Chapter 10

The Wide-Angle View

Challenge

Challenge is the Component that sets the Birkman apart from similar assessments. The Need for Challenge addresses the degree to which we are able to present ourselves to those around us in a positive light. Are you outwardly self-confident, or do you tend to be more outwardly self-critical? Do you exude an easy self-assurance to charm others, or do you charm them by a self-effacing, more self-deprecating style?

It isn’t just about the individual, but also about how the individual perceives himself or herself and other people. It shows whether you tend to set yourself up for a series of achievable successes or strive for ever-harder challenges while accepting—even inviting—others’ input. Both can be paths to success, but which style works better for you? Of all the characteristics unique to the Birkman, the Challenge score is perhaps the most outstanding in its distinctive ability to measure a fundamental perspective that has an impact on everything we do and say. It is the single important measurement that encompasses all of the relational insights of the Birkman. It is also a self-and-others view that may well be embedded in our core view of ourselves.

Challenge, like Freedom, is also a perspective unlike any of the other Birkman Components. It doesn’t follow the three-tiered Usual Behaviors, Needs, and Stress measurements. Challenge is, rather, an overarching perceptual filter and a highly influential one. It provides a valuable piece of information that speaks volumes about a person’s outward self-confidence and offers solid clues as to how personally self-critical and demanding a person tends to be.

In the workplace, your approach to Challenge will emerge from your first interview with a company, when you must evaluate yourself. Some of a company’s best candidates were not their best interviewees. Birkman has saved more than one job candidate.

Many of us will see a score that lies somewhere in the center, meaning that we find outward self-confidence or self-criticism to be conditional and based on the situation. On the Birkman scale, that means the general population lands between 40 and 60, with an average of a predictable 50. All of us are capable of alternating between the need to project a confident, self-assured demeanor and the temptation to be critical of ourselves.

If you lived alone on an island, how easily you can project self-assurance wouldn’t be an issue. But in the real world, Challenge is a useful measure of how you see yourself in the context of society and how you sense others perceive you. You ask yourself, “Do I look successful to other people? Do I feel that I am more than or less than most people?”

Challenge, for example, can point to how your inability to accept praise can be thwarting your image at work. Coaching may be needed to avoid the awkwardness that can follow accolades. When are you being too modest, and when do you need to share more reward and praise with colleagues?

Most successful salespeople and professionals who depend on their talent for communication and persuasion are low Challenge. As an audience, you would want to see the smooth, easy news anchor image of a low Challenge person. They are charming and good at selling themselves. It is important for them to maintain a public image of success, and they are very protective of that image. It can also cause them to publicly deflect blame when things go wrong, even if inwardly they worry the blame might be justified.

Many CEOs score on the lower Challenge side. They project self-confidence and give an air of invincibility, and can easily adapt to socially desirable traits and convey competence. Birkman is seeing more lower Challenge scores in high-performing executives, including at the upper echelons of management. In general, those who fall into the lower end of the continuum tend to set reasonable goals for themselves so there is little to no risk of embarrassing failure.

At the other end of the spectrum, those with a higher Need for Challenge will find it more difficult to sell themselves. They tend to be self-critical and may even blame themselves for things going wrong that they have no control over. They may take on impossible tasks and risk a devastating failure because their drive for accomplishing the difficult (challenging) goals helps them feel better about themselves.

So if you are dealing with others or leading them, how do you help them maintain their desire to be seen in a positive light? How would you coach a very self-assured employee or an overly self-critical one?

LEADERSHIP AND CHALLENGE

Consultant Todd A. Uterstaedt of Cincinnati worked for six months with an executive at a health care organization who was seen as a high-potential manager—a future contender for the company’s top post. The organization is a family-owned regional group that caters to senior citizens through a range of services: from in-clinic visits to around-the-clock home care. The group’s upper management was beginning to craft a succession plan and was considering Todd’s client, a family member in his thirties who was seen as very capable but young for the position—and in need of some coaching.

The Birkman showed that the client had a low Challenge score, which was soon to become central to the preparation training, as well as to the coaching effort itself. Todd had begun by putting together a hefty 360-degree review that included feedback from more than a dozen of the client’s colleagues. The consultant was trying to tread lightly on the critiques, knowing that a low Challenge person wants to look good in other people’s eyes and tends to dread criticism. “I kept asking him how he was doing as we made it through the report,” says Todd, and the client kept telling him to continue.

