This happens for various reasons such as:

• Dysfunctional team dynamics,
• A team formation that is not suitable for the current circumstances,
• An unhealthy workplace culture,
• Low team morale,
• Groupthink, or
• Lack of team cohesion (or consensus culture).

In fact, the reasons why your team could be performing below its optimal performance level are countless, and teams perform at their best only when certain conditions are met. We work with you and study your team to identify ways to elevate its performance and enable it to reach its true potential.

Allow our psychologists to enable each one of your team members to realize their full potential

Our psychologists and neuroscientists will work with every individual on your team and assess their talents and skills, in order to help each of them realize their utmost potential in the organization. This can involve a few interviews and questionnaires, and then recommendations to bring the best our of your team members.

Is your team energy scattered or concentrated?

The energy of your team may be all over the place. Different team members might be moving in different directions. Different working styles and approaches may be incompatible and clashing. Conflicts may arise. Some team members may be preoccupied with their problems at home and not at their highest level of concentration and presence. Some may not be aligned behind your mission and vision, and the list goes on. All of those factors, and others, mean that your team is not putting all of its energy into useful work, work that will ultimately benefit everyone.

We have developed a proprietary approach to assess and examine how your team uses its energy and how focused that energy is. We then ensure that your team is working like a single unified force and all of it energy is going into the same focal point (in line with your strategy). By doing this, we ensure that each team member is contributing to one common pool of value with the least amount of friction possible. Your team members will be working with one another in harmony and will interact in intelligent, meaningful ways. They will perform better on all sorts of tasks, and working speed will pick up dramatically.

Increase your team’s collective intelligence

Teams think and act collectively. This comes with both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you have more brain power and energy available to achieve more. The disadvantage is that, working in a group involves dealing with politics, complexity, and dependencies. Within a group, your team usually only moves as fast as its slowest member (often slower).

Many teams are slow to reform. They are simply not dynamic enough. The roles and responsibilities are too rigid, which often hinders the team from achieving a breakthrough when it is most needed.

Managing knowledge for collective intelligence

Managing knowledge on your team is a crucial task, especially if you are trying to base your competitive advantage on your ability to innovate. Yet, this task in particular has proven to be challenging. You need your team to think as efficiently as a human brain does. This can be done when you structure your knowledge management processes properly, and our team will set up those systems very carefully for you.

Get to know what is moving your team from within with anthropological insights

When it comes to anthropology – particularly human behavior- nothing is absolutely a given nor completely obvious. From an anthropological perspective, organizations are small communities and they function as such. Mutual agreement and interests between individuals are the building blocks of those organizations.

However, the way organizations are managed today has been the same for decades, despite societal and technological advances that render that approach obsolete. Management theories still talk about “managing human resources”, which is based on the assumption that managers can actually “control” human behavior. They cannot. At best, they can influence it, but only to the extent of their understanding of the cognitive and cultural structures of the individuals and the team.

In every organization, there is a behavioral matrix that ultimately determines the success of that organization. This matrix is often complex and your “HR” systems can only influence it to a certain extent. This is why you need deep insights into this matrix.

Our anthropologists will analyze the social systems at play in your organization, how they work, and the socio-cultural problems your team faces. They will examine the behavioral matrix in your organization, be it simple or complex, in detail, to identify hidden conscious and unconscious forces moving it. This understanding will enable you to change that matrix and harness innovation and high capability.

To foster that understanding, it is important to understand the interactions and exchanges taking place within the organization at all levels. Those interactions and exchanges shape the small community that the organization is. Moreover, anthropological insights will enable you to identify the best ways to communicate with your team effectively and efficiently. It will also help you understand the collective brain in your organization, which essentially determine the levels of collective intelligence of your team and take it to the next level.

Understanding the collective brain will enable the board and management to devise effective strategies to harness the true potential of their team. Those strategies will be based on mutual respect, agreement, autonomy, and an accurate understanding of what makes your team thrive.

If you want your cultural change programs to succeed, then anthropological insights are indispensable

Furthermore, Anthropology helps you understand the culture in your organization, and helps you initiate cultural change programs successfully. Because you cannot change performance radically without changing the culture, anthropological insights are indispensable.

