Hanging around in bars...
... Area of Interest Bars, that is.
Just another observation from the workshops I have been doing in the past few months (I am still waiting for confirmation that I am the first Birkman Consultant to conduct a workshop in the Atlas Mountains...). For various reasons - once that I failed to spot that a participant had already done a workshop with me the previous month, twice that participants from non-English speaking cultures asked to redo because they hadn't realised they could answer in their mother tongue, and once that the participant was sure he had answered the first 50 questions wrongly - I have had several "retake" profiles to look at.
First thing - 100% of them required a magnifying glass to spot the differences on the Grid. Kind of reassuring.
Secondly, Areas of Interest showed me something interesting. On only one occasion did a "top three" score move (and in that case I could postulate a "more honest" answering pattern the second time round; it was Social Service that dropped out 2nd time round, and the person in question works for a not-for-profit. Low scores never moved. Mid range scores did tend to reorder themselves.
I am sure we could ask Larry Lee or Paul Waddlington about this, but my lazy guess is that this apparently high consistency on "top three / bottom two-three" scores coupled with apparently lower consistency for the mid-range scores tells us two things:
1. Don't get too precious about differences of a few percentile points - they aren't significant. (Someone made this point to me when I launched the original TeamPlayer, which allowed you to fine tune what you felt would be a significant difference between one person's Usual and another person's Need; waste of time, they said. More recently, at the last Conference in Houston, Larry showed some of us a team analysis based on just 5 broad bandings of scores. Now it seems to me that this is probably equally true of AoI also... okay you all knew this already!)
2. Do focus on the strongest preferences (both for and against) - not only do they seem more stable in a retake situation, but also, when I talk with people, they are the ones which leave the biggest evidence trail in their lives. Top three, bottom two (or three if they are all in the <20 band) is my focus these days. Other scores aren't saying anything very powerful, more like "yes fine, but not the be all and end all..."
That's just reminded me - next time I must do the other Mechanical artefacts I have observed. Fascinating...
Just another observation from the workshops I have been doing in the past few months (I am still waiting for confirmation that I am the first Birkman Consultant to conduct a workshop in the Atlas Mountains...). For various reasons - once that I failed to spot that a participant had already done a workshop with me the previous month, twice that participants from non-English speaking cultures asked to redo because they hadn't realised they could answer in their mother tongue, and once that the participant was sure he had answered the first 50 questions wrongly - I have had several "retake" profiles to look at.
First thing - 100% of them required a magnifying glass to spot the differences on the Grid. Kind of reassuring.
Secondly, Areas of Interest showed me something interesting. On only one occasion did a "top three" score move (and in that case I could postulate a "more honest" answering pattern the second time round; it was Social Service that dropped out 2nd time round, and the person in question works for a not-for-profit. Low scores never moved. Mid range scores did tend to reorder themselves.
I am sure we could ask Larry Lee or Paul Waddlington about this, but my lazy guess is that this apparently high consistency on "top three / bottom two-three" scores coupled with apparently lower consistency for the mid-range scores tells us two things:
1. Don't get too precious about differences of a few percentile points - they aren't significant. (Someone made this point to me when I launched the original TeamPlayer, which allowed you to fine tune what you felt would be a significant difference between one person's Usual and another person's Need; waste of time, they said. More recently, at the last Conference in Houston, Larry showed some of us a team analysis based on just 5 broad bandings of scores. Now it seems to me that this is probably equally true of AoI also... okay you all knew this already!)
2. Do focus on the strongest preferences (both for and against) - not only do they seem more stable in a retake situation, but also, when I talk with people, they are the ones which leave the biggest evidence trail in their lives. Top three, bottom two (or three if they are all in the <20 band) is my focus these days. Other scores aren't saying anything very powerful, more like "yes fine, but not the be all and end all..."
That's just reminded me - next time I must do the other Mechanical artefacts I have observed. Fascinating...
Labels: Areas of Interest
posted by jon at
16:48
1 Comments:
I agree that the top and bottom "intense" scores are the critical factors in understanding how our interest scores affect our lives.
I just finished a session with a small team, and we were posting top and bottom scores on a grid to compare the activies/functions of the job and how the team members would be motivated or de-motivated by differing options. The only person missing from the board was the manager of the team, who had no post-its up with his name.
His scores ranged from a high of 80 to a low in the upper 30's, nothing that fell in the range I asked for. After explaining his scores to the group (noticing he was missing, they called for him to post his scores) he noted that he often noticed visceral reactions from subordinates when delegating tasks and projects, but had never really understood why. He was "comfortable" with almost any type of task, had a varied work history, and no real definable major in college. He was a real jack of all trades. But the light turned on as his team talked about the types of projects and tasks that they were passionate about ("Please let us wear our ipods when doing data entry!!!) or those that drove them bonkers...like the low Numerical and Clerical that was their Admin Assistant!!! Classic stuff.
Sometimes team events can cloud the issue for individuals. Sometimes they are the light that illuminates something that is fogged over in their own life. This was a case of the latter.
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