We first used the Predictive Index in 1992. We were running a technology services company, trying to hire and lead people fast enough to keep up with growth, and a colleague introduced us to behavioral assessment as a tool for making smarter decisions about fit. Honestly, I was skeptical. I've always believed you could read people — I'd been doing it my whole career. What could a survey tell me that I couldn't figure out from a conversation?
Quite a bit, it turned out.
What the PI gave us wasn't information we couldn't have eventually figured out. It was information we could have figured out — in about eighteen months of friction, misalignment, and guesswork — that we now had in thirty minutes. It named what I was seeing in people but couldn't always articulate. It explained dynamics I'd been managing around rather than addressing. And it showed me, with more honesty than most feedback ever had, some specific ways my own natural wiring was getting in the way of the people I was trying to lead.
We've used it ever since. In every company we've led or consulted for. On every leadership team we've built. With ourselves. That's not a sales pitch — it's context. The things we're going to share with you in this article come from thirty-plus years of applying behavioral insight in real organizations, under real pressure, with real people. Including each other.
"You cannot lead others well if you don't understand the impact you have on them. And you cannot understand that impact without first understanding yourself."
— Ray DaveyI want to add something to what Ray just said, because I think it's important.
When we talk about behavioral insight in leadership development, it can sound like a tool for identifying problems — for figuring out who's misaligned, who's underperforming, who needs to change. And it is useful for those things. But the part that has mattered most to me over the years is different. It's the part where a leader sees themselves clearly — often for the first time — and something shifts.
I've sat with leaders in debrief sessions who, twenty minutes into the conversation, say something like: "I've known this about myself for years, but I've never had language for it." Or: "This explains a pattern I've been living with my whole career." That moment isn't about diagnosis. It's about recognition. And what becomes possible after genuine recognition — in how a person leads, how they relate, how they develop — is remarkable.
That's what behavioral insight is, at its best. Not a label. Not a box. A mirror, held steady and without judgment, that lets a leader see what's actually there. What they do with what they see is up to them. But you can't work with what you can't see.
What Behavioral Profiles Actually Reveal
The Predictive Index measures four fundamental behavioral dimensions. These aren't personality types — they're stable drives that shape how people work, communicate, make decisions, and respond to stress. Understanding them, in yourself and in the people you lead, changes the nature of the conversations you're able to have.
The Four Behavioral Dimensions
- Dominance — the drive to exert influence over one's environment. High dominance leaders are decisive and direct; they can also be impatient or unintentionally override others' input under pressure.
- Extraversion — the drive for social interaction. Highly extraverted leaders tend to inspire and build relationships; less extraverted leaders bring deliberate analytical depth — sometimes misread as disengagement.
- Patience — the drive for consistency and a steady pace. High patience leaders are calm and reliable; lower patience leaders drive urgency and embrace change, which energizes some team members and creates anxiety for others.
- Formality — the drive for structure and precision. Highly formal leaders are thorough and quality-focused; less formal leaders tend to be flexible and entrepreneurial, but may create ambiguity that frustrates those who need clearer structure.
Here's what I want you to notice about those four dimensions: none of them is good or bad. Every point on every spectrum has genuine strengths — and every point creates specific challenges. The question is never whether your profile is the "right" one. The question is whether you understand it well enough to work with it deliberately.
And — this is the part that matters most to me — whether you understand it well enough to recognize what the people around you need from you, which may be very different from what comes naturally.
The Leader-Team Dynamic
Understanding your own profile is valuable. Understanding how your profile interacts with the profiles of the people you lead is where things get genuinely interesting.
The most common source of leadership friction isn't a lack of skill or commitment — it's the mismatch between what a leader naturally does and what the people around them genuinely need. I've lived both sides of this. I'm high dominance, high extraversion, low patience. I move fast, I make decisions with less information than most people are comfortable with, and I push hard for results. Those drives have served me well. They've also cost me, in specific situations, with specific people, in ways I can trace back directly to moments where my wiring ran over theirs.
The PI didn't change my wiring. But it gave me a map — of myself and of the people I worked with — that let me see those dynamics coming instead of only understanding them in hindsight. That's the practical value. Not transformation. Awareness early enough to make a different choice.
Picture a leader who scores high on dominance and low on patience — decisive, fast-moving, results-driven — managing someone who scores low on dominance and high on formality — methodical, thorough, focused on getting it right before moving. Without behavioral awareness, that dynamic almost always produces friction: the leader experiences the team member as slow and risk-averse; the team member experiences the leader as reckless and insufficiently careful. Both feel unheard. Both are working hard. Neither is wrong about the other — they're just looking at each other through the lens of their own behavioral profile.
