Animal Analogy

You have heard the expression “getting your ducks in a row.”  It refers to the desire to get things organized or aligned before taking some action.  I heard Seth Godin recently talk about “keeping frogs in a bowl.”  He was proposing that it was more accurate than getting ducks in a row, since for most of us, the things that we are hoping to align before taking action aren’t exactly in our control.  They are as unruly as trying to keep frogs in a bowl.  Most action doesn’t need to wait until ducks are in rows and don’t require all the frogs to be in the bowl. We need a new animal analogy.

What animal doesn’t wait for all the information but rather does what they know to do, as soon as they know to do it and figures the rest out in a process of failing forward and failing fast?  They are my new hero.

Maturity is Curation

With experience and expertise comes the ability to choose well.  To understand better the implications of choices that you make.  To see the full landscape when the forks in the road rise to meet us.  To pick that which suits our strengths, brings us joy, and optimizes our success.  To not worry about what others think of the choices we make, realizing that they are one of the few things in life that are truly our own.

Pace Car: having one and being one

In the world of racing, there is something called a pace car.  It is out in front, setting the pace and demonstrating the angles to the curves of the course.  Especially in amateur racing or in educational driving experiences that people might do on race courses, the pace car is especially critical.

In our professional careers, we have pace cars as well.  Leaders at your company who mentor you in the ways of the business and model the pace of decision making.  Journalists, bloggers, authors, or TED talk speakers who are inspiring you with new ideas to propel you forward.  Admired business leaders about whom those authors write and who blaze new trails.

And in the other ways we are the pace car for others to follow.  We are setting the trajectory of the curve that will avoid risk and launch us into the straightaway. 

As a woman in a male-dominated industry, I have often had to be my own pace car.  I couldn’t look around and see mentors or role models that were helping me navigate or modeling things for me who were like me or who had blazed the trail in front of me.  From tactical issues like how to dress for a board meeting or larger issues like finding my unique position as a leader were left for me to figure out.   This is probably why I became a self-professed professional development junkie.  This is probably why I never had a job that wasn’t created for me to a large extent.  Why I wanted to work with and for smart and capable people (generally men) who would tell the truth and I have been blessed by their advocacy.  Why I feel a responsibility to mentor women at my company (and there are so many talented and capable women at Planar) and the industry (through groups like Women of InfoComm Network, Women in CE, and others). 

So, I have come to peace being the pace car.  It no longer fazes me.  In fact, I do some of my best work quickly and under pressure.  I don’t mind the visibility and attention that comes with that position.  I don’t fear failure as much as many do (which is both a blessing and a curse, let me assure you).  I highly value feedback from those who mean it for my good.  And I am constantly trying to improve my times and those who are following in my tracks.

We should be constantly asking ourselves, “who is your pace car?  How can you be a pace car to others?” and using the results of that question to drive to new results.

See you on the track!

Be an SME

A Subject Matter Expert (SME) is a person who has experience and capability in a certain field of study or discipline.  On major project teams, they are the ones who you can in to make sure that what you are proposing is technically feasible or won't break a current process or system.  Although in today's fast-paced, mobile, technology-drenched environment, people are rewarded for broad curiosities and interests, there is no substitute for deep expertise in an area.  So, as we begin this new week, I am challenged to think about the areas in which I am an SME and how I can go deeper to learn more to strengthen my value there and how I might make that expertise available to solve problems and create possibilities.

Student's Guide to LinkedIn: 4 Things to Know

The following article was recently featured on LinkedIn.

You may have heard about LinkedIn and wondered whether it was for you.  As a student, particularly a high school student or in the early years of your college journey, you might wonder if the time is right to join this network or wait until you have more experience or your diploma and are looking to start a your professional career.  Here are some thoughts to consider.

1. You are starting your career now

The skills you are learning and the relationships you are building now, will be important later as well, so don’t wait.

2. Join LinkedIn

It is the world’s largest professional social media network at 380 million users.  A new member joins every 2 seconds.  Go ahead and list your school, major activities or awards, service organizations for which you volunteer, and list your title as “Student” (unless you want to get creative and you want to be an “Academic Technician” or “An Agent of Change”).  You’re your profile professional and focused on academic or professional work, not your preference in music or your summer vacation plans (there are other networks for that).  List out your skills and experience so others can endorse you.  Don’t forget to list entrepreneurial activities as well.  Your profile is 11x more likely to get viewed with a photo and 13x more likely to be viewed when you list skills.

