Getting People Right

Forget About Motivation

H. Arne Maus

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783755749622
• eBook ISBN: 9783755774884
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

H. Arne Maus explains in his book the building blocks of thinking and how to understand people in a better way. Learn why people do what they do. Learn the difference between managers and leaders and how the profiles required for each of these roles may be identified. In addition, Arne Maus shows the influence of Cognitive Intentions in professional situations and how much you gain by taking them into account when hiring. The aim is to find the right person for the right job - this increases the efficiency of the workplace and at the same time the job satisfaction in the corporate cultures - be it at the level of the company, the department or the team.You will learn the difference between motivation and engagement. This book shows why motivation is not enough. Today, we can measure engagement within an organisation and demonstrate the kind of productivity it leads to. In this way, we also show the leverage points for improving engagement and productivity.The author is the developer of the Identity Compass® system, and in his work, he has set his focus on measuring Cognitive Intentions. By identifying these unconscious preferences, whether they are those of managers, leaders, employees or even customers, a company can discover new ways to measure motivating and demotivating factors in the working environment and to create ideal working conditions for employees. Not only will this increase workplace efficiency, it will also enable the company to find intelligent ways to reduce personnel costs.This book will also support coaches and trainers as they provide their clients and participants with more intensive and more effective guidance toward lasting success.

CHAPTER 1

Why Use Profiling Systems?

To recruit the wrong person can easily cost a year’s salary. According to calculations done by a globally active business-consulting firm, the search for a new employee costs approximately $65,000, just to find an employee who seems to be the right one for the job. That means it will cost another $65,000 if it later turns out that the new recruit was actually not the right one. These calculations do not take into account the internal interviews with the senior consultants who make the final decisions on hiring.

From a business standpoint, however, these costs must be added in. What this means is that a bad decision when hiring could result in double the costs specified above. And still not all of the costs have been considered. It can become quite expensive to have an employee in the wrong position. Not because they are a bad person, but because it was not adequately taken into account when hiring them, whether, in addition to their professional qualifications, they also had the soft skills to fulfil the responsibilities assigned to them.

It is likewise not good for the applicant to take on a position to which they are not suited. Changing jobs too soon or failing to make it through the probationary period will leave behind indications on their résumé which could hinder their later career. Furthermore, a bad fit between a person and a job will cause stress for the job-holder. Usually this stress will spread to their colleagues, as they must deal with the job-holder’s poor disposition. They will have to take on the portion of the job-holder’s work that the job-holder will not be able to handle, as well as endure other consequences of the bad hiring decision. Before an applicant decides to take a job, they should always ask themselves, “Is this the right job for me?” Sadly, in times of high unemployment, this happens far too seldom. When there is a shortage of skilled professionals, it is a different story.

With a good competence profiling system, it can be determined beforehand to what extent an applicant is suited to a job, or, conversely, how well the job suits the applicant.

1.1 “How Do You Operate an Employee?”

This is a provocative question. If you ask this of an employer, they will typically respond by saying, “What? Operating employees? They should be doing their jobs; that’s what I pay them for. That’s that.” Then if you say, “Yes, I understand. Then how do you operate a machine that is worth $75,000?” Quite typically the answer will be, “First the service people come, and they install the machine before anyone ever turns it on. And of course, every employee receives instruction in its use, perhaps two or three days of training. Only trained personnel are allowed to operate the machine, and naturally there is a maintenance contract for it. Certainly, you must safeguard that kind of investment.”

When an employer tells you this, you might reply with, “In your company I would rather be a machine than an employee, because you really take care of your machines. But what about your employees?” Most likely this person will then stop and realise, “There is truth in what you say.” Incidentally, you will also get the same kind of answers about machines that are worth only $10,000 or $20,000.

1.2 Safeguarding the Investment in Employees

This shows the importance of safeguarding the investment in employees. One way to do this is by examining professional qualifications, mostly in the form of references and letters of recommendation. These days, however, the significance of employer recommendations is sometimes very dubious. Since the late 1970s, in any case, I have always written recommendations for myself upon leaving a job, and my superiors or personnel departments have merely signed them. Another factor is the crucial importance of the personal competencies necessary to accomplish a task. My grandmother used to say, “You can’t see what’s inside a person’s head.” That is correct. Still, there is a need to quickly and reliably identify an employee’s personal competencies.

So, what do we mean by personal competencies? Among them, for example, are flexibility, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, leadership skills, communication skills and the ability to deal with conflict, either in teams or with customers or superiors. These competencies also include personal working style and emotional intelligence.

