Chapter 2

Identifying Your Strengths

If you know your strengths and interests—and how to keep them charged—you can play them off the assets of others and make yourself a desirable employee for any company. No matter what your Birkman results are, they will show your potential to any company looking to balance its staff with a variety of competent employees. They also will show how to improve your approach and performance in any situation.

“Look at your Birkman and be proud of it!” says Jan Brandenbarg, senior consultant in the Netherlands. “Just look at what you can do in a better way or a different way. The main thing is you learn to accept who you are. If you don’t accept yourself, do you think your boss will accept you?”

THE UNIVERSAL FOUR

Your Birkman assessment begins with the Life Style Grid, which recognizes four overarching personality types that are widely acknowledged in psychology. Birkman uses them in a unique way, but didn’t invent this matrix. The genesis of the idea of the universal four goes back at least as far as ancient Greece. Hippocrates declared that four types of people make up the population of the world, and this concept has endured through the centuries in various forms and terms in different cultures. It is best known in modern times in the work of Carl Jung, a pioneer in social psychology. The Birkman considers this four-part distribution to be natural in society and necessary in all organizations, and treats it as a prerequisite for the healthy functioning of the world as we know it.

The four color quadrants on the graph represent society as a whole. Your grid profile provides a broad-brush summary that gives you an overall view of where you excel. It plots your interests (averaged) and shows where your interpersonal or socialized styles fall based on a model of how people behave in general. Where your interests fall on that graph will pinpoint where you like to focus your attention and where your dominant work preferences are. Attributes are associated with each of the four colors and the general job categories they represent (figure 2.1).

Blue (Thinker/Designer)

Blue is associated with the person who inhabits the world of concepts and ideas. These are people who enjoy being creative and innovative and like to come up with fresh, even unorthodox approaches. They are reflective and tend to look inward at all possibilities. Because they are imaginative and good at connecting ideas, they gravitate to the big picture and dream of the future. They often are seen as nurturing and caring.

The color also represents art, literature, and music. Blues don’t have to be professionals in these fields, but they do consider them important in their life. In the nonartistic field, Blue can represent someone who prefers working on strategy and long-term planning. Because Blues are introspective by nature, they tend to rely on their own reactions to inform their decisions. People with Blue interests might choose careers in the fine arts, design, research, medicine, or strategy, for example.

Green (Persuader/Communicator)

Green represents people who are good communicators—persuasive people who relish being in contact with the public and are comfortable with social interaction. They are group oriented, never seem to tire of talking to people, and feel they never meet a stranger. If you say “Party!” they say, “I’m there!”

They are comfortably assertive, typically talented at selling, and are seen as having an abundance of charm and enthusiasm, even while being strongly competitive. They can be relied on to get a good understanding of people and then react instinctively to give aid and support. They tend to be more direct and assertive than their Blue brethren, and their focus is on the external world. They tend to be good at motivating others and supporting change, and the change they expect is for the better.

In a professional environment, they can channel their love of people into work in highly communicative fields, such as sales, preaching, public relations, law, politics, motivational speaking, and media.

Red (Implementer/Expediter)

Red is the color of the implementer, the hands-on doer, the builder. Reds have a practical bent and often possess a sense of urgency about getting things done. For this reason, they can excel as first responders in emergencies because they are thought of as making good, quick decisions and managing in crisis. They are pragmatic in their approach, being goal oriented and focused on the facts. They tend to be adept at technology.

They also tend to like the outdoors, where they might be employed in landscaping and building. They typically enjoy hiking, camping, and biking. An explorer might be a Red, particularly modern explorers who might need to be technically savvy as well as adventuresome. Some of the Red professions are engineering, information technology, mechanics, law enforcement, crisis management, security, construction, park ranger, and energy-related jobs, such as oil rights and petrochemical fields.

Yellow (Administrator/Analyzer)

Yellow denotes a person who guards the system and values the numerical and the clerical. They are conscientious people who enjoy the process and procedure associated with any task. They are good at paying attention to details and are thorough in their examination. That means they represent order and seek to do things in a systematic way, insisting on checks and balances. For that reason, they also are often the ones demanding fair treatment.

On the job, they plan the work and work the plan. They don’t get frustrated or bored by repetitive tasks, but instead relish the consistency. They get into the routine and maintain precedent to provide order and predictability. They don’t mind doing their work calmly behind the scenes and prefer not to be interrupted when they are focused on their tasks. Yellow job titles include accountant, banker, financial analyst, controller, fiscal officer, organizer, office manager, and administrator.