And remember, it is editable, so things that are important for you to highlight today might not always be, so plan to curate your profile regularly to make sure the most important things are highlighted there.

Like any social network, don’t give out your personal information too broadly.  Things like your personal email address and the like can be hidden.  You can choose to use your first name and last initial until you are more comfortable with the system.  You should include a picture, if you are comfortable, but make sure it is professional (like a school photo or one taken when you were giving a speech or working in a lab, instead of one taking on a jet ski or at the football game).  You must make wise decisions regarding your own privacy, of course, and those are very personal decisions that you should consider with your parents and trusted advisors.

3. Connect

The whole point of a social network is to, well, network.  Start by sending LinkedIn requests to your teacher or professors.  Invite fellow career-minded classmates.  Invite your mentors and adult friends that know you well.

4. Be generous

There are several features on LinkedIn that all you to participate in a generous way, as you learn the ropes.   

First off, you can read the news feed of those you follow and like or comment on their news.  Congratulate someone on a new job or major project completion.  Comment thoughtfully and supportively on a published article.

Second, you can endorse the people you are connected to for their skills.  A few endorsements per person is appropriate. 

Thirdly, you can write recommendation notes.  Read what others have written and you can add your own.  Remember that these will likely live on the site for years to come, so keep them professionally worded and highlight transferable skills.  For instance, when writing a recommendation for a friend who was the yearbook editor, you can mention that project, but then say how you appreciated their attention to details and deadlines and how they modeled teamwork.  Those are things that future employers officers might be interested in, after all.

If you start supporting, endorsing, and recommending others, you will find that they will do the same for you and your profile and network will grow.

This article was posted on the Saturday Academy website. 

Action Creates Opportunity

We often think that opportunity creates action.  We will do something great once some external condition is met.  But the opposite is true.  Action creates opportunity.  Start making movement and see your goals easier to achieve.

"MARKETING MARKETING" ARTICLE FEATURED ON RAVE

“Marketing Marketing” was featured in a recent rAVe newsletter to the ProAV industry.

"5 Things" Article Featured on rAVe

"Five Things Everyone Should Know How to Do" was featured in a recent rAVe newsletter to the ProAV industry.

AMA PDX Guest Blog Post: Y is for You: What Google's Alphabet and Personal Branding

The Portland chapter of the American Marketing Association is featuring Jennifer Davis' guest blog entitled "Y is for You: What Google's Alphabet Teaches Us About Personal Branding."

Guest Editorial on rAVe HomeAV Edition

Jennifer's article on the "Five Things Everyone Should Know How to Do" was featured as a guest editorial on rAVe's HomeAV Edition on August 13th.  This email is distributed twice a month to professionals in consumer electronics, audio-visual equipment, and technology spaces.  Find the article here.

Y is for You: Google's Alphabet and Personal Branding

I read with interest the restructuring announcements from Google this week, as they rebrand the parent company into Alphabet, building out the letters with innovative products and business models - starting with “G” for Google, which remains a wholly-owned subsidiary.  It’s a bold move for a company that doesn’t want to be conventional.

This got me thinking about our own personal branding efforts and how we can apply Google's bold lessons to our own career paths.  

1. Your past is only part of your story

Google is known for search and related properties, but the management team saw that strong association as a strength of Google (the products) and a limitation to Google (the company).  Making that same distinction between what you do and who you are and want to be, is extremely useful.   Early in your career were you known as the person who organized events, the person who could calm agitated customers, or the person who could help someone with their Excel questions?  Although those things are useful and might still be part of your portfolio, they are not all that you are, nor do they limit you in the future.  You can delegate (as Sergey and Larry did with Sundar taking over Google or Susan running YouTube), train and coach others, and step away from what you were great at in the past, to develop new capabilities.  Reinvention isn’t just possible, it’s required, to move forward.

