At The Forté Institute we always say, “It all starts with YOU.” Self-awareness must   come before situational awareness. The better you know yourself, the higher your situational leadership skills will be and how you adapt and balance with others clearly becomes a measure of success. Understanding your unique communication style and how to leverage your strengths is a key to your self-development and professional growth. 

Why does it matter? Because the ability to achieve interdependence to accomplish goals in virtually every situation in life matters!

Learning and understanding your own strengths and the motivators and de-motivators of others is the gateway to building relationships of trust. Building and maintaining trust is a full-time job. It is built slowly and over time but can be broken and lost in an instant. 

In most Forté Communication Style Profiles, the primary communication style strengths will be evident, which, depending on the intensity of that strength, will reflect that individual’s attitude, action and responses as much as 60 percent of the time.

The Breakdown

In the Forté Profiles, we look at both the pattern and the intensity of that pattern. Note below the three Forté profiles offered with each report.

On the left is the individual’s Forté Benchmark/Primary profile, which has little variance over one’s lifetime. This is where the power of self-awareness starts in the Forté 8-part suite. 
The center profile - the Current Adapting profile - is how the individual has been adapting their strengths to accomplish goals over the most recent 30-day period. As humans, we are constantly adapting to our environments, so why not choose to adapt consciously and with intention? 

Life goes on, and you can think of different individuals or situations in which you tend to adapt differently when communicating with them. On the far right, the Perceiver Profile shares with you how you are “most likely” coming across to others now and for the next 30-day period. As we can all attest to, it’s not the message given that is important, rather the message received. Understanding how you are coming across to others becomes a catalyst for more effective communication choices. 

If there is a two-point intensity difference between the Current Adapting and Current Perceiver profiles, Forté offers a communication style strategy to utilize over the next 30-day period to close those potential gaps of misunderstanding. The strategies can be updated as often as every 30 days.

If you would like to gain a deeper understanding of this, we welcome you to click on this link and complete your own Forté Communications Style surveys.