Psychometrics are big business, with a market size of $12.32 billion USD in 2021. Therefore it’s highly likely that at some point in your adult life you will have completed at least one psychometric assessment.
Psychometrics are used to measure individual differences such as personality, strengths or inclusive leadership capability. Psychometrics are designed to raise awareness, to help the user to understand themselves better and consequently implement change accordingly.
However, if you reflect back on when you last completed a psychometric assessment, regardless of how useful you found it at the time, can you identify any lasting changes that you implemented based on the results? Unfortunately the probability of lasting change is pretty low. This is because behaviour change is fundamentally difficult. Humans are creatures of habit and this is why it can be extraordinarily hard to change our behaviour, even when the desire to change is present.
Despite this, here at Inclusive Leadership Company, we are huge advocates for the use of psychometrics. We believe that good psychometrics can provide glimpses of ourselves, raising awareness of elements of our psychology that were previously unknown. The more we know about ourselves, the more intentional we can be with our behaviour.
Therefore, we propose that the key to getting the most from psychometrics is understanding how we can best implement behaviour change based on psychometric results. Here we present our three key tips, based on the scientific evidence, that can help us to maximise behaviour change following a psychometric feedback report.
1. Ensure high psychological fidelity: reflect on specific examples from your day to day work to help you translate the findings of your feedback report
Taking the time to reflect on how to translate the findings to your own context will help to ensure that you are able to sustain lasting behaviour change.
One of the biggest challenges with applying learning is when it is unclear how to translate what we have learnt to our own context. The concept of psychological fidelity describes the level of similarity between learning and the workplace. When psychological fidelity is high, the learning is very similar or even identical to the context. For example, when learning to fly a plane, a flight simulator would be a high psychological fidelity learning context compared to driving a car. Learning to drive car, in all likelihood does not translate well into learning to fly a plane! In terms of psychometrics:
- How easily do the results translate back to your own working life?
- Does the report provide examples which help bring, what may be abstract concepts, to life?
For example, if your results tell you that you are introverted, what does this mean for you? What are the implications for your own behaviour? If results tell you that your curiosity is low, how does this translate into specific recommendations to increase curiosity?
2. Link your development goals to a bigger purpose: this will keep fuelling your motivation and resilience to meet the goal.
Goal-setting in development conversation, when done right, is a powerful tool to direct attention and increase persistence. However, for goal-setting to achieve this, it must be clear why we are pursuing a goal. How does the goal link to our dream, our purpose or our values? If, following your psychometric result, you identify changes you would like to make, it is important to consider why you want to make these changes: because the report suggested it is a good idea is not a good enough reason! Reflecting on what it is you want out of life and exploring your values and how you might work in a way that fulfils these values, is the first important step in the goal-setting process.
Once you have clarity on your purpose or dream goal, you can work back from this to identify the smaller goals or steps that you need to take to achieve this. Ensuring that any desired behaviour change, such as changes following a psychometric result, tie in or link back to this purpose or dream goal, will help to keep you motivated and support you to persist when things get tough.
3. Harness the power of implementation intentions: these are specific statements that describe how you will implement a desired change in behaviour.
Implementation intentions are an extremely powerful yet simple tool to support behaviour change method. They are specific statements of intention with regards to how you plan to implement a change of behaviour. You can use them when your are setting your development goals and also as a technique to focus your attention just before you enter a situation in which you want to change your actions and reactions.
When you are setting the goal, the intention is to provide reminder prompts and remove any ambiguity of how goals should be acted on, by specifying both the behaviour and the situation. They are often described as ‘if x then y’ statements. For example:
- If I am about to go into a meeting then I will always take a moment before the meeting starts to make a note of any potential biases I may have to help me to be more aware of these and consequently mitigate them.
- If I am chairing a meeting then I will state aloud during the start of the meeting that critical thinking is needed in this meeting to encourage participants to share their open and honest feedback.
We can also be mindful of our language, for example instead of saying I will try to remain calm and curious in the meeting, say instead I choose to remain calm and curious in the meeting.
When you have your psychometric feedback report, you can use the report to formulate a series of implementation intentions which will guide how you will make changes. Finally, find a way that will work for you to help you to remember these implementation intentions until the new behaviour is embedded. This might involve using technology such as reminders on your phone, writing them somewhere prominent to provide a visual reminder or taking a moment at the start of each day to review them and identify which intentions are relevant to the activities planned for your day.
Raise awareness of your Inclusive Leadership capability
Our Inclusive Leader Development Assessment is a combined self and 360˚ assessment that measures the critical elements that the scientific evidence indicates are essential to Inclusive Leadership. This includes:
- Leader wellbeing
- Leader mindset
- Leader lived experience
- Leader knowledge of EDI key concepts
- Leader inclusive behaviours (as rated by leader and raters)
An unique element of our Inclusive Leader Development Assessment is that it allows leaders to understand how inclusive their leadership is from raters who are different to the leader in at least one of the main protected characteristics.
We are experts in behaviour change and therefore we appreciate that the key to behaviour change is for individuals to feel empowered and inspired, not shamed or defensive. Our feedback report combines detailed and comprehensive feedback in an easy to interpret and accessible format.
To complete the Inclusive Leader Development Assessment yourself contact us at enquiries@inclusiveleadershipcompany.com