Let our neuroscientists help you achieve true cognitive diversity (or neurodiversity)

While it is generally beneficial to have people from various backgrounds on your team, real diversity depends on cognitive diversity. This diversity will ensure that you have both divergent and convergent modes of thinking on your team (both are equally important). Those modes of thought usually drive the team in different directions (too little cognitive diversity and you have groupthink, too much and your team cohesion will be impacted negatively). In short cognitive diversity is an advantage but only if handled with care. We help you ensure you have optimal level of cognitive diversity on your team, which stimulates your team’s creativity and improve their problem solving abilities.

For your team to function well, you need an optimal level of cognitive diversity. Too much diversity and there will be tensions that will eventually undermine the cohesion in your team. Too little diversity and the competitiveness of your organization will decline. Diversity is definitely an advantage, but it needs to be handled right.

Organizations are usually familiar with traditional functions (such as marketing, finance, production, … etc), but now they need to think of a new unconventional function in the firm: the cognitive one. Your organization acts like a giant brain that performs cognitive tasks (such as information processing), but the question is: how efficiently?

We work with you to actually define and build that function, and then refine it in order to cultivate the innovative talents available in your team.

Identify the right leadership style for your organisation

There is no single perfect leadership. The right leadership style often depends on the situation, which is why we are seeing a shift lately towards situation-based leadership. The same leader won’t be as effective in two starkly different contexts.

Here, our role is to help you understand your organization and its behavior in depth (based on anthropological, psychological, and neuroscientific research), and then identify the best leadership style.

Building vital organizations

Our aim is to transform your organization into a vital one that works like a beehive. We do this through various means.

The link between workplace design and people performance has been proven beyond doubt. To enable your team to reach its fullest potential, the workplace environment must promote the right behaviours that push your organization forward.

Our designers work with psychologists and neuroscientists to identify the optimal workplace conditions for your team members to thrive, individually and collectively. They will offer you the following:

• Optimal lighting conditions for your team depending on their tasks
• The optimal interior depending on weather your team is planning, executing, innovating or implementing ideas
• The optimal ventilation
• The right noise (or silence) levels for your team to remain stimulated
• The right interior design depending on whether you are planning, executing, brainstorming ideas or implementing them
• Optimal spacing so that you can maintain team cohesion while team members can still focus. This will enable team members to work independently and interdependently.

Embark on a cultural change program with us

Your organizational culture can be either conducive to high performance and growth or an impediment standing in its way; there is no third alternative. The challenge for most executives and boards is that cultural change programs are the toughest to pull off. The failure rate is way too high. Senior managers struggle to put their fingers on what culture is, let alone change it. People’s resistance to change add to the challenge. All of those factors grind the cultural change programs to a halt before they even start.

Cultural change programs are challenging, but the challenge is not insurmountable. We can partner with you to devise an organizational culture change program that actually delivers. High performance usually follows on its own.

Here is what we offer you:

• We will identify and map your organizational culture and group dynamics, which will show us where to focus.
• We will develop a road-map for change.
• We will get a buy-in from almost everyone in the organization, as sustainable change comes from within.

Mitigate the risk of human error

Human error is not only too common, it is proliferate. The majority of risks organizations face can be traced back to human error. It is only natural for them to become fatigued, and for their decision making abilities to become impaired under unusual level of stress. Mainly, human error can fall into one of two categories:

• Error in thinking
• Error in behaviour

The former often leads to the latter, thus we try to address the first one first and foremost. This usually results in a much better risk management performance, fewer errors, and results of better quality.

How will your team change following our engagement?

• Your team will have a shorter response time (this includes responding to opportunities, threats, and changes in the internal and external environments faster).
• Your team will become more flexible.
• Your team will become better able to tackle bigger challenges with more confidence.
• Your team will develop better capability to deal with complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and chaos.

Following our engagement, our consulting team will help your organization achieve the following

• Better competitive position: even if you are in the lower percentiles in the market, we will enable you to reach a high percentile and better position in the market
• Better financial position: your net income and net financial position should improve gradually.