2. Leave room for more

Google is still a huge part of their portfolio, naturally, but with the rebranding effort, they made room for other companies, sub-brands, and initiatives to build out the portfolio.  If G is for Google, they literally have left room for 25 other multi-billion dollar ideas.  If you thought about what you do as just one letter in your alphabet, how could that shift your thinking?  How could you play bigger thinking that your career to date has just been one chapter (or the prologue) of a larger story? No one else knows what you are capable of, maybe not even yourself, unless you apply yourself to this line of thinking.

3. Good times are a great time for change

You have heard the adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  I don’t think anyone would say Google’s business model was broken.  Yet, they felt urgency and took action to change when things are going well.  Some analysts have commented that most companies don’t announce a “restructuring” when things are going well, their stock is flying and their market cap is pointing heaven-wards.  Usually, those words are reserved for companies that are struggling and require massive surgery and intervention to stay viable.  It is difficult to contemplate a change, especially a big one, when things are going well, but that might be exactly when you need to make a change. Perhaps it is time to retire the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” advice, and rather strive to be a person who is willing to give up good ideas in favor of great ones!

The First Half

I suspect this applies to more than just monster roller coasters.

Do Well by Doing Good

A different way to think

A lot has been written about the different style of learning and how people approach thinking in different ways.  Sir Eric Robinson touched on this in his popular TED talk about how schools are killing creativity.  In the talk, he refers to a famous dancer and choreographer who finally find other people who thought like her (through movement) when she joined a dance class in elementary school. 

Others of us think by creating.  Some of us build physical models or like to get hands-on.  Others of us think by drawing.  Or by writing. 

This week, think about how you think and experiment with some different approaches to see what new ideas emerge.

How to Market "Marketing": a primer for business people who market

I just returned from a Frost & Sullivan marketing conference in which I participated in discussions around the alignment of sales and marketing.  The mere mention of the topic brought out emotions on both fronts and it was clear that done poorly, the relationships devolve into a Dilbert cartoon (or “sock puppet theater” as one presenter noted), with both parties suspecting the others of subterfuge and buffoonery. Marketers are often left wondering how they can better market “marketing” within their organizations and to their leadership teams.  

Let’s face it, many companies de-value marketing.  Some consider it the department that makes pretty pictures or that it is simply the administrative support for the sales team.  Others strongly value the strategic involvement of marketing in product strategy, branding, strategic planning, and industry leadership.  I am blessed to work for an organization that models the latter, but I certainly am familiar with the former.

Usually, this lack of respect or understanding for the role of marketing in the organization takes two forms:

• Exclusion from decision making and strategic conversations (a focus on tactical execution only, often exemplified by only having junior marketing staff who report up into another function like sales or G&A)
• Lack of adequate resources to do high-quality marketing work (budget, time, or resource limitations that keep the work tactical and reactionary)

This topic is a big one (worthy of more than one post).  To get the conversation started among follow marketers, here are four key questions that you can ask yourself to help you answer the question of how to market “marketing” in your organization.

1. Can you express your motivation for wanting to market marketing in terms of overall business results?

Do you think that investing in a marketing automation system and nurturing campaigns will generate 20% more revenue next year?  Do you believe that improving the brand consistency across the organization will lead to higher customer perception of quality and improve gross margins by 2% for the next product launch?  Do you believe that developing a new interactive platform for sharing product benefits with your sales channel will reduce the sales cycle by 2 months resulting in a 13% increase in revenue with the same effort?  Do you believe that having a seat at the decision making table would improve the company results or employee engagement demonstrably? Can you describe, in plain English or in understandable data, the financial benefits and returns of marketing investments? These are the types of questions you should be asking, when you are thinking of advocating for anything in a business environment.  What is the business impact for the change you are advocating?

If you don't know how to answer these questions, it could be an indication that you are not yet ready to advocate for a larger and more impactful role for marketing in your company... and that you should get ready.  That in itself, should be a call to action to learn more about your business, your drivers of value in the market, your customer problems, your solutions, revenue or customer attribution models, and overall business strategy...and how score is kept financially in your business.  You must strive to be a business person, as well as a marketer.  And today, those should be distinguishable.

