The Power of Understanding: Career Upside Uses the Birkman Method To Build More Connected and Productive Teams

December 11, 2025 at 02:51 AM EST

Career Upside is helping organizations build stronger, more productive teams using the Birkman Method. By uncovering individual work styles, needs, and stress behaviors, teams improve communication, trust, and efficiency. The approach provides leaders with clear insights to strengthen engagement and collaboration.

Career Upside, a consulting firm focused on career coaching, team coaching, and executive coaching, today announced a renewed focus on helping organizations deepen team connection and improve productivity through advanced behavioral insights powered by the Birkman Method. By translating personality data into practical team strategies, Career Upside enables groups to communicate more effectively, reduce friction, and operate with higher trust and cohesion.

Increasing Productivity With Fewer People

Teams today struggle with miscommunication, remote-work issues, time zone mismatches, personality clashes, and unclear expectations. These challenges erode trust and slow progress, and often leaders don’t fully understand why performance suffers.

Career Upside helps organizations bridge these gaps by using a data-driven path to connection, leveraging the Birkman Method to uncover how individuals prefer to work, what they need from others, and how they behave under stress. Through customized team-building activities, leaders and employees gain a shared language and a deeper understanding of one another, unlocking new levels of connection and productivity.

Birkman Creates Understanding

The Birkman Method is a scientifically grounded assessment that reveals:

Usual Behaviors—how people naturally operate and contribute
Underlying Needs—conditions individuals require for psychological safety
Stress Behaviors—how behavior shifts when needs aren’t met
Interests & Motivators—what energizes team members day to day

Career Upside uses real Birkman group tools and reporting, such as the Birkman Team Map, which highlights team interests, usual styles, and stress responses; the Birkman Team Overview Report, which displays team personality components, organizational focus patterns, and mindset differences; and the Birkman Team Chemistry Graph, which visualizes each person’s behaviors, needs, and stress reactions across nine Birkman components. These “team reports” form the foundation for meaningful team dialogue and actionable insights during a team productivity engagement.

Teams can also explore the Birkman Team Organizational Focus Report, which reveals the environment the group naturally puts energy toward (e.g., Operations/Technology, Design/Strategy, Admin/Fiscal, Sales/Marketing) and where alignment or gaps may exist. To dig even deeper, teams can explore their Mindset (attitudes and beliefs) using a specific context, such as “strategic planning” for 2026.

“Mutual understanding is the foundation of team performance and engagement. When teams finally see each other’s motivations, needs, and patterns, they communicate differently, work becomes easier, and teams become more engaged. The Birkman Method gives organizations a powerful blueprint for building connected, emotionally intelligent, high-performing teams.” — J. Todd McCarty, Founder & CEO, Career Upside.

How Do You Measure Success?

Teams that complete Career Upside’s Birkman-based team program experience measurable improvements, including:

Stronger communication and reduced misunderstandings
Higher trust, collaboration, and relational alignment
Clearer expectations and better role clarity
Increased performance, efficiency, and team focus
More resilient culture grounded in psychological safety

As a leader at a Fortune 500 company, I used the Birkman to improve engagement on my team. Based on an employee engagement survey conducted by Towers Watson, my team achieved a 97% sustainable engagement rating. This rating was 14 points above company norms and 17 points above the high-tech company norm. With the help of a Birkman team engagement, Leaders gain a more complete understanding of their team chemistry and how to support each person more effectively.

About Career Upside

Career Upside helps organizations optimize human performance through behavioral insight, career, team, and executive coaching, and advanced assessments. Specializing in the Birkman Method, the firm provides solutions for team chemistry, leadership development, role alignment, and organizational culture.