The transition from military service to civilian life is a profound and challenging phase for veterans. Having spent years in a structured and disciplined environment, service members develop a unique sense of identity that is deeply shaped by their experiences in the armed forces. 

As they step into civilian life, these veterans face a critical need to establish a new sense of personal identity, reconciling their past with their future. Understanding the factors that have moulded their identity during their military tenure, and addressing the significant adjustments required for civilian life, are essential for their successful reintegration into society.

This article builds upon the two previous articles entitled: The Veterans Quest #1 - The Hidden Battle of Veterans in Transition and The Veterans Quest #2 - Transition and the Perceived Loss of Purpose, that laid a foundational understanding of the plight of veterans as they traverse the, often bumpy, period of transition into civilian life.

1. Ambiguity and Lack of Structure: Transitioning veterans may initially find civilian life to be ambiguous and lacking the structured environment they are accustomed to. This absence of a clear-cut mission can lead to a perceived loss of purpose.

2. Reconciling Service and Civilian Roles: Finding ways to transfer their sense of service and commitment from military roles to civilian professions can be challenging, especially when facing professions that may not appear as directly impactful.

3. Navigating Identity Shifts: As veterans separate from the military, their identity can undergo significant changes. They may struggle to reconcile their former roles and experiences with the person they are becoming in the civilian world.

4. Missing Camaraderie: The strong bonds formed during military service can be challenging to replicate in civilian life. The absence of a close-knit unit can lead to feelings of isolation and disconnection from a shared sense of purpose.
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Hidden in plain sight, many veterans in transition face a daily battle with challenges for which they find themselves ill-equipped. 

Every society with a significant number of military veterans in its midst must acknowledge its duty to those who have served their country. We need to go beyond a mere annual remembrance to an active acknowledgement of the specific challenges faced by veterans on a daily basis - especially during their transition from military service to civilian life.

The struggles that these veterans face must not be underestimated as they have far-reaching consequences, impacting not only the individuals themselves but also their families, communities, and society as a whole. 

By shedding light on the ramifications of the transitional journey, we can better understand the urgency of supporting our veterans and creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.

Three of the very common challenges we should acknowledge include: unemployment and welfare issues, the prevalence of chronic mental health issues, and the alarming rates of suicide. 

These issues we'll highlight here by drawing upon reliable statistical sources from both the United States and the United Kingdom, statistics that reflect what is really a global issue.

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As the demand for interactive digital experiences grows, large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4, Google’s Bard, Claude, and others, have become essential tools for facilitating effective user engagement.
For any purpose beyond simple information retrieval, however, it is now crucial for these models to tailor their responses to specific user personas if they are to achieve meaningful engagement with the user. 
Simply put, LLMs need to prove that they can get on the user's wavelength, employing adaptive and 'emotionally resonant' language that acknowledges and speaks to the individual’s core values. 
This article aims to highlight this critical need and then go on to explore the idea that an archetypal understanding of human personality may provide the most effective method of profiling users.

Adaptive language, in the context of LLMs, refers to the ability to modify the style, tone, and content of responses based on the individual characteristics of a user. 
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This could involve adjusting language based on a user's age, interests, cultural background and, as you'll see emphasised later, the user's personality. 
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The goal is to reflect the user's values and mirror their language, thereby fostering a sense of rapport, familiarity, comfort and support. 

Adaptive language holds the key to engaging more effectively with users by creating a more personalised, relevant, and empathetic conversational experience. It is about getting on the user's wavelength, understanding their communication style, and crafting responses that feel intuitive and natural to them.

We don't actually need our machines to evolve into emotional beings for them to simulate a significant level of understanding and employ appropriate, emotionally resonant language for each user. 

Emotionally resonant language involves using words and phrases that evoke specific emotions in users, thereby creating a more engaging and immersive conversational experience. Once a specific personality type has been confidently identified, the machines can utilise a whole library of language that reflects that personality's way of looking at life, and thus generate significant emotional engagement.
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Emotionally resonant language humanises interactions with AI, making conversations feel more authentic and meaningful. It also fosters a sense of empathy and understanding, essential for building trust with users - all of which helps the AI and human to work together towards a common goal.

​To effectively tailor responses to individual users, it is crucial to have a solid understanding of their personalities. This is where the concept of archetypes, or universally recognisable personality patterns, can come into play. 

When assessed properly, archetypes can provide an extremely deep and effective way of categorising fundamental human behaviours, values, and beliefs.
Applying an archetypal understanding of human personality can provide LLMs with a framework to identify personal drives and anticipate the most engaging choices of language in communication.  
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By identifying the strongest archetypes a user most closely aligns with, an LLM can anticipate certain engrained perspectives and preferences, allowing the LLM to tailor its responses far more effectively to the individual user. 