And don’t be lured into advocating that there is no ROI on marketing investment.  That is an archaic way of viewing the world and simply isn’t true.  Sure, people have wasted money in “marketing activities” (I’ll get to that below).  Sure, some data is just too expensive to get reliably in marketing (and I would argue, in every other function of a business), so business decisions must be made based on the limited information available. But you can describe the financial impact of nearly every decision of your business and marketing is no exception.  If you find yourself defending "marketing" without data, go watch the movie Moneyballand see yourself reflected in the dialogue between the salty sports recruiters and Brad Pitt’s character.  It’s a new era for business people doing marketing, with more transparency and accountability than ever before, and you must be leading the charge.

2. What is the perception of your brand and that of "marketing" in your organization? What should it be?  What is the gap?

Before you would embark on a brand building campaign, you would always begin with data to identify the "as is" state and to quantify the "to be" state.  And to identify the gap between these states.  Often this accomplished with surveys, voice of the customer, share of voice analysis, or other tools.  Why not do the same thing within your organization to gauge how far away the organization is from what you envision as the ideal?  

It is also important to know whether your brand is strong enough in the organization to lead that charge?  What are you known for, personally, in your organization?  Why do people come to you?  Does that align with what you need it to be to advocate the change you are advocating?  What can you do to change the perception and reputation, if necessary?  Are there projects that you need ot delegate to others (ie, the company holiday party, responsibility for the receptionist, etc) to improve the perception of marketing as strategic in your organization?  Who else do you need to advocate on your behalf?

3. What "marketing" does your customer really need?

This should probably be the first question, as anything (besides that which is required for regulatory, legal, or financial compliance) that isn't seen and appreciated by customers, probably isn't worth doing.  It is the definition of waste and the hallmark of bureaucracy.  But coming back to my point, what value does the customer perceive in the marketing you do?

Are your customers able to make better and faster purchase decisions because of their access to technical information?  Are your resellers able to sell more because of the sales tools you provide?  Are they able to reduce their costs with more accurate quoting resources?  Are they able to achieve business results because of the value proposition of the products you provide?  Does your marketing help set your company and brand apart in measurable ways?

Some service firms have found that dedicated sales and marketing staff is not nearly as effective as sending their consultants right out to their clients to share expertise directly and we their appetite for more (a topic covered extensively in Patrick Lencioni's book Getting Naked).  Some technical engineering firms, web site developers, or agencies find that their engineering teams are best equipped to sell and market to their technical buyers and that all that is needed from marketing is some communication tools to help facilitate these conversations, as learned from colleagues at a recent event held by the Technology Association of Oregon at which I presented on this topic.  In our business at Planar, there is a lot of "marketing" that happens in customer conversations with account managers and technical sales professionals in the field.  This is good and necessary for our technical, system-style products.  Part of the marketing team’s role in this case is to equip their sales colleagues to have these conversations and to aim them at the right targets for best success.  Each business will be different, but successful marketing begins with an understanding of the customer.

and finally...

4. What is the winning formula that is worth repeating?

Like any system, it is important to look and inputs and outputs.  If you want to answer questions 1-3, a good place to start is your wins.  Where are some situations that have gone well that you think are worthy of replication?  Go back and analyze a big order, a design win, or project award and ask everyone involved how it came to be, the touchpoints with the organization, what sales tools or marketing resources were used, and what made the difference.  There is no sense automating or "improving the efficiency" of things that are not effective.  Said another way, finding faster ways to lose money is to find a better way to drive yourself out of business.  But, if you focus on what is going right, you will find a platform from which you can advocate smart change and gain the respect of the organization and the resources to replicate what is working.  And chances are, if you know it is a winning example that can be replicated, others in the organization will as well, and you will have a common foundation to build trust and understanding.

Special thanks to Lisa Cole, Allison Cerra, Leilani Brown, and Mark Wilson for helping to refine these lessons learned.

In the News

The article "5 Things I Wish I Knew..." appeared in the Oregon Business Report this morning. Excited to see this article getting so much attention.

I had a chance to deliver a presentation based around this article at a meeting of the Women in Leadership at Planar this week.  My colleagues gave me some fantastic feedback and shared with me what they liked and thought could be improved.  I can't wait to present it again to integrate that feedback.  It is wonderful to have a room full of mentors!

