Psychometrics

Whether for selection, recruitment, or assessment centres, psychometrics is the classic tool used by organisations to clarify the base competencies and preferences of their workforce.

We are accredited in a wide range of psychometric instruments to support our learning interventions. Used in the classroom, they allow learners to reflect upon their current and preferred behaviours, communication styles and results, enabling them to take a more objective, analytical view of themselves and their interactions with others, creating a safe base from which to develop.

The most common tools used on our courses are:

Myers Briggs Type Indicator ®

Aimed at making the Jungian theory of personality types understandable and useful in people’s lives, both as individuals or as part of groups. The goal is to enable learners to understand and appreciate the differences between themselves and others. It is therefore often used in communication skills and management development courses. The tool does not measure trait, ability or character, rather it seeks to categorise people in terms of their preferences of each of the four dichotomies in Jung’s theory: Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I); Sensing (S) or Intuition (I); Thinking (T) or Feeling (F); Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). When you decide on your preference in each category via a questionnaire, MBTI assigns your personality type, typically expressed as a code with four letters.

Strength Deployment Inventory ®

This tool, developed by Personal Strengths Publishing is aimed at helping people enrich their interpersonal relationships and manage conflict more productively. Part of a suite of tools based on Relationship Awareness Theory, it can help learners better understand the motivation for their own and others’ behaviour, revealing the reasons why people act the way they do. It has a particular resonance on our programmes which address conflict and management skills.

Occupational Personality Questionnaire

This is one of the most widely used tools in people development programmes, providing information on people’s preferred styles or preferences at work, in terms of their relationships with people, thinking style and feelings/emotions. The feedback can provide individuals with a highly valuable insight into how their personality or style at work can influence their performance. It has a range of applications within Matchett’s management and team development programmes, or jobs where style of behaviour is particularly critical.

TMSDI – Team Management Profile

The Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile looks at where your motivation lies, how you can best contribute to a team and how you lead or interact with others who have different perspectives in the workplace. We typically use this suite of tools in training programmes which are focussed on helping organisations establish high performance teams who, once re-energised, go on to deliver real and immediate results.

Belbin ®

Possibly the most well known of the profiling tools aimed at developing better team working within an organisation, through a better understanding of the roles and relationships that exist within a team. Developed by Dr Meredith Belbin over a period of years at Henley Management College, 9 clusters of behaviours were identified as underlying the success of teams, which were named ‘Team Roles’:

• Action Oriented Roles – Shaper, Implementer, Completer Finisher
• People Oriented Roles – Co-ordinator, Teamworker, Resource Investigator
• Cerebral Roles – Plant, Monitor Evaluator, Specialist

The Belbin model features in Matchett courses on management and team building.

Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI)

Matchett are the UK’s largest client for this leading instrument for conflict resolution. It helps learners understand response to conflict and to develop strategies for working with people with an opposite preference to theirs. The TKI identifies which of five conflict handling modes an individual tends to use. With this information they are better equipped to analyse a conflict situation and determine how to manage it to a positive outcome. We use this tool routinely in our Negotiation Skills, Conflict and Team Development courses.

At Matchett we regularly evaluate emerging psychometric profiling tools and their pragmatic value in a learning and business environment. Methods currently under evaluation include Instinctive Drives™, Birkman ® and Human Systems Dynamics.

The Emotional and Social Competency Inventory

An emotional competence is a learned capacity based on emotional intelligence that results in outstanding performance at work. For superior performance in leadership and management, over a decade of global research clearly shows that emotional competence matters twice as much as IQ plus technical skill combined.

How it works
The Emotional and Social Competency Inventory is a 360? tool that provides individuals with feedback from several sources (e.g. manager, direct reports, peers) on their ability to be effective at using the 12 key competencies associated with emotional intelligence, illustrated down the right hand side of figure 1.

The instrument measures both emotional intelligence competencies (those in the self-awareness and self-management clusters) as well as social competencies (those in the social awareness and relationship management clusters).

What people will get
The feedback people receive shows them how others experience their behaviour in terms of the consistency with which they demonstrate the twelve emotional and social intelligence competencies. This is then compared to how they scored themselves.

All surveys are completed online and we can track the progress of each report. The verbatim comments section at the end of the report is a free text section in the survey where respondents are asked to comment on the participant’s key strengths and areas for development. The process is all confidential

Once the surveys are completed, we analyze the results and produce the feedback reports. This information will be confidentially discussed with the individual by the coach and used as a basis for subsequent 121 coaching sessions.

Each person will receive a detailed personalised report. The format is organised into seven major sections:

• The Model
• Interpreting Your Feedback
• Data Validity
• ESCI Summary
• ESCI Detail
• Item Frequency Report
• Verbatim Comments

Individuals are rated against the following categories.

• Self (self-assessment)
• Manager
• Peers (direct reports, colleagues etc)
• Others (i.e. business partners, customers, etc)
• Total others (excluding self)