Later he admitted to Todd that the process was excruciating for him. “It was just too much,” he said, joking that he felt like hitting the consultant. But he couldn’t tell him to stop because he didn’t want him to think less of him.

“Now that gives a true understanding of a low Challenge person!” Todd says.

The two had in-depth discussions about what the low Challenge score represents. Part of that profile is the need to set achievable goals, so the client found a way to absorb constructive criticism from others, “where he wasn’t open to that at all before,” Todd says.

Today the client has assumed more responsibility, and he gives much credit to the time spent in coaching and, in particular, understanding his low Challenge score.

“Now he thinks about his decisions more deeply and asks whether the decision he has made was done to look good in the eyes of others, or was the best action to take for the sake of the organization,” Todd says.

The group is still trying to put a leadership plan in place, and the client is participating in that effort.

NOT YOUR FAULT

Birkman consultant Mary Ruth Burton helped a manager at the other end of the Challenge spectrum. She was coaching an executive in a financial services organization who was getting—unexpectedly—a series of promotions for jobs well done, rising from an individual contributor to a senior director. “She didn’t set out to run a good-size area, but they kept adding responsibility to her work,” says Mary Ruth. “She developed, almost reluctantly, into a good manager.”

The senior director’s 98 Challenge score meant a tendency to blame herself for every performance and personality issue in her group. Her understanding demeanor made her popular with her peers, but as she rose to become their boss, she had to learn how to draw boundaries between herself and those she managed. With each individual encounter, she learned and adjusted her perspective. “She became excellent at dealing with her group, helping them understand their strengths and how to leverage them.” With coaching, she also learned how to be less hard on herself and came to see that she could make decisions, even difficult ones, about others based on their actions and that those actions had nothing to do with her failures.

LOVING THE CHALLENGE

Atlanta consultant Esther S. Powers decided to use disparate Challenge scores to her advantage when giving a Birkman to a man she had been dating. “I love assessment, so I thought it would be a great way to select who I’d be with” in a relationship, she says.

The man she had been seeing, Tom, took a Birkman, and she saw they looked compatible—except for the Challenge score. “I’m high Challenge; he’s low Challenge,” she says. “He likes to be appreciated.”

“Challenge is often an issue when two people can’t get along,” she adds. “It’s a big deal. Low Challenge people say, ‘I want to be seen as successful so I’ll do all in my power to make others think that,’ to the point of sometimes boasting. A high Challenge person is looking to solve problems: the bigger the better.”

The difference became obvious when each was under stress. “I’m a perfectionist and demanding, and I overprepare. I have huge goals for everything, and I want my household run that way too. He’s more charming and takes the path of least resistance, and will do things well enough.”

She married the man and has adopted his low Challenge way of doing things. Now, she says, she looks at situations and says, “How would Tom do this?”

Pittsburgh consultant Doug Leonard would agree with the power of the Challenge score to solve disputes. He had to help two government engineers end a feud that had become personal, threatening their team’s assignment. “Their upstream leader was beyond frustration,” says Doug. “Their cooperation was essential to the success of the program.” The bad feelings were long-standing and had become institutionalized over time, although they were not based on any professional differences.

The only Birkman scores the consultant introduced into the conversation were for the Challenge Component. One engineer had scored a 6 and the other an 81. “I was able to show them how their misperception of each other grew, particularly under the stress of a high-stakes program,” the consultant says. The high Challenge engineer thought the low Challenge engineer was dodging responsibility for problems in the program, and the low-score employee was upset that he was never credited for all of his accomplishments and was tired of attacks on his credibility. “My observation was that they were locked in a fight-to-win cycle, and you could see that in the Birkman: both were high Stress in Authority, Freedom, and Advantage,” Doug says. Those scores pointed to their tendencies to escalate a conflict, talk past each other without listening to what the other was saying, and have the last word in an argument.

Doug started a dialogue between the two using the Birkman report. “They were surprised that they had as much in common as they did and how those similarities were highlighted in the report,” Doug says. After just one session, he had them agreeing to band together, “albeit toward a common enemy,” the consultant adds. “A new alliance was forged.” The two had found a way to work together more peacefully.

