No! Please...Please don't make me Delegate!

Just to finish getting high Mechanical off my chest (and I say this as an 85 - my third highest score after Musical 92 and Outdoor 89), there is a downside to being so "hands-on".

How do you delegate when the whole notion of understanding and solving a problem is, for you, so tied up with getting your hands on it? You may assign what looks like work to others, but how much real work (i.e. requiring the application of experience and/or intelligence) will you let go of?

Lest that sound harsh, I have asked this of every chart-topping Mechanical I have ever had in a workshop. The closest I ever got to an exception was a guy called Steve (Mechanical 99) who said, "Yes, I would delegate... if I thought they were competent." Noting the rather conditional mood of his statement, I asked how often that condition was actually satisfied. "Not very often..."

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has more a more industrial / production oriented client base than I do. My suspicion is that Steve's comment is true; were he to find himself in a crowd of "engineers' engineers" (with their concomitant 90+ Mechanical scores) he might find that they all delegated merrily (even dangerously - "she's about to blow - you go check it out...").

But the fate of high Mechanicals in non-engineering settings is a hard one - nonetheless, you will still probably prefer to (continue to) be "dinged" at your performance review for failing to give enough away, rather than for (entirely hypothetically) ever letting someone incompetent near something you could have sorted yourself.

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...

Areas of Interest: Low Numerical Maths Teacher

Although I have never had any trouble accepting my low Numerical score in general (I wouldn't want my work to be about numbers, and my half-year score - scaled up! - in the NZ equivalent of Maths A-Level was 10.5%*), it didn't quite explain why I happily do complex sums in my head on quite a regular basis, or even choose to set up quite complex spreadsheets on occasion.

Penny dropped when I had a group of primary teachers recently, and found the Maths Specialist had scores like mine - High Mechanical, Low Numerical. Listening to him explain how he stayed (reasonably) motivated towards maths and numeracy in spite of his low Numerical score, I realised I was listening to someone describing things in Mechanical (how things work) terms. Not only did that make sense of my own surprising forays into mental and structural maths, but also illuminated the journey I made from 10.5% mid-year to something in the mid 80s a few months later. Mr Bishop, my maths master who was enlisted to give me extra tuition, asked some searching questions and realised that I couldn't understand why we were torturing the poor numbers with calculus. All it took was for him to give me a couple of illustrations where calculus would help us get something done - calculating the volume of bronze required for a ship's propellor is the one I remember, plus a very mechanical approach to follow for each of integration and differentiation and I was away and laughing. Suddenly I couldn't think of anything that was more fun than making this stuff work. Clever J V Bishop, spotting the real issue almost a quarter century before I ever took the Birkman...

* Yes, I know AoI scores aren't about ability, but ability and application do seem to follow high AoI scores, for understandable reasons; 10.5% was definitely overstating my motivation towards maths...