Pennington Choices Blog

Improve team effectiveness with the Strength Deployment Inventory® (SDI)

Written by Pennington Choices | Jun 19, 2019 11:15:01 AM

A Deloitte study identified the top four critical challenges facing every organisation today as leadership, engagement, culture, and performance. A lot of businesses are dealing with these same issues and looking for solutions. To tackle these concerns and spark change, we need to ask engaging, thought-provoking questions of ourselves and our teams such as:

  • Do you know what your strengths are?
  • Do you know how they contribute to your productivity and success?
  • Can you recognise when you “overdo” or misapply your strengths and inadvertently cause conflict?
  • Do you sometimes wish you could motivate people to get the job done?
  • Do you wonder what engages them and how to connect with that drive or motivation to produce better outcomes?

To improve your leadership effectiveness, engagement, culture and employee performance, you need to understand your employees. But how do you identify and tap into the needs and preferences of different people? How do you shift behaviours to match individual, team and organisational goals?

As a specialist strength deployment inventory consultant, we believe these questions can be answered with a tool called SDI®.

Strength Deployment Inventory® (SDI)

Strength Deployment Inventory® (SDI) is an inventory questionnaire aimed at helping us understand what motivates us to behave the way we do in normal day to day situations - when everything is going well and also in conflict situations by asking questions such as:

  • What motivates me?
  • How can I increase my value to the team and organisation?
  • How can I become more confident and self-assured?
  • How can I adapt my behaviour to bring about the best in others?
  • How can I improve my performance in terms of achieving business goals and objectives?

How SDI® will enable effective leadership, engagement, culture and performance

SDI® will enable organisations to improve team dynamics and effectiveness. It will lead to positive and productive leadership whilst ensuring conflict does not stifle performance.

Teams

Understanding the motivation of team members, who to allocate tasks to, how to improve communication and how to get better results and solve problems quickly are many of the benefits. Teams often report a greater sense of understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of each other.

Leadership

Using SDI® leaders learn how to engage people through effective communication and management strategies. They discover how to align individuals to the organisation’s mission, vision, and goals at a more personal level. Leaders are often most visible during times of conflict and being equipped to handle it in the most effective and motivating way, is crucial to retaining employees’ motivation throughout their organisational life.

Managing conflict

Changes in workload, working arrangements and methods, redundancy and stress create conflict in organisations. Behaviour in conflict can best be understood and managed when the purpose behind it is clear and the SDI® provides insight to the motives behind behaviour in conflict. It helps people to recognise conflict sooner and resolve it with more acceptable outcomes – while preserving the self-worth of the people involved. People who have had training with the SDI® continue to use the language of the SDI® to resolve their conflicts because it is simple, memorable and it accurately describes what is happening in conflict situations.

As a specialist strength deployment inventory consultant, we have used SDI® successfully in team development, motivation training, one to one coaching and in conflict resolution. It is easy to apply and understand.

By addressing the four critical challenges by the Deloitte study, using the Strength Deployment Inventory®, you will:

  • Improve team performance by getting the best from different motivational styles of teams members
  • Understand the impact of your own motivational style on others
  • Become more effective in your communications
  • Understand what causes conflict for you and for others
  • Reduce the likelihood of conflict

If you want to enhance your ability to work effectively with others and reduce the potential for conflict our strength deployment inventory consultant can help. Please contact our expert HR consultants via: hrconsultants@pennington.org.uk