Facet5 is one of the most modern and advanced measures of personality available today. Used by organisations and consultancies worldwide, Facet5 supports human capital management for individuals, teams and organisations, consistently adding real value. Facet5 is ideal for use by anyone who needs to understand human behaviour in a work context.
Symes Group uses Facet5 in the majority of its people development programs and coaching engagements, as it adds rigour and reliability to the process. The following is a case study of work that Symes Group has carried out with a client using Facet5.
Jessica Klasicki, head of Strategic Pursuits Excellence Centre Australia at Arcadis, spoke to The Symes Report about how Facet5 has helped her build a cohesive team in a high-pressure environment.
The Arcadis Australia proposal (bid) team is called the Strategic Pursuits Excellence Centre. The team is centralised and located around Australia and the Philippines. The team provides winning pursuit and proposal support to the business to sustain profitable growth, support collaboration and improve cost of sales. The Australian team focuses on providing the business with a full pursuit and proposal support service whilst our team in the Philippines has grown to enable greater support for the business. Arcadis is a leading global design consultancy that has helped design, create and improve quality of life in Australian cities for more than 75 years. With 27,000 people in 70 countries, Arcadis works right across the full asset lifecycle, and delivers a full suite of services, from design engineering, to cost management, to the environmental advisory, to the technical advisory. We focus on helping our clients deliver successful projects that have a real impact on people’s lives.
What have been your goals and objectives around using Facet5 Teamscape with the bid proposal team?
Bids are fun; they are challenging and get your adrenaline pumping. However, the dark side of the bidding process includes elements of stress, long days and/or late nights, and it is a time-pressured environment that can take its toll in different ways on different people. I consider myself very lucky; I work with a high performing bidding team. The team regularly receive commendation from our global colleagues, and they are an integral and invaluable part of Arcadis Australia.
Therefore, it was and still is, extremely important for me to make sure I have the right people who can thrive in a bidding environment. Bids are a team game, and so the right person needs to depend on other members who complement their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. I am proud to say that this team enjoy working together; balance each other and work efficiently within the highly competitive and deadline-driven world of bidding. This success is majorly due to the work we have done over several years with the Symes Group and Facet5.
The original goal of using Facet5 Teamscape was to build a complementary high-performing team. We used the Teamscape to form and reform our team, integrate new team members and work through barriers to team performance. Each member of the team has a Facet5 profile and a Teamscape to know how their behaviours are likely to fit with the role, the team and the culture.
By knowing and understanding our individual behavioural profiles, we were able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each individual and the team. We were able to determine where each person will contribute to the team, as well as those areas that may make them less effective. This approach helped the team understand how each of us prefers to think, communicate and work. It helped me as a leader understand the culture of the team, how relationships are likely to work, and how the work will be managed and delivered.
What were the benefits and outcomes of using Facet5 Teamscape with the team?
My local bid team is virtual and scattered across Australia; therefore, to have the right team members for this stressful environment, team composition was our starting point. For interviewing bid professionals, a common question is “how do you cope with stress?” I have always found this strange as there is no real right answer; however, in 2012, Arcadis found a personality tool (Facet5 through Symes Group) which helped describe an individual’s expected behaviours in a stressful time. This was incredibly useful when finding the members to form the bid team. After conducting Facet5 profiles on potential team members and Teamscape for new hires, we were able to leverage team member’s individual and collective strengths. This has helped the team strengthen our relationship by understanding each other, working through barriers in our team performance, manage stress within the team and workload. As a manager, I have been able to use the Facet5 Teamscape to understand how the work will be managed and delivered, to recognise individual strengths to achieve high-performance work outcomes. It has helped me understand how to leverage different behavioural styles for delivering complex bids, resolve conflict, engage stakeholders and manage stress. It helps to deliver results more effectively.
When the Manila Team joined the team, what were your objectives of including Facet5 Teamscape?
The Manila team is an integral part of the strategic pursuit excellence centre team. This team helps co-ordinate proposals, creatively design the proposals, manage our bidding databases and collateral. Therefore, the understanding of their behavioural profiles together with their preferences, strengths and weaknesses are of high importance to improve the team relationships, culture, communication and finally performance. This wider bid team have not had the opportunity to meet face to face; however, they collaborate daily; therefore, we needed to understand how we all prefer to think, communicate and work. The Teamscape has helped us improve communication in the virtual environment, improve problem-solving and productivity and reduce team conflict. The most significant benefit has been that this tool has empowered the team to feel more confident and assertive through increased understanding of themselves and others.
SPEC APAC (Left to right): Katie Morgan, Gabby Nicol, Charmaine Eager, Stephen Uhr, Jessica Klasicki, Andrea Vargas, Kelly Dykman