ADDING COLOR

Getting a view of the color landscape of an entire workplace can reveal one of the most stubborn problems in hiring: the tendency of bosses to hire people like themselves. On the individual level, such a view can help those dominant in one color to see where to develop other aspects of their personalities. Even a superstar can’t excel on all fronts and will lack qualities in certain key areas.

Raymond was a chief information officer in a business unit for a large multinational corporation. When he took the Birkman assessment, it was no surprise that he was a strong Red. His strengths were his follow-through, delivery, and strong analytical skills. He had built a reputation and progressed through the ranks because of his ability to get things done and focus on goals. He was considered an exceptional manager. But he sometimes came across to others as overly focused on the here-and-how, rigid in his style, and too mired in details. These characteristics sometimes hurt his ability to connect with others at work, and he began to feel he had to close some gaps in order to stay in a strong leadership post.

Stacy L. Sollenberger, a Georgia-based consultant, had to get the executive to see that what had brought him success wasn’t necessarily what would help him maintain that success. She used the Birkman to get him to start to “talk colors.” Robert saw that his strengths, while still valued in the organization, needed to be balanced with new behaviors and ways of thinking that are more in the Blue realm—strategic, long-term planning versus Red’s urgent and immediate response. The Life Style Grid helped him to see the nuances of different leadership styles based on other color attributes, which he also possessed although in much less intensity.

This high-level executive was particularly coachable, but we can flex our behaviors just so far: we can’t change our fundamental styles. Some leaders will find they must partner with or at least take the advice of people whose behaviors and styles are very different from their own. Executives who know how to best leverage the power of their Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow colleagues will succeed faster and last longer in their careers. Not leveraging the different styles can cause a clash of personalities and professional styles among people who have to work closely together.

A new employee at one Houston company says that seeing his color designation and that of one of his colleagues was a revelation for him and led to a big change in how he functioned at work. “There was a woman at work that I hated,” he says. “Every time I came up with an idea, she would shoot it down, saying it wasn’t practical or it wouldn’t work. After we did the Birkman, our consultant pointed out that I was a Blue who liked thinking about new strategies. My ‘enemy’ was a Yellow. I realized, then, that she wasn’t out to get me after all. She was just a numbers person. It was what she felt comfortable doing and how she contributed to our office. Now, before I tell my ideas to the whole group, I run them past her to see how I might have them make better financial sense. Not only do I like her now; I feel she has helped me a lot.”

The first rule of the Birkman is the one that is hardest to put into practice: how we view the world and the filters through which we perceive our environment may be very different from those of the people around us. Our standard is not the standard. We are not the “normal” one because there is no normal.

“Once you truly understand your perceptions and the biases and assumptions they carry, you’ll be able to better manage your work and personal relationships, making both more fruitful for all involved,” Dr. Birkman has said.

This personality diversity is important in the changing face of companies, which have an ever-growing variety of expertise within them. An innovative high-tech firm certainly needs a different sort of leader than a small medical facility does. In past decades, Birkman consultants tended to find a lot of assertive Reds and Greens at the heads of firms. This might be expected at a time when the biggest corporations were tied to heavy industry and many of the business leaders had been in the military. But with more diversity in the workforce now and a workplace changed by technology and other innovations in the way business is done, Birkman has found that a wide range of people representing all personality types are now in leadership positions.

PEOPLE ORIENTED VERSUS TASK ORIENTED

A number of positive-psychology assessments focus on the four-types theory; the Birkman, however, uses the grid as a foundation for building a multilayered profile.

Another dimension is added to the Life Style Grid by putting the four color quadrants in the context of two professional aspects (figure 2.2):

The bottom Yellow-Blue half of the grid shows the tendency for indirect communication. The top, Red-Green, represents direct communication. The left, Red-Yellow side of the grid, is the task-oriented half, and the right, Green-Blue, is the people-oriented side.