For example, a user displaying traits of the "Warrior" archetype will engage best with language that relates to tackling matters forcefully and head-on, that celebrates competition and immediate action, while a "Mystic" archetype would readily respond to imaginative exploration, innovative ideas and talk of (almost magical) transformations.
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The impact of using language patterns that address the user’s values at this level of their psyche can be very significant, leading not just to warm fuzzy feelings but to increased engagement, interaction and more effective decisions.

The future of AI engagement lies in the ability of LLMs to effectively tailor responses to individual user personas. By getting on the user's wavelength and employing adaptive and emotionally resonant language, LLMs can offer more meaningful, personalised, and engaging interactions.

Furthermore, employing an archetypal understanding of human personality can help in understanding a user's core values, thereby enhancing the ability to engage with them on a deeper level. 

As we move forward, it is these sophisticated approaches that will shape the future of AI-user engagement, transforming our digital interactions into truly personalised experiences.


At TEAM ME® we have a core model of six human archetypes that provides a simple, clear and effective categorisation of personality types, and a profiling method that is extremely quick for users to complete. 

We are also  working with UK INNOVATE EDGE to trial a range of solutions that leverage this core model.

We are actively seeking partners leveraging LLMs and other digital communication platforms to engage large user bases. 

Contact me directly if you'd be interested in collaborating.

Keeping a finger on the pulse of your remote team can be a significant challenge - especially if such a model has only recently been forced upon you.​
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Whilst productivity is vital, it is also much harder for a team leader to get a sense of each individuals' general state of mind when they are largely out of sight.

When the team is physically present, each member naturally receives a continual flow of ‘information’ through formal and informal; intentional and unintentional signals.

They overhear the conversations of others, catch their voice tone and even absorb the wordless sounds their colleagues emit from time to time (that express quite a lot, if you think about it); as well as receiving and interpreting non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions and body language.
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All this means that, in a distributed team, the role of the leader as Shepherd becomes even more important - and even more strained. 

In a remote setting, the Shepherd Leader’s ability to notice the condition of each one of her sheep is severely hampered. Sometimes a sheep can be lost, wandering across virtual hills for a number of days before the remote shepherd cottons on.

Of course the executives on our teams are not really ‘sheep’, and neither are they robots that simply carry out instructions. In a remote team, a higher degree of self-leadership is required, where the individual must act in a more responsible, more sovereign way over their area of responsibility and their time.
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Away from the watchful eyes of their overseers, each team member must be able to prioritise their own tasks and navigate their challenges, whilst maintaining a healthy daily schedule and remaining self-motivated.

​But it is not only that the ‘sheep’ are out of sight, it is also that the threats to the sheep are out of sight. For those still adjusting to recently enforced remote working it is essential that such threats are unearthed as rapidly as possible. 
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For this reason it is doubly important that regular feedback loops are established to ensure that not only the formal communications have been received as intended and that tasks are being carried out as expected but that the leader is able to effectively assess their remote team members’ state of mind.

With a distributed team, it is more important than ever to understand the unique motivations and drives, the stress points and weaknesses of each individual. Once these are clear, each one can be provided with the unique type of support that they require.

There should be no sense of shame for any individual requiring support, as we all have tendencies to lean one way or another - and can benefit enormously from engaging with someone who can help us course-correct on a weekly, even a daily, basis.

So imagine what it would be like to have readily available a profile of all your team members that highlights not only their natural character strengths but also their specific points of likely stress. 

Imagine being able to anticipate their specific points of stress and address these issues ahead of time - creating feedback and accountability loops, or having them buddy up with someone who can coach them or even take on some of the tasks.
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This initial insight can save a huge amount of frustration, stress and losses in productivity; helping the remote team leader ensure the individual needs of her team members are adequately met - maintaining mental health and helping them flourish even whilst distanced from their colleagues.  

If you’d be interested to see how the ‘TEAM ME’ Remote Team Profiling System can rapidly deliver accurate and actionable insights on your team’s innate strengths, underlying values and stress points, contact me today. 

Pad
Author, Speaker & Creator of Team Me Profiling System

As you lay down your weary head at the end of a long day of work, longing to fade into blissful oblivion, do you ever hear a niggling voice whispering, 

“I wonder what my team really thinks of me? 

Am I the type of leader they want?

Am I the kind of leader they actually need?”

At work, the stakes can be high. Important projects with less-than-ideal outcomes may not only have a negative impact on the business, they may also cost the respect, self-esteem, promotion opportunities, and even livelihoods, of those responsible for seeing them through. 
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These projects rarely feel like a game.

