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People · Work Gearing

Work Gearing

The skills you use to show up and operate at work, and they are not the same as your personality.

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Skills, not personality

Work gearing is not the same as personality

Work gearing is the set of skills you use to show up and operate within an organisation. The counterintuitive thing is that your work gearing is different from your personality. The key idea is that, within our work gearing, there are some things we love doing and feel passionate about, some things we are merely competent at, and some things that drain us of energy.

Organisational skillset

Here we look at the skills you bring within the context of an organisation and its life cycle. Are you a big-picture thinker or strong at product creation? Are you good at figuring out where things are broken, or at helping others and getting people moving? We also look at how good you are at task completion and getting things done, and at how the combination of these skill sets shows up as a specific profile.

Some of these characteristics will energise you and some will drain you. The key to working effectively in an organisation is understanding how you show up.

Interlocking cogs representing how a person is geared for work
A team relating and working well together

Soft Skills

Here we look at how people show up in the way they relate to others. They may be good at connecting people, or at teaching or moderating. There are various relational soft skills we look at, and at the impact a person is able to have on those around them.

Relational and task maturity

Here we look at what relational skill sets a person has, against what task skill sets they have. On the relational front we look at things like team play, collaboration and mentoring. On the task side we look at systems thinking, strategy, sense of purpose, being decisive, and so on.

A person weighing relational maturity against task maturity
The use of power within an organisation

Power

Here we look at the concept of power and how it is used within an organisation. Is it used in a power-over scenario, or a power-to scenario? We look at whether leaders are creative in the way they lead or reactionary, and whether they play to advance the organisation or play defensively to protect the assets it already has.

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Start with a short call about your people and your teams. We will help you work out where to begin.