A STYLO OVERVIEW

To meet the business challenges of today - and tomorrow - Individuals,Teams and Groups must learn to work together more effectively by acquiring the ability to accurately assess situations and to determine the appropriate behavior. The way some people do things - conduct their task and deal with others - hardly changes all throughout their working life.Others change the way they do things quite frequently, whether consciously or not. They must each learn to appropriately tailor their actions to most effectively and successfully meet changing situations and to modify situations to fit their actions.

In contrast to some instruments that categorize us into "types" based on fixed aspects of Personality that are presumed to remain stable or unchanged over time, STYLO focuses on the "how" process and reveals a person's preference for behavior (which is flexible), throws light on what people can do about their actions to make them more effective and successful, and acts as the key to open the door to learning.

Completing the STYLO Self-perception Indicator reveals a comprehensive picture of your preference for the "how" in task and interpersonal processes at work - your Operating Style. Examples of these processes include:

Leading and Following Collaborating Decision-making and Problem-solving Using resources Influencing others Delegating Acquiring and communicating information Planning and proposing

Through STYLO, your audible and visible behavior is revealed and explained to you. Your Operating Style results from the interface of three elements:

An Effective Operating Style results from your accurate judgment of situations in terms of your strengths and weaknesses, the demands of your job or role, and or the organizational environment of which you are a part.

An Ineffective Operating Style results from misperceptions or misjudgments of situations or actions in terms of the three elements.

TWO PERSPECTIVES: Encouraging and Threatening Environments

The STYLO Model and Indicator provides you with two perspectives of your Operating Style. The first is when you feel you are performing your role or function successfully. This an Encouraging Environment.

The second is when you feel threatened. This can be because you feel you are not performing your role or function successfully, or when you feel under pressure to do things in a way which conflicts with your preferences.

Many people may be more likely to make poor judgments and behave inappropriately under threat. The Operating Style you use in this Threatening Environment may be similar to, or very different from, the one you use in an Encouraging Environment. The reason for using it is to cope with the threatening situation and to return to an Encouraging Environment.

Gaining insights into behavior in both Environments allows you, both as an individual and as part of a group, to develop strategies to improve your effectiveness in task and interpersonal activities, helping you enhance your performance and success.

PREFERENCES AND OPERATING STYLE

The model of behavior on which STYLO is based is supported by the psychological theories of Fromme, Rogers, Maslow and Rotter, taking in the motivational theories of McClelland and Alderfer. Its premise is that much of the way a person acts in task and interpersonal processes, his or her Operating Style, is driven by the order and weight of preference he or she gives to satisfying four social needs:

• To support and contribute to the values, norms and conventions of groups with which he or she identifies
• To sense and fit-in with the direction of his or her current environment
• To set and achieve his or her own personal goals
• To minimize damage and loss to him or herself

In the STYLO representation of the model of behavior we describe the way the person acts to satisfy each need as an APPROACH. Your Operating Style is the way you order the importance and the proportion of these Approaches in task and interpersonal processes.

STYLO ENABLES...

...Individuals to develop these four key Skills essential in today's flatter, more flexible organizations:

• Accurate assessment of their own behavioral strengths and weaknesses
• Knowledge of the impact of their strengths and weaknesses on their judgment of situations.
• The ability to display a range of behavior which is appropriate to the situation.
• The ability to manage situations rather than react to them.

...Groups or Teams:

• To recognize and use the behavioral strengths of its members to take on essential team roles.
• To capitalize on and extend the range of individual's and group strength.
• To generate and benefit from high quality feedback about behavior among members and between the group and its external contacts.

...Leaders:

• To recognize the dominant behavior inclinations in the organization or team.
• To identify the paradigms and basic assumptions which drive these behaviors.
• To improve situational judgment from front-line to Leadership levels, widen the range of behaviors in use across the group, and
• Improve the quality of feedback and dialogue within the organization and with its external contacts.