BehavioralOS®

Leadership development is critical to sustainable business success. No surprise, the market is flooded with a myriad of solutions promising organizations better data, easily scaled applications, and significant performance outcomes. The disappointing real-life results of too many solutions is often rooted in the disconnect between the solution itself and the behavioral changes that produce tangible change. Overreliance on aggregated assessments and personality profiling, for example, can result in leaders confused by vague or overly-complex competency models that miss the ‘human’ element of being a leader—the complex and critical interpersonal exchanges that either build trust or doom a team to failure. Leaders must have the right behavioral insights to succeed. Creating the conditions for regular, open dialogue was already a huge challenge. The switch to remote work hasn’t made it any easier. What happens? In many cases, nothing. Which is a huge problem. A team that isn’t engaging in regular, open dialogue is slowly (or quickly) dying. Breaking down the walls, making people feel safe to be who they are, and to say what they really think is BehavioralOS® (“BOS”). It offers a corporate behavioral operating system to supercharge key interpersonal relationships that accelerate trust building and proliferate respect throughout the organization.

Having the right communication tools, plus a dose of humility, will increasingly set leaders and organizations apart. After all, communication is the oil on which the engine of business—and all learning and development—runs. BOS’ signature tool BehaviorTuner®, a proprietary, non-anonymous, one-on-one feedback tool, helps leaders to focus on the behaviors most important for increasing mutual understanding and trust. It is based on the behavioral research by M.I.T. organizational psychologist Irv Rubin, PhD, whose groundbreaking research uncovered a knowable universe of specific behaviors that people around the globe identified as critical for having a “win-win exchange.” One of the key findings from the research was that having good intentions is not enough.

Take for example the case of “Paul,” the President of a recruiting firm in a major Asian hub. Paul turned to BOS a few years ago when he was experiencing significant relationship static with “Alex,” his VP of sales, a person critical to the firm’s success. Paul knew that Alex was unhappy, despite Paul doing everything he could think of to make Alex happy. However, Paul had blind spots. He knew that there was a problem, but he couldn't figure out how to get Alex to speak openly about the problem. And despite all of the personal and leadership development work and self-assessments that Paul had done over the years, he was stuck, and he knew it. Paul turned to BOS for help.

“We started with a group scan of the leadership team to take the temperature and do a benchmark of the organization’s overall health. Then we worked individually with their top three executives, including Paul and Alex. Through R360 coaching engagements, we bridged the communication gap between the executives to have the conversations that they previously were unable to have. One of the key takeaways for Paul and Alex in particular was how differently they were interpreting the other’s behaviors,” explains Matt Stone, C.E.O., BOS.

The result? Paul and Alex had several breakthrough conversations within a short period of time. Paul became crystal clear on how better to meet Alex’s needs, and Alex attained the clarity and confidence to express himself more diretly to Paul.

Our tools produce the most actionable and non-judgmental behavioral data that's available on the market

The result was that instead of leaving the company, Alex stayed on board, helped increase revenue, and remains a top performer on the team to this day. As Stone put it, “Having a non-judgmental and repeatable process to clear up faulty assumptions and build on the growth was a real game-changer for them and ultimately their whole team.”

What’s particulary attractive about BOS’ solutions is the speed with which the tools facilitate change. "Our tools produce the most actionable and non-judgmental behavioral data that's available on the market. We have proved repeatedly that two years worth of trust-building can in fact be done in two hours," remarks Stone.

But what about traditional 360s, don’t they provide external input? Indeed they do, but a lot of anonymous aggregrated feedback solutions often contribute to higher distrust, “because I’m reading feedback from a nameless person, and we are wired as human beings to look for threats. So, it’s just a natural human response in an anonymous aggregated feedback situation to hyper-focus on who you think talked negatively about you, who is the threat in your team, thereby missing the entire point of the feedback itself,” Stone explains.

BOS’ BehaviorTuner tool offers leaders an efficient way to build trust through direct, open dialogue because it produces non-anonymous data. Stone believes that while there is value to some anonymnous feedback, it must be handled with extreme care and supplemented with processes and tools that enable direct dialogue, especially considering that everybody is unique and so making a universal behavioral change may not produce the net positive results that are advertised in the aggregated data. BOS is on a mission to challenge outdated beliefs and practices around leadership development.

In both traditional office and remote working setups, leaders can use BehaviorTuner to set the right language and process that’s repeatable to build a supportive work culture. “We give people a repeatable process that empowers them with both the safety and the language through which they can miscommunication and misunderstandings in order to realize that it is okay to share more openly and build trust. Put another way, we help leaders grow exceptional relationship capital—the most valuable asset that any leader has,” says Stone.

BOS offers direct services for executives and senior leaders through its R360 engagements. It also has solutions for frontline managers that help them overcome the fear of day-to-day feedback. These relationship-focused coach-facilitated journeys and training programs leverage BehaviorTuner and other tools to help leaders supercharge key relationships that matter for their success. BOS also offers its tools through partners worldwide.

BOS’ approach toward leadership development has been validated in organizations around the world. The company serves public and private organizations in the U.S., including the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and many other Federal agencies. It also works with healthcare, technology, and financial institutions in the U.S., and through partners in New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore.

BOS plans to grow its impact on leadership development in the near future by helping even more coaches, trainers, leadership development experts, and leaders get access to its innovative tools. The company sees its ICF-accredited Partner Program as critical in this regard, particulary for executive coaches. Further, BOS aims to integrateits tools with existing H.R. platforms to increase its reach. “In a nut shell, we are the only provider of a unique behavioral operating system that powers the two most important ingredients in any company: trust and respect. Because, ultimately, they’re the foundation for culture, performance and success,” concludes Stone.