Measurement is a Foundational Anchor for Successful Change
Everything in life centers around measurement—money, travel, time, age, weight, volume, temperature, stock indexes—the list is endless. That is true even in underdeveloped countries that use the rising sun and moon and the changing of the seasons as measurements.
Yet, my experience has been that most people do not have a personal measurement strategy to help improve their lives or establish their career path and purpose. An appropriate assessment/measurement strategy can offer amazing clarity, direction, freedom, and release to individuals, teams, and organizations.
Without offending people’s sensitivities, I believe it’s doubtful that career practitioners or professionals can be successful without a personal assessment strategy.
Why?
It’s essential to understand, benchmark, clarify, and measure.
Could you imagine a medical facility that does not have any measure of a patient’s condition? We need to do the same for ourselves.
Without some type of assessment strategy, how can we, as professionals, ask the right questions and confirm the correct responses for the benefit of ourselves and others?
Using assessments is only one part of a development process—but it is the most efficient and effective strategy to provide you with a strategic and powerful advantage.
What is an Assessment?
An assessment is any process, tool, or methodology that benchmarks and measures a set of criteria for individuals, teams, or organizations. Like money, volume, or distance, assessment is a form of measurement that helps individuals know where they are now and where they are going.
Most assessments do not create results.
They only document what is already true.
For instance, you go for your medical checkup. Your doctor’s action of taking your blood pressure does not in itself create the results. He or she is simply reporting what existed prior to your visit. You don’t get upset with the doctor because your blood pressure is too high—that’s your lifestyle and genetics speaking.
But unless you know your blood pressure is way too high, what are the odds you will do anything about it until it is too late? Your first clue might be a stroke.
What do Assessments measure?
There are no limitations to what assessments can measure, including personal style, job style, character traits, leadership skills, team compatibility, aptitude, values, health and wellness, self-worth, integrity, trust factors, and much more.
Who can benefit from completing an Assessment?
Given the wide variety of areas that can be measured, everyone at some level can benefit from assessments—individuals, teams, businesses, of all sizes, partners, families (including kids with a Grade 6 reading level and up), and nonprofit and volunteer organizations.A planned and intentional assessment process is one of the strategic factors that will enrich each of our lives.
Implementing a Holistic Assessment Strategy
Our lives operate in a complex intersection of numerous components. Just like an automobile has thousands of parts, we need to see holistic thinking as part of an effective assessment strategy.
Based on 30 years of work, CRG has distilled “the personality” into six primary factors, each of them playing a part in your needs, purpose, and responses. We call them CRG’s Personality Development Factors.
1. Personal Style Preferences
We see Personal Style as your natural predisposition to perceive, approach, and interact with your environment, which includes time, people, tasks, and situations. That does not change much over your lifetime.
Part of your personality—we call it your personal style—is an anchor or fix point where consistent preferences show up throughout your life, including your career and work responsibilities.
If you are a caregiver with responsibilities that do not reflect your natural preferences, that will cause you stress. The level of stress you will experience depends on the degree of the mismatch between your natural preferences and the required job style.
We believe one of the contributing reasons for job dissatisfaction of 80% of the population is there is no match between the personal style of the individual and job style requirements of the position.
To proactively reduce work-related stress, we recommend two assessments to assist you in journey.
To demonstrate the level of compatibility between you and your required responsibilities, you compare the results from both assessments.
We have experienced many circumstances where individuals have been promoted or have had their responsibilities shifted to a point where they are no longer compatible with the work style requirements of the position. The consequence is that the person becomes stressed and performance or engagement is reduced. The net results? The individual quits or gets fired.
But this was never about the person underperforming. It was a style mismatch between the person and the position.
Many professionals erroneously blame themselves for the failure when the truth is, the job situation was like trying to mix oil and water. It simply will not work. That’s a straightforward and powerful law of incompatibility.
Note: Style compatibility is separate from skills, education, experience, or natural interests and gifts.
I will discuss this in a moment.
2. Health and Wellness Levels
What are your stress and health levels? The research linking our health practices to our wellness is overwhelming.
Obesity, workplace injuries, and sick days are all increasing. Unless we do something about it, it will soon become an epidemic.
Regardless of whether we want to admit it, we all have some level of stress in our lives. Depending on the level of our stress, it will manifest itself in our mind, body, and behaviors.
How can a professional take care of others, if his or her health is challenged?
Unfortunately, many people become overwhelmed at the level of complexity or available opinions for improving their health. To address this factor, CRG developed the Stress Indicator and Health Planner (SIHP) assessment. This recently updated 24-page stress assessment and heath planner has five specific sections.
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Personal Distress Assessment
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Interpersonal Stress Assessment
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Wellness Assessment
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Nutritional Assessment
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Health Assessment
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Time-Stress Assessment
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Occupational Stress Assessment
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You respond to 120 wellness and stress-related questions.
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Your results become an easy-to-follow yet powerful roadmap to help you establish your stress levels in each section. You follow specific steps to improve your health.
Participants appreciate the ability to focus on wellness priorities. Our design breaks your stress into small segments. Individuals are sometimes surprised to discover the origin of their stress.
