Do you ever feel like your teammates just don’t get you? Maybe you even have days when you don’t even really get yourself. That’s when using a personality assessment tool can be an incredibly valuable way to get a clearer sense of yourself. My favorite tool for doing this is The Birkman Method.
The Birkman Method was invented by Dr. Roger Birkman, an industrial psychologist. It’s a tool that’s been used around the world, and it helps us get at a wide variety of things that give us increased self-awareness and better understanding and empathy of one another.
The Categories on The Birkman
1. Understand Your Interests
The Birkman allows you to understand what your interests are and what are the things that give you energy if you didn’t have to worry about making a paycheck. These are the things you’re passionate about and could do for hours. This is important for our resilience and because we all need to tap into activities that bolster our energy. Knowing what it is that helps you refuel is valuable.
This score on The Birkman helps us predict our default reaction in a situation. It’s very predictive in teams too, giving a sense of which things a team is likely to spend way too much time on (blowing past their allotted agenda time because it’s so interesting), and which topics they’ll tend to neglect because no one has the energy for them. Understanding where your intrinsic motivation comes from as an individual or an aggregate in your team is super useful.
2. Understand Your Usual Behavior
The second category on The Birkman is your usual behavior. What have you learned to do to be successful in the world? This is the good stuff. This is the value you bring to the team. How do you look at the world, what are you paying attention to? What activities are you doing? It’s helpful in understanding whether our team has a balance of the different kinds of styles that make us effective, because no one style makes a healthy team. We need a diversity of styles, and we need those styles to show up at the right moment because the styles we need when we’re blue-skying, innovating, and creating are different than the styles we need when we’re trying to produce, and expedite, and get things done.
3. Learn What Your Needs Are
The third category we can learn from The Birkman is about our needs. What do we need from our environment, from the people around us, from the ways of working, if we’re going to be at our best? It’s so helpful with a team or just for yourself to know that “if my environment looks like this, I’m going to be the best version of myself, but if I can’t get those needs met, then it’s probably not going to end well.”
4. Learn to Meet Your Needs
The fourth category that The Birkman helps us understand where you tend to go when your needs aren’t met. It’s all about understanding what your stress behaviors look like and what coping strategies you switch to because you feel you need to protect yourself.
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It’s amazing to have one tool that lets us get at all those things in a team:
- Where does the team get its energy? What’s the stuff we’re going to over-index or neglect on our agendas?
- What kind of contributions are we getting, and do we have to worry about any ways of thinking or cognitive styles that might be missing and that could affect the quality of our decision-making?
- What are the needs of our team members, and how do we make sure that we meet them so we get the best versions, and we don’t see the stress behaviors we get when people feel they need to protect themselves?
You can see why I use The Birkman Assessment with every team that I work with. For more information on the actual styles on The Birkman, check out my team effectiveness exercise.
Using Personality Assessments with Your Team
A Personalized Approach to Feeling Less Overwhelmed
Dysfunctional Behavior in Disguise
Video: Try Giving Feedback to a Leader With Low Self-Awareness