When both people have access to the same data, the conversation changes. The leader understands that the team member's thoroughness is a genuine asset, not a personal failing. The team member understands that the leader's urgency reflects a legitimate drive, not a dismissal of their work. The friction doesn't disappear — but it becomes productive rather than corrosive. And the outcomes are better than either approach alone would produce.
"When a leadership team develops a shared behavioral language, disagreements become about ideas rather than personalities. Development becomes honest rather than diplomatic. Trust builds on genuine understanding."
— Nancy CarpenterWhat Happens Under Pressure
I want to spend a moment here, because this is the dimension that matters most in the situations that matter most.
Most people have a natural behavioral style that functions reasonably well under normal conditions. Under pressure — when stakes are high, resources are constrained, or outcomes feel uncertain — that style tends to intensify. And the intensified version is often less effective than the baseline, in ways the leader can't always see from the inside.
A naturally dominant leader under sustained pressure may become controlling — closing off the input they actually need. A naturally collaborative leader under pressure may become conflict-avoidant precisely when the situation calls for directness. A fast-paced leader under pressure may push for decisions before the team has what it needs to make them well. A naturally cautious leader under pressure may become paralyzed at the moment when action is most required.
Understanding this about yourself — and about the people you're asking to perform under pressure alongside you — is some of the most important self-knowledge a leader can develop. It isn't about suppressing who you are. It's about developing the awareness to notice when your drives are serving the situation and when they're not — early enough to make a different choice.
I've found, both in my own experience and in working with leaders, that this is where a mirror held with genuine care is most valuable. Not judgment. Not a list of things to fix. Just: here's what tends to happen when things get hard. What do you want to do with that?
Building a Culture Where This Matters
The benefits of behavioral insight multiply when they extend beyond individual development to become part of how a leadership team — and eventually an organization — operates together. When leaders at multiple levels share a common behavioral language, the quality of collaboration, communication, and honest conversation improves in ways that are both visible and durable.
We've watched leadership teams use behavioral assessment as the foundation for a sustained conversation about how they actually work together — how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, whose voices tend to get heard and whose tend to get lost, and what each person needs from the team to contribute their best. Those conversations, done well, build a level of trust and mutual understanding that years of off-site team-building events rarely achieve.
What makes it work is senior leaders taking their own profiles seriously — talking openly about what they've learned about themselves, naming their tendencies honestly, and modeling the kind of behavioral self-awareness they want to see throughout the organization. When the people at the top can say "here's where my wiring creates challenges" without defensiveness, it changes what's possible in every conversation below them.
Here's what a practical development path actually looks like, because I want to make this concrete.
It starts with assessment and a real debrief — not a report you read alone, but a conversation where you connect the data to your actual experience as a leader. Where you've succeeded and why. Where you've struggled and what your profile might explain about that. What your team has likely experienced from you that you may not have fully understood you were delivering.
From there, it's about application — identifying the specific situations where your behavioral profile creates real advantage, and the specific situations where it creates risk or blind spots. That's where the development work gets focused. Not on changing who you are. On developing the awareness to recognize when your drives are producing unintended effects, and the flexibility to adapt when the situation calls for it.
The most effective development we've seen combines behavioral insight with ongoing coaching — not a workshop, but a sustained, individualized process where leaders are working with their profiles in real time, on real challenges. That combination accelerates growth in ways that one-time training events rarely do, and produces results that stick.
Why We Still Use It — After All This Time
Ray and I have been partners in work and in life for more than twenty-five years. We've used the PI since the beginning of that — first as business owners, then as therapists, then as consultants, and now together at RelateRx. People sometimes ask us how two Persuaders manage to work together without driving each other crazy. The honest answer is: behavioral insight helps. A lot.
We share a lot of the same drives. We both move fast, lead with relationships, and are energized by people and possibilities. We're also different in ways the data captures clearly — and those differences, understood and respected, have made us more effective together than either of us would be alone. When I can see that something is activating Ray's urgency, I know how to help him slow down without dismissing what's driving him. When Ray can see that something is landing harder than he intended, he knows how to reopen the door. That's not magic. It's awareness, applied over time.
I'll put it simply. The PI hasn't made me a different person. It's made me a more effective version of the person I already was — because I can see myself more clearly, I can see the people around me more clearly, and I can close the gap between my intentions and my impact faster than I used to.
That's what we offer to the leaders and organizations we work with. Not a transformation. A clearer mirror — and the support to do something useful with what you see.
If you're curious about what behavioral insight could add to your own leadership effectiveness, or to the development of your team, we'd genuinely welcome the conversation. We've been having it for thirty-plus years. We still find it interesting.