You can also use the SIHP as a benchmarking tool for yours or others’ wellness levels over time, to confirm you are improving the situation.
In 1988, my doctor diagnosed that I had a condition called manic depression. When put on antidepressant drugs, I was constantly agitated. I discussed this with a friend and we were both certain the diagnosis was incorrect. After much research, we suspected another condition. Only after a great deal of pressure did my doctor agree to conduct a new test. Following the 6-hour glucose-tolerance test, it was discovered I had an extreme case of hypoglycemia—not manic depression.
The point here is that we each need to take personal responsibility for our wellness. Don’t relinquish your health to others.
Note: CRG assessments are not a substitute for medical diagnoses nor are they a self-treatment for any suspected illness. In those cases, you should seek professional medical attention.
3. Self-Worth Levels
Self-Worth: |
A confidence and satisfaction in oneself; sense of personal worth and ability that is fundamental to an individual's identity |
Every day, each of us will have our worthiness-factor tested—from mild to intense.
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Some of you have a strong sense of self that is grounded, centered, and rarely shaken.
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Others are wondering if they are worthy of anything good that life has to offer.
Self-worth is the part of the human personality that determines personal value and importance. It is the area of our thinking that evaluates our behavior, appearance, feelings, thoughts, and abilities. It outlines both the level of appreciation we have for ourselves and the way we feel about our inherent worth—what we believe we need to be or do to have value as a person.
There is debate in the psychological community about the degree of impact our levels of self-worth have in our life and the specific strategies that best assist us to improve our self-worth.
The majority of research overwhelmingly supports the opinion that there are strong overall benefits to having high self-worth in our lives. Self-worth is not only a source of motivation and personal energy to engage life, they also expose areas of psychological vulnerability.
In CRG’s Self-Worth Inventory, we help individuals identify their self-worth levels in five critical areas in their life: Self, Family, Peers, Work, and Projected Self.
It is interesting that we can have what we call situational self-worth, where we might feel confident and worthy at work but not at home. Perhaps the opposite is true for some people. Implementing the method of situational self-worth is a very powerful process to help pinpoint where a person can specifically improve his or her levels of self-worth.
Dr. Nathanial Branden, author of Our Urgent Need for Self-Esteem, sums up our thoughts in this quote.
“Self-worth provides the experience of being able to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness. It consists of two components.
1. Self-Efficacy: |
Confidence in our ability to think, learn, choose, and make appropriate decisions
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| 2. Self-Respect: |
Confidence in our right to be happy and the belief that achievement, success, friendship, respect, love, and fulfillment are appropriate to us. |
Basic challenges of life include such fundamentals as being able to earn a living; take independent care of oneself in the world; being competent in human relationships that are mutually satisfying; and having resilience that allows you to bounce back from adversity and persevere in your aspirations.
Self-worth is a basic human need essential to normal and healthy development. A lack of self-worth causes psychological growth to stunt. High self-worth provides resistance, strength, and a capacity to regenerate, while low self-worth diminishes our resilience in the face of life’s problems.”
High self-worth can never be given to a person by someone else or by society. It must be sought and earned by the individual.
Does it matter if your sense of personal value is high or low?
The answer is absolutely YES!
Use the Self-Worth Inventory to identify your current level of self-worth in the five critical areas. Based on those results, you can take action steps to determine which of the 12 strategies (listed in this assessment) for increasing and developing your self-worth are the most appropriate for you.
4. Environmental Factors
Your reality and preferences are based on both nature and nurture. So beyond personal style, your background has contributed to who you are—in terms of what you like and dislike in your environment. Culture has a powerful influence on what we find acceptable or comfortable.
Even within the same country, you will find significant diversity within borders and geographic regions and also among social economical conditions. All your experiences have shaped your perceptions and expectations.
Have you taken the time to filter through your core values, to ensure they are represented in your life?
One of the most powerful exercises you can do to increase your fulfillment in life is simply ensure a values alignment between you and your work environment. Example: If honesty is one of your highest values, and it is not represented in your organization, this will cause stress and job dissatisfaction.
I have had the privilege of conducting over 2000 seminars with thousands of participants. I am constantly amazed at the high percentage of individuals who either tolerate or accept work environments and personal lives that are not supportive of their supposed core values. Every single day, they engage in a life that is contrary to their deepest needs—and they wonder why they lack energy or motivation.
What I have also witnessed are individuals who say something is of value to them, but they never live it. Have you heard someone say My family is very important to me, but that person never spends time with family members? If this condition continues, his or her personal credibility with self and others will be severely eroded. You should make the choice to fulfill and live your values or be truthful and get them off your list.
To assist you in clarifying your values, we suggest you complete the Values Preference Indicator. You will be asked to rank in priority—from a list of 21 values—your top 7 values. We call this window shopping. Next, you compare the 21 values to each other, 5 times, in a forced-matrix methodology.
Frequently, the participant’s first list of values (window shopping) does not match the second list created by the forced-choice approach. Why? It appears peer pressure and people’s environment have told them what they should value, rather their discovering it for themselves.
