Beyond Your Box

What Motivates You?

If you’re in the business of developing people and growing human potential, consider for a moment these questions:

• What motivates you to do this kind of work?
• What really stimulates and inspires you about your job?
• What aids and supports you in bringing out the best in others?
• What would take your coaching and mentoring relationships to that next level?

Many people development professionals are inspired by helping individuals and teams expand their potential, enhance their performance, and reach goals beyond the barriers that had held them back before. As coaches, mentors, and managers we are stimulated and greatly encouraged by the positive shifts people make as a result of our coaching and mentoring conversations with them.

But most coaches, mentors, and managers eventually reach a point in their professional development where they look for something more – something to expand their own performance and effectiveness. When this happens we search for a training course, a book, new method, or an assessment tool that will open up new avenues of intervention for us.

They question is, with the plethora of resources available to us what should we choose? What kind of resource will simultaneously lead to sustained positive change in your clients/employees and shift you up a gear?

Profiling… What is beyond Measure?

In answering this question many people developers have trained themselves in the use of psychometric assessment and employee profiling tools that they hoped would reveal and change their clients’ or employees’ negative behavioural patterns while developing their strengths. Many people developers also hope to obtain from profiling systems a set of structured, bespoke guidelines for the development and coaching process.

So how does it work?

Although revealing fascinating descriptions of the way different personalities prefer to process information, solve problems, make decisions and respond to stress, the question could be asked:

Have popular profiling systems proven to be sustainably useful and effective in the everyday challenges faced by coaches, managers, and their clients/employees?

Consider these questions:

• Have you used profiling in your people development programme? (e.g. Personality Assessment)
• How did the results affect the way your clients/employees respond to challenges in the workplace?
• How long did this change last?
• If you had to rate (on a scale of 1 – 10) how much overall benefit you gained from the profiling and feedback process, what would the score be?

If your rating in the last question above is on the low side, it is possible that the assessment tool you employed was based on a descriptive model of personality style. Ok, so what is a descriptive model of personality style and why might this have limited the assessment’s ability to effect real and sustainable change in your organization?

Descriptive models of personality

A descriptive model of personality (e.g. Myers Briggs – MBTI) does what it says, it describes the personality. A person’s dominant characteristics, preferences and behaviours are outlined according to various categories of functioning. So, typically you are told about your strengths and weaknesses, your learning style, your decision-making style, your typical team role and so on. Upon receiving such a descriptive profile of your personality you are likely to have a sense of positive identification with what is being described. These are the things you generally know about yourself and so you can quite quickly say “yes this is who I am.”  You may have not yet described your personality in such a well structured way, but the assessment is commonly experienced as a richly described confirmation of your conscious self-knowledge.

So far so good.

In a coaching and organizational context this kind of information can greatly enhance cooperation and tolerance levels between individuals with different personality styles who recognize and validate each other’s differing needs and personality preferences. Often misunderstandings can be reinterpreted in the framework of personality style, which can lead to greater levels of understanding and improved working relationships.

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