Operationalizing Performance

The adaptive profiles, shown on the right and measured at GRI, possess several characteristics that are important for understanding, implementing, and managing individual and organizational performance. This note lists and comments on these characteristics.

Key Characteristics

Six key characteristics that come with the measures by the adaptive profiles are the following:

• The nature of the measures, which is behavioral, and therefore, their ability to be observed and shared with more consensus than other concpets that are more abstract.
• The concentration of significant meaning in the measures with visual representations that allows continued usage and learning alongside other variables to understand people and their organizations.
• The adaptive qualities of the measures for understanding people in context, their dynamic quality, and the variability of the behaviors being measured.
• The central aspect of the measures on how people perform, function, and act, which is at the crossroads of their preferences, interests, how they think and feel about how they behave, their beliefs about who they are, and how they interact in their environment.
• The accuracy of the measures, including their validity, reliability, and usefulness for numerous applications.
• The universality of the measures over time for predicting individual and organizational behaviors.

Understanding Adaptation

The measures ultimately invite asking new questions about people and their organizations to keep them away from being disengaged and ineffective. At the same time, they assist in adapting one’s behaviors more effectively and using the information where and whenever it’s needed, often in the hands and minds of managers, to improve or help adjust behaviors within the ranges of variability specific to each person.

With practice, the measures become a reliable source for understanding people and situations, helping to find new creative solutions for individual and organizational challenges. The solutions can be read in the profiles, which help to better align with people’s resources and behavioral values. The measures are used not only to explain why and how a behavior occurred but also to predict future behaviors, along with the thoughts and feelings associated with them, and possible solutions from teh person's perspective itself.

Making the Connection with the Job demand

Whether a person is suitable for a job also depends on whether their adaptive profile aligns with their role, which is not just about intelligence, skills, or experience. Instead, it’s about how those other characteristics develop and adapt, which the measures from the adaptive profiles can reveal. The mismatches seen between the Natural and Role profiles or between the Natural and Effective profiles and the position’s profile are likely to lead to practical adjustments at the individual level, in the role in their job, their management, with colleagues and reports, for future growth within their current job or in other future job.

Seeing the Unseen

The adaptive profiles, the produced measures or metrics, reveal what would otherwise be unseen and misleading, and reflect a person’s many qualities and growth journey. Other characteristics, such as physical traits, are naturally observable. This is not true for the information shown by the adaptive profiles. The measures provide a standard for comparing behaviors among individuals, including those from different cultures, or between people, jobs, teams, and their organization.

Understanding Other Concepts

The meaning of adjectives that describe our behaviors is naturally ambiguous. Using factorial analysis with statistics has allowed us to focus on specific factors. In fact, the profiles and concepts created by reducing the lexicon also enable the reconstruction of new 'concentrates' of meaning. This adaptive model can be applied to all types of behaviors, concepts, or other individual characteristics to evaluate them in behavioral and probabilistic terms: such a way of being creative, delegating, communicating, directing, teaching, learning, solving complex problems, etc.

Making Sense of the Adaptive Profiles

By the limits of variability indicated in the measures, it is possible to focus on individual actions while avoiding strong adaptation and disengagement, which will most probably lead to dissatisfaction and a lack of productivity. When there is interest in improving oneself and an organization's performance, using the adaptive profiles starts to make sense, and their applications are limitless.