This raises the question of how long professional and personal competence can remain consistent. This is what we mean when we ask, “After leaving a job, how long will my skills and qualifications remain valid? When I find a new position doing the same job, will I be able to start working right away?” Depending on the field, professional competencies may remain consistent for between a couple of months and five years.

This couple-of-months-period applies in the computer industry. Products in this industry are developed for the production span of three months. After that, these products have already been overtaken by further technological developments and are replaced by newer models. At a computer trade show some years ago in March, I saw a computer that I liked very much, and I ordered it. I received it in June. In November, a colleague of mine decided to buy exactly the same computer. By then, the computer was no longer available; it had long since become outdated.

Speaking of computers, they have a longer production cycle than their individual components. For example, today’s hard disks are being produced only for a couple of months, after which they will be obsolete.

At the end of the 1970s, when I first started using computers, rumours were circulating about large-capacity disk drives. In those days, they were not called hard disks, but “Winchester drives” or “rigid disks” — and they were said to have the unbelievably large capacity of 1 MB on a 5¼-inch drive. Today we shake our heads in amazement and disbelief to think how little capacity that was.

It was calculated at the end of the 1970s that in perhaps ten to fifteen years we would have reached the absolute limit of memory size. This would have meant that it would no longer be possible, technologically or physically, to fit more and more data into increasingly smaller chips. This limit was estimated to be one megabit per chip. By now (2022) we have long since had chips with several gigabits (one gigabit = one thousand megabits). Hard disks, incidentally, have by this time exceeded the limit of 16 terabytes (one terabyte = one million megabytes) — not, however, on a 5¼-inch drive, but on a 2.5-inch drive. That works out, at the outside, to be about 50 times smaller.

Today there is still no end in sight to this development. Moore’s Law, dating from the 1970s and applying to the computer field, holds that every 18 months twice the capacity becomes available at half the price. Time and again for over forty years this law has proven to be true. It’s coming to its end right now, until we get Quantum computing off the ground. So, if someone were to leave employment in this field and stay out of it for a full eighteen months, they would have to learn their job all over again.

And this strikes a chord with everything I have heard from people who are already established in their career. They often say, “At some point in the past I learned how to do something, and now I am doing something different, because my profession is changing so much.” Things are no longer the way they were one hundred years ago, when someone would enter into a profession, learn it and practice it in the same way for the rest of their life.

What did you learn to do when you first started? And what are you doing now? How much did you learn that was new? How many new things did you have to learn because of the pressure of change? So much for the idea of professional education.

Such a rate of change makes things more exciting, but then again, it also makes things much more complicated. Personal competence, on the other hand, does not change in just three months. If you happen to meet someone again after not having seen them for three months, they have not suddenly become a different person. That can happen after five years, after twentyfive years, or perhaps not at all. People do not change so quickly. It may be that in the meantime they have undergone a trauma or had some other defining experience, a divorce, for instance, or an accident or illness — something that produced significant changes in their personality. However, such things are not the norm, and they cannot be predicted. Once you have determined a person’s personal competencies, you can depend on them much more so than on their professional competencies.

In many departments of a company, the work is so specialised that new employees, however well-qualified they may be, must still spend several months learning new skills. Thus, it can only be in the best interests of the company to select employees who are suited to the organisation in terms of their personal competence. This calls for a good profiling system, one that can ascertain the personality characteristics and behavioural tendencies of applicants and that can verify their suitability for a position. Such a profiling system would be a great benefit to any company. And the range of choices on the market is extremely confusing. Which of the many profiling systems would be the best choice? What are the most important things an organisation bear in mind?

CHAPTER 2

Requirements of a Profiling System

When an organisation chooses to use a profiling system, what criteria should they use to make the best choice? Certainly, it is important for it to have high-quality content, to be simple and easy to use and to have an identifiable benefit in everyday life. It is equally important for the questions to have a high selectivity. If the questions in the profiling system are not truly selective, the person conducting the interview will not know exactly what the subject is responding to.

Furthermore, only purely work-related questions should be posed, because people behave differently in the workplace than they do in private life.

The risk behaviour of people in a professional context may be completely different from that in their private life. When, for example, people engage in high-risk sports in their leisure time, such as snowboarding or bungee jumping or the like, one cannot assume with certainty that they will also be likely to take risks in the context of their jobs. Likewise, a boss in a firm can dismiss employees with icy detachment and at the same time be a warm and loving husband and father at home. For this reason, questions posed in these analyses should always be situational and relevant to the job. Otherwise, the results will be too unfocused.