Yet, if you were to observe the game-play on that decades-old board game, Dungeons and Dragons, you might be struck by the relevance of the lessons and analogies it presents. 
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In this game, a group of diverse individuals need to collaborate with their designated leader and facilitator, the ominously titled Dungeon Master, in order to bring into their world a creative yet viable story; overcoming obstacles and meeting various goals along the path.
Does this sound familiar?

Those who feel chained to their desk in a poorly lit room, fearing their next encounter with a fire-breathing boss will resonate particularly well with this analogy. Though, even they need not yet abandon hope. :-)

​Despite its fantastic setting, many Dungeons and Dragons scenarios display distinct parallels to managed-team situations. As a team leader, you may have been promoted from within the ranks and now find yourself managing people who, until recently, were your fellow “players”.

Or perhaps you were brought in to organise a broad mix of characters who needed to step up - a team that is now required to rise to new heights, or a team caught in conflict, who can’t seem to collaborate in an effective way. 
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Whatever your situation, as you assess your effectiveness as a leader, you might consider these questions:

The Dungeon Master who knows their natural style of leadership, who constructs the story in a way which allows them to compensate for their own weaknesses, whilst maximizing the players’ success, will win great respect and may even get away with the occasional draconian decision.

Bringing your full deck of managerial strengths to play, means having a keen sense of your existing abilities and challenges. This kind of honest self assessment is far more important than a pipedream of perfection. 
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Self-awareness breeds a palpable sense of confidence and trust in both yourself and in your team. Realise that you are the one who sets the tone and timbre - whether consciously or unconsciously - but if you are unsure how you are received by the others on your team, it may be time to put on your rhino-skin armour and ask for honest feedback. 

As the Dungeon Master designs the game, they seek to utilize the players’ individual characters’ abilities and their personal gaming styles. A great gaming master also challenges the team, raising their skills ready for bigger and better collaborative experiences.
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The awareness you develop regarding yourself must equally be extended to your team members - to know them as well as you know yourself. Only this way will you be able to build trust - and to ensure it travels both ways. You will surely want your workers to believe in you, but you had better also believe in them. 

So request their input, ask for learnings from previous experience, watch for body-language cues in their responses, and listen, listen, listen.

Chaos is a double-edged sword. It can force us to discover and create innovative solutions. In Dungeons and Dragons, “chaotic evil” denotes a role played with no regard for others, for rules or for anything but themselves.
No doubt, as sane human beings, we baulk at the idea of being such a narcissistic leader, but there can be potentially destructive elements of chaotic “evil” in a manager who creates a rigid “my way or the highway” method of control. Failing to communicate clearly on points such as workload or priorities, or refusing to operate with flexibility can provoke critical lesions in an otherwise healthy team. Make sure your chaotic freedom is channelled for good - leading to fresh ideas and innovations that benefit the project, the team and the customer. 
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In so many ways, the Dungeon Master is the god of the game. The words spoken by the game master carry enormous importance. And the same is true for every leader managing a group of humans.
The vocabulary and tone of voice that a manager wields, has similar energy to build up or break down. Every time you speak, you are not just communicating information, you are presenting an example of your ideal response tenor.  Review and assess your natural way of speaking to your team. Record yourself doing it, in order to elevate your awareness of your voice as a vital tool of influence.

In Dungeons and Dragons, a so-called “critical hit” is always something to be celebrated, but a great Master gives equal weight to the game-enriching opportunities embedded in a roll of the dice that results in a “critical FAIL”.

Similarly, the way you deal with errors has immeasurable implications for team performance and morale. 

Be brave enough to also look to yourself as a potential cause also. If there are issues, an assignment may not have been communicated or understood clearly, or your way of seeing the problem may not quite align with the viewpoints or past experiences of the others on the team.
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Question in a non-judgemental way to gain clarity.

To grasp the potential of your team is perhaps your most essential function as a leader - understanding the characteristics that make each individual truly valuable, no matter how differently they may show up in the workplace. 
Schedule a time now when you can review and assess your situation in the light of these key lessons from the Dungeon. 
Huge kudos to you, for taking on this adventure and setting your sights on raising your leadership game.

Now, please don't leave me in the dark.
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I'd love to hear you share any lessons you have gleaned from board games you've played in the past - those that have actually caused you to reflect on your work and even changed your approach in a professional setting.

#teambuilding 
​#managementskills

In the UK, there is presently no single piece of legislation which deals with workplace bullying. Bullying is currently covered by a range of other laws including: The Equality Act 2010, The Employment Rights Act 1996 and Protection from Harassment Act 1998. 

Companies of all sizes, and in countless countries across the globe, now appear to be hastily seeking solutions to address what is still far too common an issue. This new sense of urgency is likely due to the rising threats of legal action, lawsuits and fines being applied to companies who are not demonstrably tackling bullying and harassment in the workplace.