​The Team Challenge

Great leaders rely on great teams to ensure business success. In order to deliver the best possible performance, the leader needs to understand the team’s strengths and vulnerabilities in fine detail. The leader also needs to clearly communicate their requirements with each member so that messages ‘stick’ and focus is maintained.

CatapultTeamWorks client David Brazier, Head of St James Senior Boys’ School, wrote in The ISA Journal ‘perhaps the most challenging aspect of both my headships has been forging effective Senior Management Teams. Invariably, these teams are already in place and have a way of working and a culture based on the previous guard… and he/she must work hard to create a new team dynamic to meet future needs and his/her vision.’

Whether your team is ‘inherited’ or selected, knowing you have the right individuals in the right roles is a key challenge in your role as leader. Balancing the team and knowing they are focusing on the right stuff is another

Addressing the Team Challenge

CatapultTeamWorks supports better decision-making at all levels in an organisation. Decision-making quality is the key differentiator between successful and unsuccessful businesses – CatapultTeamWorks enables leaders, managers and team members to fully understand their team’s capacity to make the right choices for the business’s success.

CatapultTeamWorks does not attempt to classify people into ‘types’ but provides a unique thinking-pattern profile for individuals in the team providing powerful insights into personal strengths and vulnerabilities. In addition, it highlights the impact of that thinking on the team dynamic and, therefore, on team and organisational performance.

‘Axiometrics has provided us with insight to issues that we had not recognised and since then we have started to see good results from the coaching and changes suggested.’

Project Manager, JAMES, MOD

What is CatapultTeamWorks?

CatapultTeamWorks is an internal business intelligence tool-set and suite of products and services that deliver the science behind strategic decisions related to a business’s human capital at individual, team and organisational levels.

CatapultTeamWorks is an efficient, rapidly delivered, accurate, reliable, affordable and un-gameable product-set delivering solutions targeted to the unique requirements of each organisation.

Underpinned by Axiometrics® profiling, CatapultTeamWorks has been developed from the value science work of Nobel-nominated Dr Robert S. Hartman. It enables us to identify the internal valuing system and associated thinking patterns that influence our attitudes, decisions and consequent actions; it determines why, based on our values, we do what we do.

Conventional profiling tools, ask people to describe themselves, or what they would do, in given situations. This introduces two main problems in a team context :

• Conventional Psychometric tests are based on interpretation of observed behaviour; trends and patterns are then interpreted to create a ‘norm’. ‘Norms’ will vary across cultural groups making comparison of like with like impossible.
• Behavioural and Personality assessments which are ‘created’ through inductive reasoning and are self-reporting assume that individuals are able to make the ‘right’ decision when deciding what behaviour is needed to drive the best result.

Axiometrics® profiling is now widely used to measure and assess the qualities and risk attributes of individuals, teams and organisations across the world. It is seen as complementary to other approaches used in human resource management such as those delivered by psychologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists.

What does CatapultTeamWorks do?

The CatapultTeamWorks offering provides an effective individual and team profiling and coaching service where individual team members receive detailed feedback on their strengths and vulnerabilities across a range of core competencies under the headings:

• Knows what to do
• Knows how to do it
• Planning and organising
• Getting things done
• Working through others

Knowing how these attributes are distributed across the workforce is key to understanding the dynamic of the team and its subsequent capacity to function effectively. The Team Dynamic workshops that follow individual feedback and coaching explore the balance and focus of the team and the resulting strengths and vulnerabilities to delivering organisation vision and priorities.

Follow up team and/or individual coaching ensures insights may lead to profound shifts in thinking, decision-making and action.

‘A worthwhile process that can give great results and from a company that has the ability to easily show potential and actual improvements in the working environment.’

Project Manager, JAMES, MOD

How is CatapultTeamWorks delivered?

CatapultTeamWorks is based on a simple, 15-minute, online statement-ordering exercise undertaken by designated staff. It is non-invasive, ethically robust and demonstrably reliable. The profiling methodology:

• Identifies how we make sense of our experiences and, consequently, how we are likely to behave
• Makes no attempt to classify or categorise individuals
• Is based on a single Universal Norm – and emphatically not one ‘created’ to validate a result
• Does not discriminate for age, gender, creed or culture (and is validated by the EEOC)
• Is able to predict future performance based on current attributes relative to a defined environment
• Cannot be ‘gamed’

Outputs from the online assessment are presented in a range of reports and used as a foundation for one-to-one feedback, team dynamic workshops, coaching and learning need analysis – all delivered by qualified and experienced analysts, coaches and facilitators.

Value added by CatapultTeamWorks

The organisations  that used CatapultTeamworks found they had also:

• Identified individual leadership needs to drive better business outcomes
• Improved clarity about where to focus attention to address the team and individual performance issues
• Optimised use of the diversity of thinking in the team
• Increased awareness of how individuals are perceived by other team members
• Produced a rich description  of the strengths and vulnerabilities of individuals and groups
• Developed an understanding of how and why people do the things they do
• Improved confidence and focus at an individual level
• Become clear about roles in the team
• Nurtured greater mutual respect and efficiency
• Illustrated improved access to thinking strategies  that enhanced individual performance

What does CatapultTeamWorks Cost?

Report charges are calculated from a simple fees model and, likely to be different for every project, are agreed upon in advance of any commitment. Individual report prices range from x to y with significant reductions available for bulk purchases. Overall project costs are kept low by careful resource management and incentivised by follow-on activities to maintain human resource capacity and provide a means of measuring culture. Coaching and consultancy rates are highly competitive and results are cost-effective.