Is your answermachine recording anything like as honest as this?
What would your title be if you were a book?
This was the fascinating question posed to us in a workshop with Roy Childs from Team Focus who was explaining to us the value of psychometric questionnaires and why they can be misinterpreted.
We were posed other challenging questions such as:
- Does your personality change?
- Is it just our behaviour that changes?
- Can major life events or illnesses change who we are fundamentally?
After Roy asked us to write a simple pen portrait of ourselves we began to realise the value of a questionnaire – to magnify and structure our thoughts about ourselves.
This navel gazing was an attempt to understand why some psychometric tests can be useful, whereas some can be more about your work context and role rather than your personality.
Questionnaires need to be reliable and valid but should be used as a starter for a conversation to establish where you are now and find out what you have begun to believe about yourself. In a coaching session they can act like a third person in the room giving a core objective opinion.
A test can also help you identify if you are stuck.
Whether profiles change over time was another interesting topic for discussion. There is evidence that even MBTI (Myers Briggs) profiles will change over time and over 50% of people will change by at least one letter.
Roy believes that our ‘story’ should change. ‘Every extrovert can discover the introvert within them and vice verse’ says Childs. A questionnaire helps to explore and discover the parts of ourselves that are not normally given expression to.
Team Focus has developed a psychometric test called VbiM – Value Based Indicator of Motivation.Values are the key to understanding people’s energy and motivation. VbIM uses the latest technology to provide more sophisticated assessment by combining both normative and ipsative approaches within the same questionnaire. This lets people look at the relative strength of their own values, and the priority they give to each, as well as providing a means of benchmarking against the pattern of values that prevails in the general population.
Another useful tool is theResilience Scales Questionnaire (RSQ) which asks people to consider how they react to pressure. Sometimes pressure brings out the best in people. Sometimes it makes them less effective. We can think of these two reactions to pressure as ‘Stretch’ and ‘Stress’.
The test has 3 different behavioural hierarchies that challenge and expose the gaps that traditional questionnaires may not.
These new angles enable an individual to look at what they do when they are particularly stretched, stressed or under pressure. It measures the movement that might occur when you are in different states and how well your resilience levels allow you to perform.
As much of our current coaching work is dealing with motivation, stress, anger management, anxiety and self esteem this new angle will be a welcome boost for coaches, trainers, HR professionals and managers alike.
So to summarise a questionnaire is like a snapshot – capturing your story as it is now. So what would your book be called? And what would be the chapter number…and how many chapters would it have?
To find out more contact the lovely Roy Childs at Team Focus http://www.teamfocus.co.uk their website contains funky titbits like this below…
Did you know that Albert Einstein was not considered to be particularly gifted by his university lecturers? Seems they didn’t know how to spot talent!
Posted in Change, Communication
The reason why the world is in chaos
This photo poem by Rian Varghese sadly seems to ring true for us in the 21st Century.
Posted in Communication
How much is sickness absence costing your business?
This calculator from Bupa looks at what sickness costs in different sectors. It’s a really useful tool in proving the value of coaching, therapy and communication to maintain the wellbeing of people.
http://www.bupa.co.uk/business/all-business/workplace-health/workplace-absence-calculator
Posted in Internal Communications
5 reasons employees keep their mouths shut
We liked this blog by Brett L. Simmons.
Study reveals why workers censor their opinions. Job safety, anyone?
There is a difference between employees not speaking up at work because they don’t have anything to say and not speaking up because they fear the consequences.
Managerial behavior can signal employees that it is unwise to speak up. But even when managers are not to blame, some employees will still be reticent to share information they believe is risky.
“The Academy of Management Journal”recently published an extremely well done study by James Detert and Amy Edmondson that examined employee beliefs about when and why speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate.
The authors found that “sometimes unwillingness to speak up is not experienced as intense, discrete fear but rather as a sense of inappropriateness; voice seems risky because it seems wrong or out of place.”
Through a series of four studies, they identified the following five beliefs employees can hold about authority figures that can cause them to exhibit self-protective silence:
1. Negative career consequences of voice. If you want advancement opportunities in today’s world, you have to be careful about pointing out areas of improvement to your boss.
2. Don’t embarrass the boss in public. You should always pass your ideas for improvement by the boss in private first before you speak up publicly at work.
3. Don’t bypass the boss upward. Loyalty to your boss means you don’t speak up about problems in front of your boss.
4. Need solid data or solutions (to speak up). Unless you have clear solutions, you shouldn’t speak up about problems.
5. Presumed target identification: It’s not good to question the way things are done. Those who developed the routines will likely take it personally.