Love Your Product: What Butterfly Grove taught me about being visionary? Part 1

Some children have imaginary friends.  I had an imaginary town.  It was called Butterfly Grove.  Between 2nd and 4th grade, I worked on this multi-faceted project in which I envisioned the life and times of an entire city. 

Taking a fairly comprehensive design approach, I laid out the city (even built a clay model at one point), wrote the town newspaper (The Butterflyer) and envisioned the businesses that would be in the town.  The pet shop was named after my sister, who loved animals.  There was a local branch of the Bank of America.  I designed a book store and coffee shop combo (decades before Starbucks had the idea) called the “Book and Bagel.”  I even have a coupon book from the “Welcome Wagon,” I drew up to promote these businesses.  It was a consuming project that I think back with fond memories to this day.  It is just the kind of thing that I’d probably still enjoy doing.

In those formative years, Butterfly Grove taught me a lot and allowed me to experiment with innovation in ways that I have applied since then.  The first is this:

Love Your Product

Butterfly Grove was a city that I would have wanted to live in.  It had a small town feel, but modern amenities.  I designed all the buildings and decided where they were located. I even got to pick the name of my street. It was the perfect town for my purposes.

In product development circles, there have been experts on both sides of this issue for decades:  should product managers and entrepreneurs be data-driven, maintain passive attachment to their businesses, and keep an open mind with regards to customer feedback to see where to take their products or should they design things for themselves to use?  Those in favor of the dispassionate approach, note the success of professional managers building conglomerate businesses without direct involvement in the business propositions of any one product line.  Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter and author of Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of a Creative Mind, falls squarely on the “you have to love and use your product” side of this argument.  So does, Jason Fried, the founder of 37Signals and author of Getting Real, Remote, and Rework.

I had an experience with Jason 10 years ago that illustrated this well.  I had contacted the support group at 37Signals whose produce Basecamp I have used to manage a variety of projects over the years. I had been highly recommending this tool and I knew they are always developing new offerings. I suggested to them that they develop a new interactive, collaborative scheduling service. The idea would be that it would allow a person to set up a calendar of events and allow people to RSVP. However, it would be more than an Evite (which is another tool I love and use all the time). The innovation that I was suggesting was that the tool would allow multiple events to be managed from one interface and that it would include an element of capacity planning. Let's say, a hair studio wanted to use a tool like this to accept online appointments. They could enter the number of stylists available throughout the day and the software would prevent people from overbooking, perhaps suggesting alternates that might work or managing a waiting list. I thought this would be cool for a variety of their small business customers and I knew that I could use it right away for a project I was working on for a non-profit “mothers of preschoolers” group.

But, I digress. I sent the idea to them in some detail. I received a response back that surprised me. I thought that I would get a "thank you and we appreciate your submission" generic email and that would be that. Instead, I got a personal email back from Jason at 37Signals that read "We will not be building the software you suggested. We only build things we can use and we wouldn't use this."

Needless to say, I was a little taken back. Jason is known for his strong opinions and, perhaps, email missives of this type are common in their organization. But, the whole thing got me thinking.

Here is a company that is very well-respected and builds great tools. They got a suggestion for what would be a great product (in my humble opinion) and they said, "no." No, because it wasn't something they were passionate about. No, because they wouldn't personally use it.  If they had been running a pet grooming salon, a community center, or a doctor’s office, perhaps they would have seen the value.  Since then, others have developed online scheduling tools for various purposes (from SignUpGenius to Doodle), but there still isn’t a great single tool that I know of for scheduling.   So, my "collaborative scheduling" idea is out there for someone to develop!

Thinking back to those days spent on Butterfly Grove, I was certainly an amateur city planner in every sense of the word.  The definition of “amateur” is someone who engages in an activity for pleasure, instead of financial benefit. The root of the word is the same French-Middle English word for "love."  Someone who is motivated by the love of something.  It has been said that if you do something you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.  Butterfly Grove didn’t feel like work.   I think this is a powerful lesson for innovation.  Work like an amateur and build something you love.