A LOOK INSIDE

For consultant Patti Corbett Hansen, of Houston, Challenge is the best Component for helping individuals see themselves clearly and goes to the core of how she uses the Birkman. “I wanted to do something to help people restore faith in themselves,” she says. “Instead of looking for someone to ask for help, it answers the question: ‘What do you have within you that can help?’” The Birkman, she says, can shine a light on your strengths and help you to see how to become more resilient and trust that you have the resources to solve your own problems.

One of the strengths of the Birkman is that it gives us the ability to see ourselves and our behavioral styles in a social context. In other words, it helps give invaluable answers to a number of questions—such as: How do my day-to-day behaviors or my motivating needs compare with the person I am dealing with at work or outside the office? How am I similar to or different from the others on my team? How do my spouse and I contrast and compare in terms of our interests? How do we differ in terms of what recharges us, or depletes us?

At the end of the day, we want the answers to help understand what we all have within us: a profound human need to be loved and accepted and to find solace and satisfaction by giving love and acceptance to others.

THE BIRKMAN AT WORK: LIFE’S NEXT ACT

Many of us today will live long and healthy lives, we’ll have more than one career, and some of us will undertake more than one profession. Sometimes we just need a small departure from our routine as we balance our home and work lives. Those who choose to leave the workplace behind entirely are likely to plan for a life in pursuit of long-held dreams. At all of these junctures, it isn’t always clear what the next step looks like. After catering to the demands of others at work and at home for so long, we aren’t even sure what we want. The Birkman can reveal to us—or just remind us—of our own motivations and needs so that our next acts can be a better choice for us.

Military, Translated

One of the more difficult and trying transitions into work can be reentry from serving in the military. “A particular type of person is attracted to the military,” says Tony Palmer of Atlanta, who specializes in counseling military officers and is a former Navy aviator. In Birkman terms, it often is a person who scores high on a Need for Authority (likes to know who is in charge) with a high Need for Structure (prefers a system and process to be in place) and a lower Need for Freedom (little need to express individuality). Anyone with a nontraditional military profile, he says, would likely become a pilot or a member of Special Forces—the kinds of occupations that allow less Structure and more Freedom.

No matter how they serve, however, military personnel tend to share the same transition issue when they leave to enter the mainstream workplace. “They are suddenly faced with an extraordinary amount of freedom where they had no freedom in the past,” says Tony.

All else being equal, one of the biggest hurdles the returning veteran faces is that it isn’t always easy to match a civilian position with prior military responsibilities. That disconnect can hinder the résumé-writing and job-search process. “The problem is translation—their experience is in language and responsibilities that civilians don’t readily understand,” Tony says.

To address that issue, Birkman International, in addition to the usual assessment report, provides a “crosswalk,” a listing of correlations between military and civilian jobs to guide military job seekers and the companies who are hiring them. “The value of the Birkman is to help military people understand where their natural gifts and strengths are, which is critical to identifying and securing their best options,” he says.

Tony coached one army officer who had served for eight years in his post, earning a record of strong accomplishment in data and records management. An initial challenge for him when he was first looking for civilian employment was to translate his extensive experience into meaningful civilian language. He managed to do that by matching his experience with the job descriptions in the Birkman Job Families Report, Tony says. He also used his Birkman Usual Behavior scores to highlight his strengths in eleven themes of work during interviews with recruiters and hiring managers. He was able to land a job within several months as a senior manager of record services for a major municipality at a six-figure salary, Tony says. Dennis M. Orr of Golden, Colorado, a former Air Force captain, says many veterans are reluctant even to speak about what they were doing in the services, let alone to discuss equivalent civilian jobs. “You don’t necessarily want to keep doing what you had to do in the military,” he says, “you want to move into what you want to do.”

Many of the people he coaches have suffered physical and mental traumas during their wartime tours of duty, he says. In those cases, the Birkman has helped him teach about potential Stress triggers. But veterans, in general, can feel thrown by the loss not only of the structure they crave, but also of the camaraderie and high level of accountability that come with military work, the consultant adds. He led a group of unemployed members of the Colorado National Guard, and spouses, through a pilot employment project in October 2012. Two months after the first twelve participants completed the four-week course, two already had found new jobs. Dennis credits the Birkman with contributing to the success of the course: a forty-hour workshop that began with the assessment and went on to teach resume-writing and interviewing techniques, among other things.