INTERPERSONAL STRENGTHS

The next step in deepening your self-awareness is to take a look at how the colors are combined to form your personality because you know instinctively that there is some of every color inside you. Locate the four symbols on the grid landscape that identify aspects of your personality. These are your interpersonal strengths—not only who you are but who you are in relation to the rest of society. They reside in the color quadrant that best represents how you express those aspects. Plotting on your Life Style Grid the analysis of your responses to the assessment questions makes your complex personality profile easier to conceptualize. The four aspects of your personality are

• Interests—the asterisk: WHAT you like to do, or where you gravitate in terms of your activities
• Usual Behavior—the diamond: HOW you like to do it (your socialized interpersonal behavior) or how you see yourself and how others will see you
• Needs—the circle: WHERE you ideally would like to be, that is, your expectations of the world around you and where you find your comfort zone
• Stress—the square: your frustrated, reactive behavior that can occur when your needs go unmet

What you are looking at is how different compartments in your life take on the attributes of a certain color. Your Interests color, for example, could be very different from the color of your Usual, or learned, behavior, which can be different from the color of the environment in which you like to work or recharge. That may sound a bit confusing at first, but our personalities are complex. Any assessment that pins a simple label on you or assigns you to one type is selling you short. Who would say that human behavior is ever one-dimensional?

Looking at the grid now, you will instantly be able to see where your energies and passions will be directed in terms of working with people and ideas, or with details and tasks.

Interests

Your Interests asterisk is in the color that best represents what appeals to you most in your life (figure 2.3). In this case shown in the diagram, the asterisk in the Yellow quadrant indicates a leaning toward the numerical and administrative side of a job. Interests are important for us to know because they say much about what satisfies us over the long haul. When an employer can connect what a person truly loves to do with that person’s job, employee retention skyrockets. We like to say that whether it is an income or an outlet, your Interests keep you more happily engaged in your work and your play, and both types should be part of your daily life.

You probably know pretty well where your interests lie, and despite your feelings of growth and advancement through life, those interests have changed little since childhood. We have all heard stories about when accomplished people first discovered their passions. Biographies of violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, for example, include a story of his parents finding their four-year-old son in his room plucking out a musical tune on rubber bands he had strung across the knobs of his bedroom dresser.

Your asterisk on the Life Style Grid was derived from your average ranking on a list of ten basic Interests representing the four color fields. These are activities that you enjoy and find fulfilling. They may be tied to your work duties or as a way to recharge when you’re not at work. The Areas of Interest show your natural mix of types of Interest and the degree to which they are important to you. The Areas of Interest, in connection with their color attributes, are

Blue

• Artistic
• Literary
• Musical

Green

• Social Service
• Persuasive

Red

• Mechanical
• Outdoor
• Scientific

Yellow

• Clerical
• Numerical

Your Interests aren’t necessarily what you’re good at; that is, they are not a measure of your skills or any innate talent. Rather, they are what you like to do or what appeals to you. You don’t have to be an opera singer to be an opera buff or to play the saxophone to love jazz. But if those Interests are important to your life, they will be a source of your energy and well-being. For that reason, companies have begun to be more flexible in accommodating employees’ lives outside work. It ultimately boosts productivity.

“I can’t draw,” Shelley Hammell, an Atlanta-based consultant, tells her clients. “If you asked me to draw a person, I’d still draw a stick figure like a kid, maybe add that little flip-do to show one is a female. I have no artistic talent. But my artistic score in the Areas of Interest is high, and I love art. If I’m on a business trip, the first thing I do after checking into a hotel is to see if there is a museum nearby. I use art to relax and to recharge.”

Yet because people tend to be good at what they like to do, you may have become skilled in one of these categories. In the workplace, think of them as strong indicators of how you prefer to direct your energy, all else—pay, prestige, and opportunity—being equal. Birkman has learned that our Areas of Interests show us a nutrient in our lives—something that strengthens our emotional well-being. In addition to using the scores to point to a career path, improve your work environment, and tailor a job to suit you, they also show you what you require in your life to maintain your energy.

The ten areas, a measure of your passion for one of the fields, whether or not you make your living in it, are ranked from 1 to 99:

Under 10	Something you would prefer to delegate to others
10–39	Something you probably would rather not do if given the option
40–60	Something you can take or leave
61–75	Something that is probably a regular activity
76–90	Something you are likely to feel you can’t live without
Over 90	A true passion that can turn a life around

Feeding our most vital interests is as essential to feeding the spirit of a person as water is to a plant. So a high score means it is an Interest that is likely to inform your choice of work as well as your recreation. You have to tend to your passions when you are trying to be at your creative and productive best. This is especially true when you have to work your hardest over many hours—exactly when your obligations can obscure your Interests or start to crowd out time for recharging.

You won’t find it easy to turn your focus away from the task at hand, not only because of time constraints, but because Interests can be subtle, and they sometimes get buried and forgotten over the years under career, family, and other daily demands. That is what happened to a chief executive officer at a gas company in Arkansas. He was surprised when a Birkman consultant showed him an Interest score of 97 in music.

