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2 Lessons 15 minutes completion time

What you'll learn:

This course will cover the strengths and caution areas associated with Adapting Teams, explain how this and other Team Types are determined, and demonstrate how Strategy Types can impact an Adapting Team.

Introducing the Adapting Team


An Adapting Team is one of the nine Team Types identified by The Predictive Index.

Adapting Teams self-organize and work together when they see value in combining individual strengths. They exchange information organically, and expectations for how to work adapt over time. When conflict arises, it’s often because of behavioral differences. But the team is malleable enough to address conflict using whatever mediation strategy seems appropriate at the time.

Natural Strengths
  • Can adapt to any business initiative
  • Flexibility in getting work done
  • Ability to pivot team culture as needed
Caution Areas
  • Though versatile, the team may struggle to do one thing very well.
  • Lack of a clear strategy may make it difficult to focus team efforts.
  • A wide variety of personalities may lead to communication difficulties.

As an adapting team, we are flexible and equipped for change, however we needed to be aware that we may tend to try to focus on too much. We have such a wide variety of profiles on our team that we are always able to find someone best suited to accomplish the goal. Knowing which member is best suited for goals and awareness of our caution areas, allowed our team to exceed what we set out to complete each quarter.

— Jamie Whited

The science of an Adapting Team

A Team Type is a collection of individuals’ behavioral patterns, as plotted within the Team Discovery tool. Team Discovery aggregates each individual’s PI Behavioral Assessment results. Then, using PI’s proprietary calculations, the tool plots each team member against a four-quadrant map. This lets you visualize the degree to which each person falls in one quadrant versus another. For a team whose members equally fall within all quadrants, they will often result in an Adapting Team.

But it’s not this placement alone that determines the Team Type. As mentioned, we have to consider how strongly individuals fall within each quadrant, so there are cases where you might get results that don’t seem as obvious, even if a large portion of the members fall within one quadrant. To better understand how these individuals are plotted, check out the video below.

How individuals are plotted in teams.mp4

Your business is not something you want to leave up to chance. To ensure a well-oiled machine, you need to understand how it runs and how to tune it. That means considering the behavioral traits of each new team member and how their traits can complement or balance the team they’re joining.

Adapting Teams and the quadrants

An Adapting Team is associated with all quadrants. The behaviors will be equally dispersed between all four.

  • Focus on pursuing new innovations
  • Prefer to act quickly and assertively
  • Communicate by talking things through
  • Focus on results and goal achievement
  • Prefer a focus on tasks and execution
  • Resolve conflict by focusing on the task involved
  • Focus on process and predictability
  • Prefer analytical decision making
  • Communicate after thorough reflection on their own
  • Focus on collaboration and relationship building
  • Prefer to support others to grow and develop
  • Communicate by talking things through

Getting the best out of your team

With each team, there are strengths you want to lean on, as well as caution areas you should account for. Based on what you’ve learned about Adapting Teams, use the interactive below to determine some actions to get the most from your team.

You shouldn’t just rely on your Team Type to achieve success. Although it’s important, there is also another factor to consider, and that’s your Team Strategy.

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