Three times now I’ve used different psychological or behavioural matrices to be ‘assessed’ for my suitability for the job that I do.
This seems like a ridiculous exercise I know but if you are truly intersected in self development and improving your ability to communicate with people in the work that you do, then sometimes these exercises provide extraordinary insight.
The first one we did years ago was Kolbe introduced at that stage by Chris Barrow and it allowed us to look at different personalities within the business and to see, in terms of our management, people who had what skills, to give what jobs to the best way.
When Hayley Brown and I did our level 7 leadership training at Nottingham Trent University, they introduced us to Belbin which gave us a really useful insight to either discover or to further understand my significant personality failings which lead to carnage within an organisation.
While I knew I was someone who liked to start things, I wasn’t quite so clear as to how much I did and how little I liked to finish anything.
Left alone in an organisation is completely toxic and results in death, but Belbin provides a graph which visually shows you how much of a bampot you actually are and what’s fascinating is that when you put my graph and Hayley’s graph together in Belbin it’s almost seamless because Hayley is a compulsive finisher, who can take tasks and just chew them up and spit them out.
I just come up with batty ideas and start projects and leave carnage in my wake for other people to clear up.
I thought I was done with all of this type of stuff but in fact I don’t have time to pay any attention to any of it (which is a shame because it’s self-development) but I have a patient who is an industrial psychologist, whose daughter I treated for extensive traumatic injuries previously and who came to see me relatively recently for treatment of her own and in discussion in surgery (and this is some of the joys of being in surgery) she offered to do a little bit of an assessment on a new matrix called Hogan.
I decided to take her up on her kind offer and so one weekend some weeks ago I sat down for an hour when no-one was in and answered all of the online questions in the way that I was asked and then waited to see what happened.
What was particularly interesting about Hogan is that when my patient was able to sit in front of me and explain the result, she was able to tell me things about myself that I would never have told her, that I instinctively know which at least gives some validity in the form of testing.
What was more insightful though was the discussion about how some of the things which seem to be a positive characteristic can turn out to be a negative if taken too far and some of the things that we see as a negative characteristic, of developed properly, can be massively beneficial to what’s going on in the work and the business.
It also tied in though with what I’m doing with Consultation Master Classes and the discussion of consultation and ‘selling’ in healthcare.
For someone you don’t know to be able to sit in front of you following a series of questions that you’ve done on your own and explain to you that in personality terms, you have no interest in money and no interest in status, is quite enlightening and reassuring.
I always said I wasn’t interested in either of those two things but it’s one thing to say it and another thing to walk the talk.
It’s interesting though to have it validated by an independent personality scoring test which is quite reputable.
Much of that discussion is really personal or at least internal for the business but it’s just reaffirmed a course of action that I’ve been taking, to do less of the things that I’m really bad at (which ultimately damage the people around me) and to refocus and realign on the things that I’m good at.
I can minimise the damage of the negative and maximise the impact of the positive and that has to be better for everyone.
What looked like a blot in the diary that I didn’t want to use, turned out to be (as it always seems to) something good.
Blog Post Number - 2763
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