“I’ll bet you have music on your office computer,” said the consultant, Bob Brewer, PhD, of Oxford, Mississippi, as he pointed out the score.

“No, I don’t do anything with music, though I do like music,” the CEO replied.

Bob then approached the subject from a Birkman point of view: “What are people telling you about working with you?”

“That I’m cranky and hard to deal with, and hard to get along with,” the executive admitted.

“This might sound crazy, but get a radio or something to play music on and keep it on during the day,” Bob told him.

The chief executive thought it was an odd suggestion, coming amid the more targeted leadership and training advice he was getting, but he did it. When Bob checked back with him some weeks later, the CEO said that one small suggestion had made a huge difference in how he felt at work—and it showed: “People are coming to me now and saying, ‘You’re a whole lot easier to deal with,’” he said.

Bob told him, “You’re feeding the passion you have.”

You have learned so far in this chapter that knowing your general color attributes can help you see gaps in your professional style and strategic thinking. Such an accurate measure of your Interests will allow you to zero in on what you need to achieve workplace balance. You now know in what areas you might need to place more focus in training or in career satisfaction.

The Birkman Areas of Interests was used at one Toronto company to help an employee in a senior position who wanted to be considered for a promotion. His Birkman showed he possessed a low Persuasive but high Social Service rating. Seeing this information, Joanne Rivard, vice president of human resources for IPEX Inc., started working with him to help him learn how to better sell his ideas. It was a typical concern at the company, which makes thermoplastic piping for buildings, she says. The company is focused on engineering and so attracts top people who tend to be dominant Red, supported by Yellow. “But we quickly found out that without Green and Blue, they wouldn’t be good leaders,” says Joanne, who is certified in the Birkman Method.

Her candidate for promotion, an engineer, had an 87 in Mechanical and a 71 in Scientific, as might be expected for someone who had worked on machines for his whole career. But there was one surprise: he also had a 94 Outdoor score—the sign of a true passion. Joanne sought an opening in a next-level position that would suit his need for time outdoors. She found one: a project in another province that required travel and on-site inspections.

“With a culture of promotion from within, using a tool like the Birkman is critical to development plans,” she says. “It also helps with finding people who want to mentor.” She says the company has a high retention rate; some 40 percent of employees have been there more than twenty years. “Before Birkman, IPEX thought of coaching as a performance improvement plan. Only those who were ready to be kicked out of the organization would get it as a last-ditch effort. What Birkman did was provide me a basis to remove my human resource hat and become an objective coach by using the Birkman language and tools I never thought of before.”

Usual Behavior

The Birkman explores your Usual Behavior—so named because it describes the way we usually show up and present ourselves in our daily interactions (figure 2.4). This is your socially desirable behavior. Your Usual Behavior is always described in terms that are positive and productive.

If your Interests represent what you want to do and your Needs are basically where you want to do it, then Usual Behavior is how you choose to do it.

In figure 2.4, the diamond in the Red quadrant suggests a person whose learned behavior is a take-charge personality.

Your Life Style Grid might show that while you have strong Interests associated with one color, you get things done in another way, with strong preferences for the environment in which you prefer to work. Some people will be concentrated in one quadrant, while others may be spread across the grid with several different colors. The grid is a simple way to view and understand at a glance the natural complexity of our behavior. There is no one way that is either better or worse than another. What matters is appreciating the depth and variety of our basic inclinations and the fascinating variety of human nature.

One information technology (IT) employee said he was pleasantly surprised to find his Interests asterisk far from his Usual Behavior marker. “I’m an IT person who loves coaching,” he said, “so I was pleased my diamond (Usual) was in Yellow but my Interests (asterisk) were in Green.”

Lisa Hart, a Boston-based consultant, puts an interesting twist on introducing the Birkman color grid. Before she distributed the Life Style Grid Report to a roomful of aspiring managers in one seminar in 2011, she put four posters on easels on which she had written the four colors and their attributes. She then told the participants to stand by the description that best suited them.

After the forty or so employees—most between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-three—rushed to their choices, she had a few explain what attributes drew them there. Some joked about favorite colors or colors of their favorite sports team, but an inordinate number went to the Reds, because they said it seemed to be a good leadership description.

When their actual Birkman results were handed to them, there were many surprises. One woman found she was a Blue. The person sitting next to her, whom she had known at work for some time, told her that certainly her results were wrong.

