Team members who undergo the M&M training and preparation for a behavioural assessment (sometimes called Collaborative Behavioural Assessments or Behavioural Assessment Centres) often take on this workstream on top of full workloads, competing priorities, and busy personal lives, and do so with much bravery. It’s an intense process that requires in-depth training, getting out of their comfort zones, and sharing themselves with their new team, and yet they are overwhelmingly likely to recommend the experience of training with us with others (with an average of 9.6 out of 10).
We’ve asked them what advice they’d give anyone going through the process for the first time, and this is what they’d like to share.
1. Get to know your team members
Creating close personal relationships is a shortcut to high-trust and cohesion across the team. As one of our team members reflects, “Your number one priority is to get to know your team members, as simple as that. Truly get to know them and the depth of their personalities and perspectives.”
This is sage advice, as getting to know people as individuals builds trust and increases empathy – two ingredients for great collaboration. This also ensures that regardless of what you face you are supported (and everything is easier together). If you know and trust team members, you are able to concentrate on ensuring that they have chances to contribute, share their experiences, and help them through the process, which helps to reduce your nerves. “The weight of the task is not solely on your shoulders. The better you can get to know your team members the easier it will be to rely on them, play up their strengths, and overall make yourself and everyone feel at ease, confident, and supported.”
2. Keep an open mind and trust the process
The line, “trust the process” is perhaps the single, most common piece of advice from our teams after going through preparation and assessments. Although we’ve all experienced the benefits of great leadership, collaboration, and what can happen when teams work well together, preparing for a behavioural assessment is very different to what many people in the infrastructure industry have experienced before, and it can at first seem like a time consuming and unnecessary process.
But #trusttheprocess quickly becomes somewhat of a motto (sometimes muttered, occasionally yelled!) as the team starts to see the benefits of our preparation, and understand the depth of the behavioural assessment and their impact on winning and delivering work successfully. While teams are all different, the stages they go through in becoming close and preparing for assessments have the same dips and peaks, and good coaches are able to support individuals and teams through these to ensure best preparation for ‘game day’.
3. It’s about the assessment, but it’s really not about the assessment
To win a collaborative project, you need to win a behavioural assessment. And so in some ways, preparation for the assessment is like studying for an exam. But great preparation is about so, so much more than that – by the end of the preparation the team has experienced a full-scale behavioural learning program and completed a quest together that binds them forever. Assessment preparation is about putting together people from across organisations and very intentionally creating a best-for-project team that will be the foundation for the mobilization and delivery of the project. It also has the power to change lives in the now, as the content and learnings can be applied to any project (or even at home – our favourite feedback is from families!)
As one team member advises, “Do it! Embrace the process, it is weird, and fun and different but we should all do it to become better team members in our company.” Going through assessment preparation is a life-changing experience that people find individually enriching in both a personal and professional sense, which is why collaborative behaviours are so much more than assessments to win projects – at their core, they should be about development, best working together and great delivery – the reason why clients have included them as part of the procurement in the first place!