2.1 Usability

How long does the questioning take? Is it possible to interpret the answers yourself, or do you have to send them in and wait three days for the results? When purchasing a profiling system that you can interpret yourself, are you required to pay in advance for useless additional services? What do you do when you have ordered or purchased ten evaluations, and it turns out that there are twelve subjects that you are interested in? What happens if you have forgotten to order more before you need them? Or if you have re-ordered in time, but it takes longer than usual to process the order?

2.2 Comparison with Job Profiles

Can you use a profiling system to create a job profile? Can you then match an applicant to this job profile? And how simple is it to do this? Is it possible to compare members of a team? In doing so, can you also identify difficulties within a team? Or is it also possible to “design” a team? Take as an example the task of putting together a team for a project. On this team there are people qualified in all of the proficiencies called for by the project — can you then simply try out various team profiles, in order to find out how the individual team members fit together? Can the profiling system be used for personnel development? A job-holder may be really good at their job today, but in these times of workplace change, that does not mean that they will still be good at it five years from now. Can anyone really plan for the future when the demands on job-holders continue to evolve? Can the profiling system also be used to guide today’s job-holders into their future?

2.3 Are the Results Useful?

Can the user take the results of a profile analysis and derive from them something of truly practical value for their own organisation? The best results are of little benefit if they cannot be used to develop a concrete plan of action for the organisation or for the employees who participated in the profiling. The results would be useful if, for example, steps were taken to further develop employees’ skills, or to design a better work place.

Can the results be used to gain relevant insights into the filling of a position? Is it possible to use existing profiles to conduct team evaluations, to see how the members of a new team will interact? With many profiling systems, the licensee can get profiles only in the form of prepared evaluations, for example, on paper or electronically in a printable PDF file. It is difficult to put these results side by side so that team comparisons can be made.

2.4 Are the Results Communicable?

And this is most important: How easy is it to communicate the results of a profile? If only experts can understand them, and even the experts have difficulty getting them across, then the applicant will say, “I do not understand this at all, and I do not see myself reflected in these results…” The author had painful experiences in this regard. He filled out a test while applying for work, and the end results, in his own opinion, had very little to do with him. He could neither relate them to himself nor understand them.

2.5 Is It Socially Acceptable?

Often in an evaluation there will be a statement to the effect that “Mr. Smith is this or that…” There is a serious disadvantage here, in that the results of the assessment are put forth in such a way as to define the person on the level of their identity. I find it highly questionable when I see an advertisement for a profiling system that claims to gauge the way people use their brains and then defines this as being genetically determined. This sends the message, “You’re not happy with this or that result? Tough luck! You can’t change it; it’s genetic.” It is questionable for this reason alone: brain research has been demonstrating more and more clearly over the past twenty years to what extent the brain is still capable of learning, even in old age. So, a good profiling system must also take into account that people can change, and this must be reflected in the results.

When using the profiling systems that are typically found on the market, it has been my experience that people see themselves reflected in the results to a degree of approximately 50% to 60%. That correlation is too low for me. In one profile that I personally filled out while applying for a job, it came out, among other things, that I was very good at implementing the ideas of others, but that I had very little creativity. People who know me well would argue just the opposite. And it is this kind of “hit rate” that significantly reduces the credibility of profiling systems and prevents them being socially accepted.

This is why you should choose a profiling system in which people see themselves in their profiles at a level of 95% to 100%. Such a high percentage should not be achieved, however, by using vague and general descriptions which could fit just about anyone. Rather, it should be done by measuring as many individual indices as possible to create scales which are particularly meaningful for the individual. Only then can you expect a high level of social acceptability.

The personnel manager of a major corporation in Germany gave a job applicant feedback on his profile, which ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 Why Use Profiling Systems?
• CHAPTER 2 Requirements of a Profiling System
• CHAPTER 3 Thinking Means Deleting
• CHAPTER 4 Background
• CHAPTER 5 Why Is All of This Important?
• CHAPTER 6 Cognitive Intentions — An Overview
• CHAPTER 7 Combinations
• CHAPTER 8 Cognitive development - not Personality!
• CHAPTER 9 Measuring the Working Climate
• CHAPTER 10 Burn-out and Bore-out
• CHAPTER 11 Identifying People Who May Bully Others
• CHAPTER 12 Case Studies
• CHAPTER 13 Profiling Cognitive Intentions
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photographs and Graphics
• Questionnaire for Determining Cognitive Intentions
• Copyright