“You’re definitely a Red,” he told her.

“No,” she replied, “this is correct. I’m a Blue. I consider myself a creative person. I was trained to be more Red, and that’s the only side of me you’ve seen at work.”

Her Birkman showed her to be a Red in her Usual Behavior but a Blue in Interests and Needs. With that information in hand, says Lisa, the woman could show her bosses that she is a better strategic planner and thinker than they might have thought. She also knows now that she has to make sure her creative Blue self is being nurtured or she’ll reach a stress point. Constantly being forced to behave in a way that is against your basic tendencies causes internal struggles that no one sees but that can affect your professional performance and personal well-being.

The hope is that empowered by her Birkman, the aspiring manager will become more confident about her core strengths and better prepared to investigate the full spectrum of her personality. With her newly gained self-knowledge, she can carve out a rewarding career path, so that any future leadership role will make the best use of her biggest talents and make her work more satisfying for her and for her company.

Needs

It’s trickier to discover—and for most people to articulate—what our underlying Needs are. Motivational Needs address the environment in which you prefer to dwell and how you get back your energy. In other words, they tell you what you will need to be at your best. With our Usual Behavior, we can flex or adapt our social styles as we see fit. Needs, however, remain constant. If your Needs are in the Blue quadrant, you will likely require a creative outlet to be in your comfort zone.

The Birkman gives you the vocabulary to begin a discussion about your authentic Needs. On the Life Style Grid, Needs are represented by a circle (figure 2.5).

Stephan Altena of Munich works with executives across Europe and in the United States. He describes typical top-level culture as “deep Red.” At a company’s lower levels, they “aren’t Red yet,” he says, but they try to adapt their behavior as such. They conform to whatever work style is necessary to succeed, explore their interests outside the job, and tend to their personal needs away from work. It’s their way of handling their work-life balance. “They say to themselves, ‘My life outside work will pay me back for my efforts on the job.’”

Put another way, the Birkman can tell to what degree that person’s Red behavior suits his true personality and so shows what he will need to do to get back his energy for work. “The Birkman is a good coaching tool because it’s always about work and life,” says Stephan. It’s the only one that combines obvious behavior with behavior that isn’t obvious to others, or even to the people [taking the assessment] themselves.

Stress

A critical aspect of the Birkman analysis is its ability to clarify Stress behavior. Your Stress tends to be cumulative and will manifest itself when your Needs aren’t met over time. Stress is represented by a square placed over the Needs circle (figure 2.6).

For the most part, others can’t see our deep interpersonal Needs, so we have to take responsibility for getting them met. When we fail to do this, we risk sliding into our discomfort zones—and dreaded Stress behavior. For that reason, the square in the diagram sits over the Needs circle. Just as we all have our productive strengths, we all have the flip side of our motivations as well, and that shows up as frustrated, unproductive behavior.

Stress is where many Birkman takers appreciate the relational aspect of their assessment reports. We all get frustrated at times, and we all have a bad day now and then. But although we are all prone to stress at one time or another, we don’t all show it the same way.

Jonathan Michael coached a member of Parliament in Ottawa, Canada, to follow his passion outside work, based on his high literary and music Interest scores. The lawmaker had been complaining of fatigue and feeling overwhelmed—not unusual considering the huge responsibilities he was assuming. “I asked if he wrote poetry, and he lit up,” Jonathan says. The politician, a Harvard-trained lawyer in the House of Commons, also was an author and, the consultant guessed from his profile, might have a poetic streak. “He said, ‘When I was in Harvard I wrote poetry every week,’” but then he stopped when he became a lawyer and lawmaker.

“A lawyer should write poetry,” Michael told him, and inspired the lawmaker to start writing again. He told the consultant that it has affected his life as a parliamentarian. It relieves his stress and gives him a lot of energy to go back and do what he does. “It’s an act of renewal for him,” Jonathan says.

The Markers Together

These four markers of asterisk, diamond, circle, and square—two of them coinciding—form a triangle whose size, shape, and general positioning hold meaning. The markers can be located anywhere on the grid, with little correlation seen between Interests and Usual Behavior. Those whose Interests and Usual Behavior are in the same quadrant might be truer to the assumed characteristics of that color and present themselves as such. They will have a certain consistency and predictability in their behavior, which could make it easier for others to read them and so meet their needs. It could also make the person a little less flexible about leaving his or her comfort zone and understanding the needs of the other types.

