A Communication Approach to Behavioral Analytics

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Are you an INTJ? An ESFP? Are you high open? Low neurotic? Are you dominant? Steady?

From Myers-Briggs to the Big 5, to DISC and beyond, we’re all familiar with the personality tests that live in the ever-growing realm of behavioral analytics.

Whether you’re looking to better understand your customers, your employees, or even your friends, behavioral analytics offer insights into what makes others tick. This data-driven relationship hacking saves us a lot of time, frustration, and even embarrassment as we learn how to relate to the people in our professional and personal lives.

But there’s one big shortcoming: the majority of behavioral analytics methods are grounded in self-assessment, and research has shown that self-assessment is highly inaccurate.

There are plenty of reasons for the discrepancies — high performers tend to rate themselves modestly while low-performers often inflate their own contributions, and men tend to rate themselves much higher than women do.

Regardless of the cause, the learning is clear: We need a more objective approach to understanding each other.

At QC, we believe communication measurement offers a valuable alternative to self-assessment for behavioral analytics.

After all, we’re constantly communicating, from e-mails to phone calls and meetings to head nods across the room. And yet we’re only aware of 5 to 15 percent of the signals we send.

So what can we uncover about each other — and ourselves — in all of those unconscious signals?

A lot, as it turns out. From trustworthiness to leadership or promotional potential to employee engagement, researchers across the country and the world have identified countless applications of communication analysis in and out of the workplace.

From identifying new hires to helping managers inspire their teams to grooming upcoming leaders to represent global brands, recent progress in communication science, data analytics, and intelligence augmentation enable endless applications for this communication approach to behavior analytics.

How will your organization take advantage of the opportunity?