One participant, a veteran in his forties, had retired from the military after more than twenty years, and had an expertise in languages and in intelligence. It was no surprise when the Birkman showed he had a high Interest in Literary, as well as strengths in Persuasion and Mechanical. As is typical with military personnel, he had a high Usual Behavior score for Structure and he was deeply Red. He landed a federal government job in Colorado with the Air Force. He told Dennis that the Birkman gave him “great insights” during the job search, and that he expected to continue to refer to his report throughout his new career.

The Enjoyment/Employment Pattern

Betsy Cole, PhD, of Waltham, Massachusetts, knows how hard it can be to get to a second act in a career. She helps women, in particular, figure out what the next phase of their professional life might be and how to make it more rewarding than previous work. She combines the Birkman with other exercises to get people to see their unique gifts “and the work they were born to do.”

She likes to talk to them about their success stories over their lifetimes to uncover themes and patterns that might lead to their fulfillment and success. “A job is an expression of a pattern,” she says, “especially in the second half of life. They may not even have a job, but they do things for fun. It’s an expression of who they are.”

One woman in her mid-fifties with three grown children was in a corporate job in a pharmaceutical company but was starting to feel stuck. She described her role as being a “helpmate” to her boss. She worked behind the scenes to aid his success, but the question dogged her: “What is my life purpose?”

Her Birkman showed her to be a strong Blue, someone who wanted to delve into long-term strategies and planning, not taking on a management role. She also was profiled as a knowledge specialist or a consultant. She discovered using the Birkman and other tools that she wanted to leave her operations position and move into one that drew on her scientific experience of helping to bring new drugs to market. She had never been good at going after what she wanted, partly because that was never clear to her. With coaching, she began to have more conversations at the company about her needs and what opportunities were available to her. She made specific requests, told her superiors what she was looking for, and engaged her mentors in discussion. Over time, she was offered a job that required her to step up and be a leader in her own right. She is continuing to look to even better opportunities and is getting closer to her dream job as a strategic leader in helping to identify promising scientific research that can spur the development of crucial new drugs.

Retire or Rewire?

Bob Brewer coached one woman as she looked to leave behind a career as a senior tax accountant. “She said, ‘I’m fifty, and I don’t know if I should stay in accounting.’ She was in a midlife crisis, fighting boredom,” says Bob.

She told him she had always wanted to be a librarian, but her father told her when she was young that the best way for girls to make money was in accounting. When Bob and his client looked at her Birkman together, it was not a surprise that she had a literary Interest score in the 90s. “If you get above 90, it’s a passion, and you better be involved in that in some way,” he told her.

The woman decided after much thought and counseling that she was “too deep in her career” to make a job change or retire early. In that case, the consultant advised her to make a smaller but no less important change: volunteer at a library. She did, and tending to her real needs made her feel content enough that she was able to continue in her career.

An American theologian working overseas for thirty-nine years wasn’t ready to retire either, but in 2012 he started planning his reentry into the United States. At age sixty-eight, Trent Hyatt and his wife, Vivian, were preparing to begin a new phase in life and wondered about the best way to approach the lifestyle choices they faced. The missionary was teaching church history, theology, and the Bible in Eastern Europe and Russia. When he was working in Budapest, he and his team were given Birkmans by consultant Cy Farmer in Germany. Trent had an unexpectedly high score in music. He said he always had music playing in his office but had never focused on it. Now he was excited to explore what this discovery might mean in the context of his future plans.

“I do have a passionate love for classical music,” says Trent. “But that is a hobby or just one of my loves. I also love nature, mountains, the ocean, and so on. I have a PhD in systematic theology, and I am a teacher. I love to teach. So it never even occurred to me that music would show up as my highest value. What was funny to me was the way everyone, everyone else on the team, said, ‘Of course! We knew that.’”

He said the assessment helped him realize “and accept” that “to experience life with a satisfying balance and pleasure, I need music—lots of it. Knowing this has, in a way, released me to indulge this beautiful passion without feeling somehow guilty about it. It is part of me, part of what makes me, me.”

The Birkman helped lead him to the idea that the next home he and his wife would share would be in an area where music, concerts, and musical education could be a substantial part of their everyday lives.