Come Bloom With Me

Your lasting legacy won't be your accomplishments, but the accomplishments you enabled in others.

How To Get Promoted in Four Easy Steps

There is a ladder, if you will, that you must climb to be qualified and recognized to take on more responsibility (in exchange for more authority, more compensation, and more influence that may come along).  There are many rungs to the ladder, but today I want to talk about the first four and how you can give yourself a promotion and grow as a leader.  In short, you should be secure on each rung before you could expect to climb to the next.  Together, you can give yourself a promotion in four easy steps.  Let’s begin.

Rung 1: You can manage your time

Most individual contributors (that is, people who are not managers, but responsible for their own work) have one main resource that they alone can allocate: their time.  We all have the same 24 hours a day and how people choose to allocate those hours makes a huge difference in their results.  A lot of experts have written tomes on this subject (some of my favorites are Getting Things Done, the classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the provocative 4 Hour Work Week, and the insightful Better Than Before), mobile apps have been written to help track and monitor time allocation, and there is no shortage of life hack websites that will walk you through best practices for time management.  But if you can not manage your own time and get work done in a reasonable timeframe with reasonable effort, no one will consider you ready for more.  If you don’t know how you spend your time or feel like you are chronically under-estimating the amount of time things will take, missing deadlines, or letting down your team mates, this is a place to start.  To be a manager, you must first manage yourself.

Rung 2: You can optimize your potential

Once you have mastery over your deadlines and tasks, you can build upon that to make the most of your capabilities and interests.  You start with an understanding of your style, approach, and thinking processes (using tools like Myers-Briggs, StrengthFinders, Kolbe, and others that I have blogged about in the past).  You get feedback from worthy mentors.  You seek out professional development opportunities.  You strive to get better and to outgrow your current assignment.  You broaden your perspective beyond how you spend time today to apply yourself in new ways to new problems.  You know what you need to inspire and drive you and you make sure your environment is right (which is described in detail in the book Triggers).  You never stop managing your time and you never stop growing, of course, but you have reached this rung of the ladder when you have a vision of your best self and understand yourself well enough to play from your strengths and propel yourself to new heights of performance.  If you want to be a leader, you must first lead yourself.

Rung 3: You can manage other people’s time

The first supervisory job that most people have involves managing other people’s time.  You make sure people show up for their shift.  You make sure the phones get answered as expected and the call queues are not too long.  You make certain that there is adequate coverage to handle expected traffic at a trade show or retail environment.  You sign time cards.  You help them know what to do between punching in and punching out.  You offer up work instructions and on-the-job training.  In many cases, you can help others reach the first rung of their ladder by managing projects and allowing more capable people to manage their time towards the good of the project.  This is where basic employee engagement comes into effect.  Good managers have employees that have the time and resources to achieve the goals at hand.

Rung 4: You can unlock other people’s potential

This is the run where leaders emerge from among the sea of managers.  Their employees not only want to use their time better, but they want to be better.  Using both encouragement and discipline, they realize that honestly, delivered respectfully, is a gift and can help high potential individuals achieve more than they thought possible.  Identifying latent talents.  Probing for unrealized motivations.  Describing hidden possibilities and bringing those to light.  Establishing new standards and enabling people to do more than what is required so that they can feel pride in their work. Helping individuals bloom, where they are planted and to find new landscapes to explore.

These first four rungs on the ladder illustrate a great truth about getting recognized and promoted: most things are within your control.  

Whether or not you want to be a manager of people (that is not everyone’s ambition), these same principles apply.  As I have said before, you don’t have to wait for someone’s permission to get the experience you want and need to further your career in whatever direction you wish to direct it.   You, alone, can effectively manage your time for maximum results.  You alone can be curious about your own potential.  And without a job change or a fancy title, you can help others do the same.  From whatever role you are in today.  It won’t be long before you are ready for the next challenge and that will be recognized by others. You’ll be doing a bigger job already when the opportunities come your way.

Know Thyself: The Toolbox

I must start out with a confession.  I am a self-assessment junkie.  I love analysis tools that help me better reflect on my strengths, style, and effectiveness and how I relate to the world and approach problem-solving.  I understand that not everyone does.  But even more so, not everyone even knows that tools like this exist or how to use them. This post is meant to remedy that.