A wide triangle shows a broader behavioral swing with more diversity in social styles and a wide-ranging approach. The further the distance between the Usual Behavior and the Needs markers, the greater the likelihood that others will not easily see their core Needs, and the harder it will be for others to get a fix on the person’s Needs. That distance also can create some confusion to others as to how to interact with them. But opposite colors also can be an advantage: other strengths might take over when needed. Whether your triangle is in one, two, or three quadrants, your strengths will be clear.

SPEAKING IN COLORS

The Birkman is one of the most-used training instruments within Wal-Mart and has particular success with team builders who are midlevel managers, says Stacey Mason, of Bentonville, Arkansas, who spent eighteen years at the company before starting her own consultancy in 2008.

The Birkman was used to address participant needs in training programs and to trouble-shoot companywide. “I’d get a call from Sam’s Club or the pharmacy division asking for a way to improve teamwork or communications, or to understand how to leverage different team members within the group,” she says.

Stacey spent most of her career in logistics for the company before moving into corporate training and development, where she became senior manager for leadership development. Because Wal-Mart used the Birkman, the staff were fluent in the language of Birkman colors so “there wasn’t much guessing or figuring out how to navigate personal relationships,” says Stacey. “People simply told you upfront how they wanted to be approached or how they preferred to get work done. They would say, ‘I’m a Yellow Usual.’ It was normal for them.”

To explain workplace roles and how they related to the Birkman Life Style Grid, Wal-Mart’s corporate-development department had some fun leading training participants in an exercise in which segments of the class were put in certain color groups and told they were going on a hypothetical road trip: taking a group of kids to Disneyland, says Stacey.

“We’d have a conversation with the people standing in each color group and talk about what they needed to take on the trip. They would talk about the trip from the perspective of their color. If you were standing in the Blue zone, you talked about how nice it is to do this for these kids and what it means in a larger context for society as a whole. Greens were riding on the bus and singing karaoke and Facebooking as we went. The Reds allowed only one bathroom break, and it had to be when we got off the interstate to get gas. And they were very clear on departure times: ‘You will be on the bus at 6 each morning and when I say 6, I mean 5:30!!’ The Yellows pack snacks and first-aid kits. They bring a GPS, an atlas, and a MapQuest printout, and release forms signed by parents of the kids.”

THE BIRKMAN AT WORK: TEAM BUILDING

The Birkman is an effective workplace tool for building and maintaining teams from the smallest project unit to those pulled together from far-flung offices to achieve a game-changing goal. Most teams understand the task at hand, and most were chosen to be on the team because they can do their jobs well. Where teams break down is in communication and clashing ways of getting the job done. The Birkman can point out individual styles and differences and teach each team member how to take advantage of those contrasts to better reach a common goal.

Remember, the colors also represent the progression that puts an idea into practice: Blue for strategy, Green for persuading others to adopt the idea, Red for implementation, and Yellow to keep the process on track. A business needs a solid presence in all those steps. The Birkman allows business leaders to see the personality profile of their company as a whole, or any unit or team in it, and to judge whether it has the right balance to move forward.

Such a snapshot is of increasingly vital importance in the workplace, where teams often have to be formed or reconfigured quickly to meet an urgent demand. In the past, it was more common to have teams functioning together for long periods of time, allowing colleagues to form bonds and to smooth out glitches in how they worked together. Now that teams come together on short notice, it is critical that there be a way for the manager to see the big picture and for the whole staff to understand each other’s contribution to the whole.

Creating Effective Team Leadership

A vice president at a Fortune 100 corporation used the Birkman to help win a multibillion-dollar government contract. The proposal submission required hundreds of employees with a broad array of skills and expertise to come together to work in teams. The company had lost the first time it submitted its proposal, but because of some technicalities, it was given a second chance.

The executive, new to the proposal effort, asked Birkman consultant Connie Charles of Delaware to help her quickly build a strong leadership team to guide the effort to win the bid. “In order to win, we’re going to need to create an entirely different culture and a new way of working together,” the executive said.

This vital new team—composed of people with diverse expertise in engineering, finance, supplier management, and business development—wasn’t accustomed to working together. “The team came from all different parts of the company with their loyalties intact,” Connie says. “Compensation, grade levels, internal processes were all different—and they weren’t going to change!”

