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From Individual Profiles to Team Patterns · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:03
  Edwin, we've spent two episodes on what OAD measures in one person.
• 0:08
  Today I want to zoom out, because the piece makes clear this isn't just an
• 0:11
  individual tool.
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  Right, Claire, one profile tells you about one person's traits and pressure points.
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  Aggregate profiles across a whole team, a whole department,
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  and you start seeing things no single review would ever surface,
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  which teams are under chronic role strain, where a leader's style is quietly
• 0:30
  misaligned with the culture around them, where organizational design itself is the
• 0:35
  actual problem.
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  Give me a concrete example of that team-level pattern, because I think it's easy to
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  nod along in the abstract.
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  A sales team overloaded with highly dominant, low-detail profiles.
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  On paper, that team closes deals fast, and it will, that's exactly what those traits
• 0:52
  produce.
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  But implementation and client retention suffer, because nobody on the team is
• 0:58
  behaviorally wired to handle the detail-heavy follow-through that keeps a client
• 1:02
  past the signature.
• 1:04
  That's not five people having a bad quarter.
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  That's a team composition problem.
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  And the fix there isn't firing anyone, it's rebalancing who's actually on the team.
• 1:12
  Precisely, or building in a role that covers the gap deliberately.
• 1:17
  And there's a subtler version of this too, when everyone on a team reports the same
• 1:21
  perceived job behavior gap.
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  If the whole team feels they must act a certain way that doesn't match how they
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  naturally operate, that's rarely five individual quirks lining up by coincidence.
• 1:32
  That's usually the role, or the culture around it, that needs redesigning.
• 1:37
  This connects to leadership specifically too, doesn't it, not just team composition.
• 1:41
  It does, and this is where it gets genuinely useful for coaching.
• 1:45
  Comparing a leader's traits to their perceived job behaviors shows exactly where
• 1:50
  they feel pressure to manage differently than they naturally would.
• 1:54
  And there's a specific pattern worth watching for, a leader whose profile shows an
• 1:59
  extreme, sustained gap between trait patience and high-urgency perceived job
• 2:04
  behaviors.
• 2:05
  Over time, that's an early burnout signal in the leader themselves,
• 2:09
  not just their team.
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  So the tool can flag risk in the person managing the risk, which is a blind spot
• 2:14
  most companies have.
• 2:16
  Most companies watch for burnout in individual contributors and completely miss it
• 2:20
  climbing the ladder.
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  Leaders rarely say it out loud, so the behavioral signal is often the only early
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  warning you get.
• 2:27
  Let's talk numbers for a second, because turnover cost is something every HR leader
• 2:31
  already tracks, just maybe not tied back to this kind of mismatch.
• 2:35
  Industry figures generally put knowledge-worker turnover costs somewhere around one
• 2:39
  to one and a half times annual salary per departure.
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  And behavioral misfit is a major driver of that number, people placed into roles
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  that demand behavior far from their stable traits, quietly disengaging until they
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  leave.
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  Which is why re-administering the assessment at key points matters,
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  after a promotion, during a reorg, or just annually.
• 3:01
  Growing gaps over time act as an early warning system for disengagement or quiet
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  quitting, well before it shows up in an exit interview.
• 3:09
  That's a very different posture than treating this as a one-time hiring gate you
• 3:12
  check once and forget.
• 3:14
  It should be part of an ongoing people analytics stack, alongside engagement surveys
• 3:19
  and retention metrics, not a single snapshot from someone's first week.
• 3:23
  Okay, I want to close on something important, because any tool that generates
• 3:26
  behavioral data on people raises a fair question about how it's actually governed.
• 3:30
  And it should raise that question, Claire.
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  This only works responsibly with real governance, who has access to profiles,
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  how results get communicated, how long data is retained.
• 3:42
  Organizations need transparent policies with employees about why the assessment is
• 3:46
  used and how it benefits both sides, not just the business.
• 3:50
  And it's explicitly not meant to be the sole basis for a hiring decision,
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  correct?
• 3:55
  Correct, and that's not a legal disclaimer tacked on at the end,
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  it's the actual design philosophy.
• 4:01
  This is one structured input alongside interviews, reference checks,
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  and job-related assessments.
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  Overreliance on any single assessment is the wrong use of it,
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  full stop.
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  The relationships between data points drive good decisions,
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  not an isolated score treated as a verdict.
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  If you want to see your own profile as a starting point, OAD's free Top Performer
• 4:22
  Profile is about seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours,
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  no credit card.
• 4:26
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
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  One person's data is a story.
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  A team's data is a pattern.
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  Read the pattern, and govern it responsibly, and you've got something genuinely
• 4:37
  useful.
• 4:38
  Perfect place to close out this series.
• 4:40
  Thanks, Edwin.
• 4:40
  Always, Claire.