Below is a round up of some of the best assessment tools that I have used in the past.  With a short description of each (not exhaustive or complete by any means) and a link to where you can learn more or take the assessment.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on your favorites (or these or others that I might not have heard of before).

They are in rough alphabetical order.  I have no professional relationships or affiliations with any of these organizations, although I have taken all of these assessments over the years.

DiSC: This personality assessment might be one of the best known.  It is administered by hundreds of consultants (chances are your own HR team might have a certified trainer) and can be accessed online for less than $40 (and there are plenty of free "knock offs" out there as well).  It identifies people's dominant dimensions (Dominance, Influence, Stable, Compliant) and graphs individuals and groups into different combination profiles like "Promoter" or "Counselor".  This is a simple tool to help people understand each other better.

EQ-i: This is a measurement of emotional intelligence, thus EQ-i stands for Emotional Quotient Inventory.  It is administered by lots of professional coaches and trainers and can be accessed online for less than $40.  It provides composites along several factors includes self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision making, and stress management.  I have been told that a high EQ score is more important than any other single factor (IQ, etc) for professional success, but I do suspect that is subject to the field and role of the individual.  However, there is no denying the impact of interpersonal relationships on success.  

The Flag Page: The Flag Page was developed in cooperation with the marriage expert, Mark Gungor (Laugh your Way).  Although it is used by organizations, it is an inexpensive tool ($10) designed first for individuals.  It uses the language of citizenship to identify which "country" is dominant in your style (Fun, Control, Peace, Perfect). This is very accessible assessment and they even have one for children to use for family dynamics.

Harrison: The Harrison Assessment is a complex tool administered by trained professionals often as part of a team workshop.  It is based on paradox theory, which illustrates how individuals can act in seemingly contradictory ways, especially under stress.  It highlights 12 paradoxes that relate to the workplace (things like diplomacy and frankness or organization and flexibility) and plots each individual in a default position and indicates what behaviors they might demonstrate when under pressure.  The resulting individual assessment is over 20 pages long and the team assessment is equally as rich.  I understand the assessment is relatively expensive (over $300 per person), but I have never personally purchased it, so I am not certain.  It is much more complex and requires more work to understand and apply the insights than the other assessments.

Kolbe: Designed based on the research of Karen Kolbe,  the Kolbe Cognition Survey looks at how individuals approach problem solving and rates them on four dimensions (Fact Finding, Follow Thru, Quick Start, and Implementor).  The individual assessment is $49 and available on their website (a Kolbe A index).  They also have a series of products for determining job fit (managers complete a Kolbe C to develop a profile for a job and the employee completes a Kolbe B to identify their perceptions of the job requirements and when compared these B and C indexes show areas of gap or opportunity).  It can be used for recruiting and job fit analysis.  There is a youth version (Kolbe Y) as well.  This assessment is easy to digest, but allows for nuance and discussion than some of the more simple tools.

Myers-Briggs:  This is probably the most popular and extensively used "personality test" given.  Myers-Briggs is administered by thousands of practioners and is available online for less than $50 (and there are a number of free knock-off versions out there as well).  The survey gives back a score along four criteria (covering interpersonal styles, structures, decision making, and information) and sorts people into one of 16 personality types based on their responses. This is used in casual and in-depth coaching settings with success.

OAD: The Organization Analysis and Design survey is administered by an independent consultant or trainer certified by the organization.  It measures individuals along several constructs including assertiveness, extroversion, pace/patience, detail orientation, versatility, emotional control, and creativity.  Doing this as a group can reveal patterns and organize individuals into four profiles (architects, builders, experts and facilitators).  I have seen this used effectiveness to identify general patterns in groups.  It can be explained fairly easily (it is more complex than Kolbe and less than Harrison).

Clifton StrengthsFinder: This survey (developed by the "father of strengths psychology" Donald O Clifton and Gallup Organization) came free with my copy of Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham.  It allows you to self-identify your top 5 strengths and identifies how we can use those talents.  

There are many other assessments that one can do individually and in facilitated conversations with executive coaches or consultants, which I can cover in future posts.  

Which are your favorites and why?