I recall during a seminar several years ago that in this stage of our values program, a 23-year-old male sat sobbing in the corner. When we took him aside to find out what was wrong, he confided he had just realized his life did not reflect any of his top 7 values. Why? Because he had been living his parents’ values—not his own.
5. Social Teachers
This refers to the social teachers and modeling we have personally observed or experienced during our lifetime. Parents, teachers, peers, and those with authority over us have initially set the standards to which we conform. We carry this luggage into our lives. Many studies suggest that our understanding and relational norms are pretty well established and anchored between age 10 and 12. Those norms are then translated for most of us into relational expectations. It is those expectations—know or unknown—stated or unstated—that contribute to our level of contentment in life.
As a caregiver, are you aware of the way those expectations show up in the workplace and in your life? Do they contribute to your success or do they hinder you?
We have two assessments that will help you confirm your belief system.
The first assessment pertains to leadership and self-management issues. In the Leadership Skills Inventory – Self, you establish your leadership skills levels and compare your beliefs about leadership against proven leadership principles. If a respondent is not in agreement with the 12 leadership principles outlined in the first segment of the assessment, we suggest that he or she not proceed with the measurement of the remaining 60 leadership skills.
If you are in leadership, where did you get your model?
For some of you, there has been no modeling. It has been leadership flying by the seat of your pants. Even if you are a caregiver to only one person, leadership skills are required, from communication to counseling skills. The Leadership Skills Inventory – Self is an excellent professional development and coaching tool that outlines specific opportunities for each person. Because the assessment is designed to be self-scoring, the value of the results will be directly linked to the honesty in which it was completed.
For those of you who operate your own business—or are thinking about it, the Entrepreneurial Style and Success Indicator compares your background and orientation to 4000 successful entrepreneurs. Your environment and social teachers have had a very strong influence on your beliefs and responses, within the context of an entrepreneurial venture. Some individuals might acknowledge that unless they change their thinking or link up with a partner who has a strong entrepreneurial background, operating their own entrepreneurial venture is not recommended.
6. Emotional Anchors
This is any event that causes you to have a significant emotional response—either positive or negative.
Maybe you are the youngest of 12 children and you always got picked on or got the last of the food.
Some people go through bankruptcy, divorce, abuse, or the loss of a loved one. Every event causes an emotional response. It is important to identify the situations that create these emotional triggers in you.
Care for the caregiver is about embracing the development of the whole person, including potential emotional anchors.
Bring it all together.
Twenty years ago, I was searching for more clarity and fulfillment in my life. In addition to completing every one of these assessments, I discovered a powerful process called Source.
There is no question that assessments as a baseline strategy are critical to our success. But they do not provide the complete picture. As part of our commitment to self-care, we must each discover our passions, gifts, talents, interests, and personal purpose—in addition to all the assessments that bring clarity to many elements in our life.
We also need to think about The Big Picture.
The Source process is a structured technique that allows you to document what is most important, inspiring, and exciting in your life. Source uses a journaling method of self-discovery and confirmation so you can discover what is already true.
Recently, I documented the Source process in my book, My Source EXPERIENCE Journal – A Personal Discovery Process for Those Who Want to Lead a Passionate and Fulfilling Life
It provides a roadmap for those seeking fulfillment in their life. To achieve the best and most complete results, I recommend assessments be used in combination with the Source process.
Final Thoughts about Assessments
Do I need a “professional” to help with the Assessment process?
The answer is Yes and No.
First, a professional almost always adds value to an assessment process. Whether an expert is required for a specific assessment depends on the type of resource being used.
Some assessments require expert interpretation, where the professional must debrief the results to the individual who has taken the assessment. In our opinion, the best application for this type of test is the screening side of hiring—not the career or professional development side.
Our experience has shown that the best assessments in career and professional development applications are those where the participant can understand the content, then self-interpret the results. The more you, the individual, understand the model and the content of the assessment, the better equipped you are to make independent and intentional career and life decisions.
Do you catch a fish for me or do you teach me how to fish?
To teach people how to fish, we equip them to take ownership of their career path and development. Self-interpretation assessments help achieve that objective.
How can I effectively use the Assessments in personal, professional, career, and/or organizational applications?
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Before conducting assessments, establish the primary items you want to measure.
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Make sure you select assessments that apply to your situation.
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In the case of a team, all members should go through the assessment process.
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Confirm your assessment strategy and consistently implement it.
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Never abuse the privilege and confidentiality of the process. Share all results with the individual.
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It is not the results that are important; it’s what you do with them.
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Choose assessments that are proven in the marketplace and that are well regarded by their users. Just because an assessment is well known by name or has high market awareness does not mean it is high quality and will meet your needs.
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If you have no experience in the assessment world, contact a qualified professional who can recommend several options and choices. The use of assessments is a must for any progressive individual or organization.
It is difficult to determine where you want to go if you don’t know your starting point. Use assessments to evaluate where you and your clients are now and to plan where to go next.
Start now. Take your personal or business life to the next level with the right assessments for your situation.
Use them yourself or with your clients.
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