Leverage Psychometrics to Improve Leadership Performance
I find psychometric tools are underrated and under-utilised, possibly because they are poorly understood or rarely, if ever, linked to individual and business objectives. A known significant contributory factor is that almost all corporate Learning & Development globally has no ROI, a staggering 93% to be precise. Training is typically cobbled together as little more than a nice idea as opposed to a serious strategic component of business development and growth. If interested, you can read about the facts and figures in another case study: Learning & Development: Whats your ROI?
Every psychometric system, with the exception of The Big Five a.k.a. O.C.E.A.N, is considered controversial in scientific circles, as they don’t stand up to scrutiny due to their deficiencies inherent with self-reported assessments. With that in mind I still consider these systems to have value as the goal is not to precision pigeonhole individuals, but to understand how best to leverage an individuals perceived strengths and weaknesses in a team context to achieve any given outcome. Through discussion and mutual understanding of their psychological operating preferences they become greater than the sum of their parts.
Let’s explore this now.
Psychometric Tools
There are many tools available, however for the purpose of this article we will focus on Myers-Briggs purely because it happens to be the one I am most familiar with. Myers-Briggs was developed in the early 1920’s and paralleled the work of famous Psychologist Carl Jung, though in a far less formal way as the creators had no background or formal education in Psychology.
The matrix below displays all 16 Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) all arranged relative to human characteristics and peer types. On the completion of the questionnaire you receive the results of your preferences, which correlate with one of the 16 types, each with it’s own spectrum of traits. For novelty I have added the distribution of each MBTI across the UK population.
I’m not going into detail on specific traits in this article as the purpose of this example is to provide a simple demonstration of the impact different personalities can have on each other and the role psychometrics can play in terms of successful outcomes. In the spirit of brevity we will make do with a vastly over simplified summary of groupings:
NF’s: Value orientated, tend to make emotional decisions based on future possibilities in pursuit of enlightenment.
SF’s: Relationship orientated, tend to make emotional decisions based on present reality in pursuit of harmony.
ST’s: Process orientated, tend to make logical decisions based on present reality in pursuit of order.
NT’s: Outcome orientated, tend to make logical decisions based on future possibilities in pursuit of change.
You can see within the spectrum of each group there are four very different ends in mind combined with four very different paths to attaining them. Now let me give you an example of using this tool to demonstrate how personality can have a significant impact on business objectives:
A few years ago I was supporting a board member from a large enterprise who was struggling to take their team on a transformation journey following a merger. As part of my investigation to understand more about change aversion in the organisation I decided to carry out a little experiment. The leadership coaching program I delivered involved capturing psychometric profiles of all those involved, which totalled 35 participants: Board, senior, middle and team. For the purpose of this article we will focus solely on the board member and associated team of senior leaders, at this point in time totalled 8.
Leadership
We have already discovered the main drivers behind each group, so what comes next will highlight a pattern as to why significant friction can present between stakeholders and delivery of objectives, and how psychometrics can be used to defuse it, see below:
You can see the spread of of personalities across 3 out of 4 quadrants. If we follow on from the previous descriptors we have 2x change orientated people, 2 harmony orientated people and 4 order orientated people, so you might be able to see where this is going already.
If we consider a team a hive mind and aggregate their preferences we end up with the following as the dominant characteristics of the team: Introvert: 62.5%, Sensing: 75%, Thinking: 75% and Judgement: 75%. To keep things simple I’m not going into the traits associated with each of these four terms, thats for another day. The significance for now is the overwhelming dominance of:
ST: Process orientated, tend to make logical decisions based on present reality in pursuit of order.
The team functioned collectively in the pursuit of order, not change as required. The change orientated personalities were outnumbered 3:1. This is obviously an over simplification of the problem as there were clearly other factors at play. With that in mind this is purely a demonstration of an interesting way to visually represent part of the story when playing back findings, especially as the decisions at this level directly impact organisational culture.
Culture
Below is a representation of an ideal development scenario using a simplified version of Prof. Mihály Csikszentmihályi Flow model, which he originally discovered in 1975 after identifying the components of high performance. I have updated this to demonstrate the relationship between Strategy, Operations and High Performance, which can be applied to any individual, team or organisation. By looking at the relationship between Challenge, defined as: Degree of difficulty to be overcome, and Support, defined as: Available resources. Four states emerge:
These four states correlate with specific behaviours that can be measured in any individual, team or organisation.
Anxiety: Missed deadlines, avoidance of interaction, likely negatively impacting employee sickness absence.
Apathy: Absence of enthusiasm or presence of indifference, likely negatively impacting employee retention.
Comfort: Lack of activity and accountability, likely negatively impacting employee productivity.
Flow: Pro-active, self-directed, emphasis on personal responsibility, likely positively impacting all above.
In terms of our example think about the mixed messaging. The leadership team had the sole objective of leading their organisation to a new and better world, while inadvertently undermining their own efforts. With talking the talk and walking the walk clearly mismatched what do you think was the resulting impact on organisational culture?
Over the following year the leadership personalities slowly changed, those not suited to this kind of work chose to leave, which is inevitable and comes with any transformation. This allowed everyone to pursue meaningful endeavours suited to their skillset and temperament, something I think is superb in the longer term. Otherwise it’s death by 1000 cuts in a culture of chaos. The company were then able to promote and recruit different personalities, resulting in an overall team personality better matched with their objectives.
Conclusion
Psychometrics can be used to better understand business problems, which are really always people problems, and improve performance, individually and collectively. And this is only one example of many. Not only do psychometrics provide valuable evidence, they provide insight on where to start.
The more tools we can leverage, the more variables and/or distractions we can identify and mitigate, the more likely we are to achieve the state of Flow and deliver agreed outcomes. Keep in mind it’s only successful in the longterm if embedded in your culture with accountability. Without ongoing reinforce people will default to the comfort zone of their preferred way of operating and problems, like the above, will re-emerge.
This is why I’ve been fascinated by human behaviour my whole life. Everything is ruled and run by humans, so intimately understanding human behaviour offers access to everything.
If you would benefit from support to adjust or reset your organisational culture, perhaps after a merger or transformation ensuring you take a strategic approach, then please do schedule a call with me by putting a 60mins in my diary at a time that suits you. We can discuss your situation and options over an eCoffee.
Best Wishes
Kenny
