AQ Success: 7 Steps for Leveraging Workplace Adaptability
© 2024 Richard Chandler, MA, LPC, Certified Level 2 Adaptability Professional
As the pace of change has quickened, disruptive technological tsunamis have become commonplace, and workplace stress has strained employees’ mental health and well-being.
A workforce that can continually adapt is required. But how do you make this happen in your organization - today and into the future?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker
“Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.” – Hilary Mason, data scientist and founder of Fast Forward Labs
What is AQ, and how does it differ from IQ or EQ?
First, what is AQ? It is the third quotient of what individuals and organizations strive to increase to enhance their success.
- IQ is much more than a test score. It is an intelligent response to practical cognitive challenges.
- EQ is for emotional intelligence, popularized by author and psychologist Daniel Goleman. It creates and sustains human connection.
- AQ is for adaptability as intelligence. Adaptable individuals and organizations can respond and thrive even during significant disruptions, whereas disruptors often derail rigid, less flexible individuals, teams and companies.
What are the Components of Adaptability?
You may already have an intuitive feel about how to improve your people’s adaptability across your organization. What if you knew how to leverage adaptability, not just generically, but specifically, based on your peoples' actual levels of adaptability - individually and within their teams?
Adaptability is Measurable and Actionable
You now can. With the help of a certified Level 2 AQai professional using the AQai assessment, you can directly measure adaptability in 17 distinct dimensions.
Based on the findings of over 100 scientific studies, this assessment has been shown to be an accurate measure of adaptability based on validity, distinctiveness, reliability, uniqueness, and robustness.
Armed with this specific knowledge of individuals, teams, and your overall organization’s adaptability, you can focus on those adaptability dimensions that provide the most opportunity to impact your company’s success.
AQai’s assessment measures three major categories of adaptability, or ACE, for Ability, Character, and Environment.
Ability dimensions include:
- Grit
- Mental Flexibility
- Mindset
- Resilience
- Unlearn
Character dimensions include:
- Emotional Range
- Extraversion
- Hope
- Motivational Style
- Thinking Style
AQ Environment includes:
- Company Support
- Emotional Health
- Team Support
- Work Environment
- Work Stress
Increase your Organization's Adaptability by Baseline Measuring, Implementing Changes, then remeasureing Outcomes
- Increasing “Unlearn” and “Mental Flexibility” help teams embrace change more quickly and with fewer complaints.
- Higher levels of “Grit,” “Mindset,” and “Resilience” can bring projects to a successful conclusion despite unplanned interruptions and setbacks.
- Enhancing “Emotional Health,” “Hope,” and “Emotional Range” makes for healthier, happier, and more productive employees.
“There is great power and leverage in optimizing environments to stimulate desired outcomes and effective adaptive behaviors. It is one of the most exciting areas of development to expand the tool from individual impact to teams and across the whole organization.”
-Ross Thornley, Cofounder of AQai
Steps for Increasing Organizational Adaptability
Use the AQai Assessment to leverage your employees’ strengths into a superpower.
Shepherd your organization into a compelling, sustainable future.
- Take the AQai Adaptability Assessment yourself (or include team members) to discover your current level of adaptability.
- Receive a debrief of your results from your AQai Certified Professional. What do these findings tell you about you and your executive team's adaptable vs. more ridgid ways?
- Expand the opportunity for transformation to your people to create a company-wide culture of adaptability. Indiviuals and teams may be measured for adaptabiity resulting in individual and team-specific data.
- Explore the findings with your AQai Professional to learn the current levels of adaptability by individual, team, occupation, work tenure, age, and additional ways of gleaning insights from the data.
- Design smarter initiatives for organizational growth based on AQai results. Be more certain when choosing the most potent initiatives to move your company forward. Based on team results, initiatives for learning and training can be tailored and team-specific .
- Measure those initiatives’ effectiveness by retaking the AQai Assessment (50% off) in 6 - 12 months so you can know the success of those initiatives with specificity.
- Launch new initiatives built upon up-to-date data to propel your organization into a virtuous cycle of growth through ever expanding levels of adaptability.
Leverage Adaptability with a Level 2 Certified Adaptability Professional
You can have more impact on your people and your business outcomes with AQai adaptability tools and processes.
If this article has sparked your curiosity about adaptability and how to leverage it to gain better results don’t hesitate to contact me with your questions.
Richard Chandler, MA, LPC, Certified Level 2 Adaptability Professional