This research is important because it shows that the boss is not always to blame for organizational silence. Individuals arrive at work with a set of implicit theories they learned based on past direct and vicarious experiences.
The authors conclude “managers appear saddled not only by their own actual behaviors inhibiting voice but also by subordinate beliefs about managers.”
If you want employee voice to become an operational priority, you should make changes to your selection, training, evaluation, reward and promotion systems. My advice is to make employee voice an expected, measured and rewarded behavior.
Hire employees who can demonstrate a record of coming forward with suggestions and solutions at their previous jobs. Never promote an employee to a management position if they didn’t attempt to partner with managers to improve their job.
If you discover you have a manager who stifles employee voice, help them with training but don’t promote them again until they demonstrate they can encourage employee voice.
If an employee believes in the safety of silence, engage them in behavior at work that challenges those beliefs. Otherwise, “it is unlikely that they will revise, set aside, or develop new implicit theories related to speaking up,” the authors conclude.
Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D., is an associate professor of management at The University of Nevada, Reno. He writes about leadership and social business at his blog, where a version of this article originally ran.
Have you joined Google+ yet?
The march of Google continues. After two-and-a-half months in closed testing, Google is preparing to widen the availability of its social network, Google+, to the public. Add Karen to your circles.
This link from Simply Communicate explains more:
Posted in Communication
Pondering presentations
Here are some thoughts about traditional presentations from our Sydney associate, Cath Lawrence …
I was at a conference recently and I ended up pondering that we’re at a really interesting stage in terms of what we expect from presenters or speakers and what they have to offer.
Over the 3 days at this conference there were some large group sessions with over 300 people in the room and some smaller sessions with 30 – 40 people gathered together.
There were big name International and Australian speakers as well as a few relatively unknown industry specific speakers. Seeing these different presenters had me thinking that the world of presentations is definitely changing; the question for me is what next?
Storytelling
Over the last few years the impact of storytelling has been an area of focus for leaders and presenters. There are some people who do it superbly, with humour, emotion and a great tale to tell.
My pondering – will this become too formulaic as more people cotton on to the fact that storytelling is both powerful and topical?
Use of technology
In the last 15 or so years the technology that accompanies presenting has changed enormously. A few of you will remember the days of overhead projectors and scribbled on acetates. Can you imagine sitting through a presentation using that now. Instead there are so many options open to us – with such things as Prezi, you tube and animated media bringing presentations to life
My pondering – will the use of imaginative and gimmicky technology take over from the message?
Added extra – Swiss politician Matthias Poehm has set up The Anti-PowerPoint party. He asserts that PowerPoint presentations are actually costing the Swiss economy billions of dollars.
The presenter
More demands are being put on the style of the presenter. Once they needed to stand behind a podium, use their overhead projector and say what they need to say. With storytelling and technology this has changed and it seems that the presenter needs to be comedian, actor and expert all wrapped in to one package.
My pondering – will style take over from substance?
Without doubt the future for presentations and presenters is changing. Any ideas on what it will take to present a clear message well in the next 10 years are welcome.
Posted in Presentations
What is Pecha Kucha?
Last month I attended a meeting run by Extra Group about Pecha Kucha, a presentation technique recognised as stemming from the Japanese art movement as a way of delivering information concisely.
The principle is very simple – 20 slides x 20 seconds per slide. Presentations are never longer than 6m40s. http://bit.ly/nVHFKw.
Posted in Presentations
What skills do communicators need now?
We recently attended a talk at the International Association for Business Communicators (http://www.iabc.com/) where the recruitment company VMA (http://www.vmagroup.com/) presented research findings about the communication industry. Some of the findings of interest were:
Top five skills for development in communicators were:
- Coaching senior leaders
- Social media development
- Influencing
- Public Affairs
- External Communications
And …
Top five skills that are ‘most lacking’ in Internal Communication recruits:
- Influencing
- Coaching senior leaders
- Strategy setting
- Writing – specific corporate messaging
- Writing – publications/online
If you would like a copy of the research findings contact Karen.
Posted in Coaching, Communication
Experience the change curve like never before
We all know about the change curve in theory – and most of us have experienced it in some form at work or in our personal life. But how do we manage people, emotions and communication at each stage of the curve? What are the techniques that managers need to adopt? How can you better understand and help encourage people through the curve so that they come out smiling on the other side? This experiential session will help you to discover, explore and learn new aspects about managing the change curve in a brain friendly way.
Session time is under 2 hours and priced to suit your budget
Contact us if you would like more details of other ‘Lunch and Learn’ topics we provide which look at leadership, communication, engagement, NLP, the brain and wellbeing in the workplace.
Posted in Change, Communication, Leadership, Leadership Communication Skills, NLP Coaching