Because of the complexities of this project and its critical importance to the corporation, the consultant knew the employees would be working in a pressure-cooker environment. She counted on the Birkman’s ability to anticipate how this stress would affect the team members’ ability to work together. She then relied on this information to help the team avoid their stress behaviors so they could work with speed and efficiency.

When faced with such time constraints, the consultant reasoned that interpersonal relationships had to be solid. “Because of the accuracy of the Birkman data, we knew where the issues were going to come from, and then how to quickly get people to collaborate to solve them,” Connie says. “Not only did we help them build strong relationships, but we were also able to identify key blind spots in their proposal process.”

Their Birkman scores, for example, suggested they would be superb team players, as their individual assessments consistently showed they tended to prefer to be rewarded as a group rather than seek individual recognition. But their idealism was causing “a competitive blind spot,” Connie says. Their assumption that everyone played by the same rules and that the competitive landscape would be a level playing field caused them to overlook how their competitors were effectively tilting the playing field in their direction. As a result of this insight into the employees’ motivations and perspective, Connie was able to help them identify ways to more aggressively manage the competitive elements of the proposal process.

The company completed and submitted its new proposal on time, and the team was pleased with its work. But the consultant took note of more assessment insight: the Birkman showed a strong self-critical streak in many of the team members. She knew that if they lost the bid, the team members would blame themselves for the loss. So before the outcome was even announced, Connie suggested the chief executive officer thank the proposal team so the employees could understand their hard work was genuinely appreciated. “If they lost,” Connie says, “the team would have been devastated and so self-critical that no thank-you would have been heard.”

But the news was good: the company won the large contract, and Connie continues to support some five hundred employees responsible for the execution of the winning program.

Starting from Scratch

Few other industries are as demanding as sports when it comes to a need to pull together a well-functioning team. Whether it is the team on the field or court, or the management team behind the scenes, athletic departments tend to be on a constant, rapidly changing cycle of building and moving.

When a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I coach is fired or is lured to another position, it means a big move. The result is typically the termination of the contracts of everyone involved: from the person who coordinates the team videos to the director of operations, says Mary Ruth Burton of Richmond, Virginia. She is among a handful of Birkman consultants who have been asked to bring the Birkman into college and professional athletics for teams and administrators. “When a coach leaves, the athletic director has to hire a whole new coaching staff within two weeks,” she says. “The speed and intensity with which this happens would make heads in corporate America spin.”

The pressure is especially intense because athletic administrators know their careers depend on successful hires, especially the head coaches and their staffs. Wise athletic directors and coaches do their research and build relationships with potential candidates for these positions. But choosing the right candidate and then pulling the personalities together into a successful unit can be an organizational nightmare. It’s important, Mary Ruth says, to have a coaching staff with a broad mix of work preferences and styles to deal with widely disparate demands, from the grinding pressure for consistent winning results to nurturing the young athletes.

The world of Division I college and university sports, made up of some 347 schools, is particularly volatile. Mary Ruth was executive coach to Norwood Teague who led a staff of sixty as athletic director at Virginia Commonwealth University, when he suddenly snagged a Big Ten job as athletic director at the University of Minnesota in June 2012. She helped him prepare for a much expanded leadership position in which he would oversee rebuilding a management team that was responsible for more than seven hundred student athletes. The students played for wide variety of teams, from Olympic sports to men’s and women’s basketball, football, and ice hockey.

“Athletics is so fast-paced and demanding,” said Norwood. “We must be strategic but also make decisions quickly. Birkman is an amazing tool for getting folks in the right roles and getting a team understanding how to deliver quickly.”1

Mary Ruth started by providing executive coaching to Norwood to help him develop strategies. She then interviewed his leadership staff, as well as a long list of people inside and outside the athletic department who had a stake in its future: staff, coaches, assistant coaches, trainers, fundraisers, faculty and the university president’s office staff, and athletic department donors. She was learning about their goals and expectations for the department—“We want them to win”; “We want them to connect with us”; “We want them to develop the student athletes”—so that she could help the administrators work out a plan to achieve those various demands. She then used the Birkman to help determine what kinds of strengths were needed to implement that plan. “If they were all Red and Green, they might be good at raising money and getting results, but would they be thinking and planning enough for the future?” asks Mary Ruth. “When strengths are clear, the Birkman provides a path for the Red leader to either work on the plan or to get help.”

Staff members, after all, are guiding a group of young people on the field or court with an eye to helping them in their studies as well as how to grow to be responsible adults. In that way, she thinks of coaching staffs as functioning like families. One of her concerns is to keep everyone alerted to Stress behavior. With a staff of seven hundred students from ages eighteen to twenty-one, there is anxiety on the part of the athletes about their well-being, their athletic success, and their academic performance.

