“All companies succeed, or fail, because of the actions and dynamics of the teams within their organization and the first step towards helping them achieve their goals is understanding their benchmark actions and behaviors with a high degree of precision and accuracy.”

Adrian Wood has more than 20 years’ experience in business management and leadership. He has passion for making companies of all sizes, from start-ups to global, successful through team development and unique leadership and management strategies across functions and divisions. He is currently partnering with major clients including Bimbo Bakeries, Cisco, Citrix, Sprint and others to make them even more effective by focusing on workplace excellence through team behaviors, not personalities.

ShadowmatchUSA is based in Dallas, Texas, and is the exclusive provider and administrator of Shadowmatch in the U.S. The Shadowmatch Behavioral benchmarking system gives the ability to identify and predict the specific employee habits and behaviors that are responsible for a team’s success. Armed with these powerful insights, leaders can better build, manage, develop and deploy teams and individual employees. By gaining these insights, their mission is to see an increase in employee performance and retention, and a significantly lower onboarding cost and staff turnover.

MO: Can you elaborate on your unique three-step process that helps you identify and predict employee habits and behaviors that are responsible for a team’s success?

Adrian: All companies succeed, or fail, because of the actions and dynamics of the teams within their organization. The first step towards helping them achieve their goals is understanding those benchmark actions and behaviors with a high degree of precision and accuracy. Only after that can you look at the next step: how to develop and coach teams towards the goals and outcomes you expect from them. And finally, you can use the behavioral information to replicate and maintain that level of success.

MO: How does the Shadowmatch system help address the key issue of mistrust when it comes to individual assessments?

Adrian:  Shadowmatch focuses on behavior, which is a far more accurate and benign set of measurements compared to personality based systems. People generally find it difficult to self-assess their own personality, and also don’t always clearly understand the results which leads to the skepticism. Behavioral benchmarking results are tangible, practical, and easily observable. It’s also not a “one size fits all” assessment: behavioral benchmarks are created based on measurable success within each organization which makes it far less arbitrary.

MO: How can Shadowmatch help when it comes to succession planning within a company?

Adrian:  One of the strengths of Shadowmatch is to address the entire employee lifecycle, and succession planning is a great use of the tool. Shadowmatch can easily develop an unlimited number of benchmarks that can represent key roles within each organization. Literally, with the click of a single button, you can compare any or all employees in the organization to the benchmark role. Instantly, you can see whom you should be targeting and nurturing as the next generation of leaders, or who would simply be great pinch hitters for key roles that suddenly become vacant.

MO: Can you share some of the common habits and behaviors of top performers and how often they are predictors of success?

Adrian: While there are certain behaviors that one can commonly associate with success, the Shadowmatch tool looks at the individual company, its top performers and the team as a whole. What might make a candidate successful in one company or role may not fit with the culture and dynamics of another company or role. The prediction is very accurate the match to the top performers in the specific environment is considered, but we honestly expect those behaviors to be unique in each company because each company represents a unique culture and environment.

MO: Once a negative or unproductive habit is identified what solutions do you offer your clients to improve or encourage change?

Adrian:  Shadowmatch was designed to always look for the positive outcome for employer AND employee. If an individual doesn’t have the habits shared by top performers in the same role then Shadowmatch has two important capabilities. First, it can create a tailored Personal Development Program (PDP) for that individual to focus on altering the behavior to match, and secondly, it can instantly search across other benchmarks to see if there are opportunities for redeployment to make best use of the individual’s strengths.

MO: Congratulations on the recent launch of your new Behavioral Team Building Analysis Module. Can you explain to our readers what this new system entails and how it can help understand and improve the performance of teams on the corporate level?

Adrian: Teams perform based on the collective actions and behaviors of the individuals. It’s the understanding of the balance and dynamics of team behaviors that determine success. By improving their alignment and focus you will continually drive better results. Basically, a team that is aligned in their actions runs much more smoothly and efficiently.

We have also recently launched a new suite of Shadowmatch behavioral analysis services aimed to assist business leaders by providing rapid answers and results to maximize the success of individuals and teams. Organizations have opportunities to improve team performance, speed and effectiveness, but very limited resources to implement the right solutions and these tools were developed with these companies and business leaders in mind.