Face the (Low) Challenge

Now I know that some Birkman Consultants find the idea of doing feedback by phone rather strange, and that's fine.* We do a lot of our work that way, and Sarah (as in Mrs Mason, sometimes known as Sarah Jury) has a real gift for it. Honestly. Clients who don't know she is my wife rave on to me about how my colleague made them forget it was a phone call, it was like she was in the room etc etc. They never say that about me!

But every now and again we have had either someone stop the session after a couple of minutes / or freak out / or - as today - ask if one of us could give them just five minutes face to face to go through some scores they haven't ever had a session on, even though I know they had the phone session on exactly those scores just a few weeks back.

And in common - it is always people with ultra-low Challenge scores. (<5)

Not terribly surprising when you think about low Challenge. "Face" (in the oriental sense of the giving and receiving of respect / position etc) is extremely important to low Challenge, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that "face to face" communication protects and promotes "Face" more than talking over the phone.

So - even if you would never consider doing feedback by phone in a billion years, this may have other implications for communication with low Challenge clients, or at least underline the importance of choosing a time and place when you can give them absolute personal attention when there is something important to communicate that is about them.

*And if you wouldn't consider doing feedback over the phone - just have a look at your own Challenge Score. I've just realised that two of the people who told me that doing feedbacks by phone was a weird thing to do were sub-five Challenge scores themselves...

Joining In under the Hood

Any inhabitant of Birkmanistan ( i.e. consultants, people working directly under the supervision of such consultants, even people who just like reading their own report) is entirely welcome to contribute to this blog. How that will work for now is via the Comments facility.

To join in, you will need a gmail account (free from www.gmail.com). Because Google also owns Blogger, that means you can make comments and authenticate your ID using your gmail account. To make a comment, just click the comments link at the bottom of any post and follow instructions.

All I ask (apart from the usual good netiquette) is that you keep within the bounds of logical connection with the blog you attach your comment to. So, for example, if you have noticed something neat about Areas of Interest, you could add that as a comment to just about any of the posts so far. If you are bursting to say something about Public Contact/Detail, at least frame it as a "hey Jon, you seem to be obsessed with AoI, could we talk about this please", not just a non-sequitur. (You know, "Jon you mentioned Artistic, now here's what I think about people with high Detail..." Que? )

Enjoy!

Artefacts of Mechanistic Creation

Y'what? Just kidding, as usual...

BUT - what do you do when (as has happened to me twice in recent months) you get someone in a workshop who everybody guesses will have a high Musical (case 1) or high Artistic (case 2) and who is really, truly not at all happy to find they have scores for these around the 50 mark.

"This Birkman thing is just plain wrong..."

"I spend all my time playing my guitar/flutes/zithers/making cards/crafts/wrapping things beautifully" (delete as applicable)

Some of you know where this is going already. Yes, they both had Mechanical scores in the 90s. One of the most broadly applicable attributes of people with high Mechanical scores? Being "hands-on". Doing stuff personally. Enjoying the "how". (Avoiding delegation, but that is another post waiting to happen).

Half an hour after telling me this was all nonsense, High Mechanical / 50 Musical said "I've just realised; I only ever play music [and he is one of the most natural instrumentalists I have ever known - jon], I never listen to it"

Slightly quicker than that, High Mechanical / 50 Artistic said "Actually, now you mention it, I am not particularly interested in looking at what others have done - I just love doing it myself. At work, I get upset if someone suggests someone else should take on some of the "handcraft" parts of my job."

Like everything in this Blog, this is all so obvious once you have seen it. But the lesson is: when someone looks you in the eye and tells you this "Birkman thing" has failed to score them properly on this or that with regard to Areas of Interest - just look at their top two bars. The real motivator is sitting there, perhaps just a little incognito...

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...

Grid Dimensions

The last couple of times I have done my standard Birkman workshop, it has struck me that what we say about the vertical, "Communication style", dimension, is also true of the horizontal, "Task focus", dimension. (And in saying this, I realise that I may be the last person on the planet to notice this)

In other words, going top to bottom we go from DIRECT to INDIRECT Communication style; and likewise, going from left to right, we go from DIRECT to INDIRECT Focus on Task. (Because focussing on people and process to get a task done is the indirect equivalent of "just getting on with the task").

Any benefits from seeing things this way? Only that this makes Blues "double indirect" and Reds "double direct". Turn any lights on? Yellows and greens are one of each - and that too feels about right. Or is it just me?