The consultant also will be prepared to hire new coaches should Norwood need them. For now, she is making sure he fills vacancies with the right people in the right jobs. Mary Ruth doesn’t hire individuals based on their Birkman profiles, but she uses the assessment to understand the innate strengths of candidates—statistics, logistics, motivational coaching, or creating new approaches to winning—that drew them to the work in the first place.

Once the staffers are selected, she uses the same Birkman report to get everyone “on the same page” and working together immediately. “We do team development sessions with new staffs of coaches or administrators to speed up their understanding of one another’s strengths, motivational needs, and reactive behaviors,” she says. “A great administration or coaching staff can figure these things out over time through trial and error, or they can get it right from the start,” she says. “The Birkman is a great insurance policy for getting it right from the start.”

Odd Man Out

One of the more typical problems Birkman consultants are asked to handle is when a staff has one or two members who seem to be always at odds with their colleagues, despite being qualified employees who pull their weight.

A California technology start-up was faced with this problem when they realized a member of an important team was constantly butting heads with colleagues. Betsy Cole, a Waltham, Massachusetts, consultant, sat in on a regular team meeting to see how well these creative people generated ideas. The brainstorming was impressive, and she could see they were pleased with the results. But one operations vice president seemed to be exasperated and kept repeating after each good idea, “Okay, so what are we going to do about that?”

When the team members saw their Birkman reports, they discovered the source of the rift. Most of them were Blue and so were focused on ideas. They had little patience with planning how to move anything beyond concepts and to begin executing the programs. Suddenly the role of the operations manager, a Red, who was a valued and respected employee, came into clear relief. He wasn’t being dismissive of their ideas; rather, he wanted those ideas to succeed and knew their designs would stay in the room unless they let him find a practical application.

“He became more appreciated,” said Betsy, who sat in on more sessions. “They started saying, ‘Let’s turn it over to Tim.’ They saw what they were doing wrong, and they began to feel they could rely on this manager to help them go in the right direction.”

Performance Reviews Perfected

Steven Foster, area manager for Redefine Hotel Management, based in the United Kingdom, uses the Birkman to give performance reviews to the ten general managers who are among the staff of 180 employees across the country.

“Before the Birkman, [the reviews] were more gauged on what we called set standards,” he says. “The problem is they didn’t focus on people, but on the evidence that a person was performing. It also had a tendency to be emotional, so the important conversations were avoided.”

Those set standards, he adds, amounted to simply checking off whether a manager did a performance review every six months for his reports rather than how well those reviews were being conducted. In looking at the work of the managers themselves, the reviews tended to note only how high the customer-service scores were for the hotel being managed. “If the scores were good, we’d assume the staff was happy, which of course wasn’t always the case. Now we look at the personality of the general manager and how that contributes to the scores.”

UK consultant Tasneem Virani introduced the Birkman to the hotel group in June 2012 and used it to help custom-fit the company’s performance reviews to key competencies for various jobs and related training. “The Birkman gives a clearer understanding of the interests that drive one’s performance in different areas of their job, and in coaching the individual according to their personality needs,” Tasneem says. “The Birkman always helps the manager to provide a more person-centered approach.”

Steven says the Birkman breaks down the conversation in a way that helps each manager identify his or her own strengths and how those can help a group achieve its goals. “This gave us detailed insight into how to have the hard conversations that sometimes we miss or don’t want to have,” says Steven. “As the answers are provided by the GMs themselves, it makes it easier to talk about things.”

The Birkman review report gives directions such as what to avoid or how to coach an employee to offer suggestions for optimal performance. For example, one Birkman profile, unrelated to the hotel group, includes this advice in its “Suggestions for Coaching” an employee:

• Express appreciation personally but without excessive sentiment.
• Give her special, personal attention in pressure situations.
• Apply rules and standards uniformly to get maximum cooperation.
• Allow changes to be a matter of choice where possible.
• Allow her initiative and freedom of thought and action.

“Now we can really discuss their future and their focus needs to ensure we get the best out of people,” Steven says of the new approach. Because of the ease of the Birkman assessment, he says, the company plans to use the Birkman as part of its routine performance review process for general and senior managers at the hotel units.

Notes

1. Norwood Teague, e-mail to Mary Ruth Burton, October 29, 2012.