Preface
Understanding and retaining people is most often cited as the number one challenge in business, and the top question leaders ask is: How do we hire, manage, and retain our people? While running a business may be hard, it turns out that managing people is even harder.
This is the reason people turn to the Birkman personality assessment: to improve their lives and their working relationships with those closest to them. For more than six decades, millions of individuals have used our positive-psychology tool in over fifty countries, and our client list has grown to include Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit groups, educational and faith-based organizations, mom-and-pop shops, couples, and families. As CEO of Birkman International, I receive e-mails daily from consultants around the world and across the United States.
The story of the Birkman Method begins with the story of my father, Roger Birkman. Growing up as the shy and thoughtful son of a Lutheran pastor, he was fascinated by people and a keen observer of them. As a B-17 bomber pilot during World War II, he saw the power of wide-ranging personal perceptions and the impact of different styles on people and their behaviors.
Returning from the war, he was swept into the booming field of social psychology. Alongside such figures as Benjamin Fruchter, Warren Bennis, and Abraham Maslow, my father was a pioneer in taking psychology to the workplace, a radical new concept at the time. He developed the Birkman Method by asking a variety of workers questions about themselves and how they did their jobs. These interviews of people in the workplace, from salesmen and truck drivers to janitors and top executives, formed the basis of his positive-psychology questionnaire, first called “A Test of Social Comprehension.”
By the 1960s, my father, who always loved technology, put the research data from his test takers’ responses on an IBM mainframe computer. These data enabled him to expand into the global workplace, tracking generational changes as well as shifting trends. Most important, the information shows how all individual employees shape corporate cultures and fit into a grander scheme.
But my father didn’t do it alone. Soon after returning from the war in 1944, he was fortunate to meet a young woman in the Women’s Army Corps at a Veterans Administration picnic. Margaret Sue Leath shared his passion for understanding people and believed in his mission from the beginning. They married a year later, and she worked alongside him until her death in 2007.
My early childhood memories include night after night of sitting at the dinner table listening to my parents talk about their work. Perfecting the Birkman assessment was their dream and a passion that consumed them. Every night my father pored over stacks of index cards filled with numbers and phrases, looking for patterns of behavior in the day’s test takers. He often discussed his ideas and the results with my mother. I don’t remember them talking about much else. At a time when few moms worked outside the home, my mother began to assist my father full time on Birkman research, and I started day care at age two. Since my preschool principal was a musical theater performer who loved music, she took me to audition (successfully!) for the role of the child in Madame Butterfly at Houston Grand Opera. From this experience at age five, I developed a lifelong love of music, just like my violin-playing mother did, that led to my first career: singing and working in opera and musical theater. From this point, much of my life focused on music and raising my three children.
Because my parents lived and breathed their Birkman work, my sister and I stayed closely involved in the family business. My dual careers in music and the Birkman Method were intertwined from the start, and I loved them both. In fact, stage directing and teaching voice gave me a chance to practice the team-building and coaching skills that the Birkman assessment encourages. Just as one off-key voice can ruin a scene, one out-of-sync attitude can derail a team or sabotage a whole production.
By 2001, I was ready to pick up my parents’ torch and we began a planned leadership transition. I became CEO in 2002, and in the decade since, we’ve added 60 percent, or nearly 1 million people, to our database; boosted our overall revenues by almost 40 percent; and more than doubled the number of countries with Birkman consultants. We’ve trained hundreds of certified consultants, both corporate clients and independent practitioners, and expanded our research department to include psychometricians who have enabled us to update our career reports and develop a comprehensive new cognitive assessment, the Birkman Abilities Inventory. We were awarded the Texas Family Business Award in 2010 from Baylor University’s School of Business and have continued to grow at a healthy rate each year.
What I understand today is the enduring value of what my parents started more than sixty years ago. Although it has taken a lifetime of effort and investment to perfect, my parents believed from the start that they had an excellent tool to measure social expectations, self-perception, interests, and stress behavior in a way useful to individuals and organizations. My goal is to continue their legacy and, more than anything else, to witness the wonders that happen when people replace defensiveness with appreciation, and confusion with understanding.
My great-great-grandfather arrived in Texas from Germany in the 1850s with our family name, Birkmann, which translates to “birch-man.” Birches thrive only if they grow in relationship to at least one other birch tree or in a group of birches. The birch tree cannot thrive in isolation and will not flourish if it stands alone, and neither can any of us. The Birkman Method works because it looks at the potential of each individual in relationship to others, both as person-to-person and as person-to-team, to help us to identify the powerful, underlying needs and the strengths that shape our performance and contentment at work.
Sharon Birkman Fink
March 2013
Houston, Texas