I am now offering Quintax Personality Profiling in my coaching work. Why use psychometrics? I believe that understanding yourself is a fundamental first step in personal and professional development. Once you understand yourself and “where you’re at,” you can start to plan your way forward. My company name captures this idea. A Creative Vector starts where you are and points in the direction you want to go. If you don’t know where you are, then it’s difficult to pick your direction.
“Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
In a coaching relationship, a psychometric profile gives a framework and some language to explore and develop self-awareness. Quintax scores for me because it has been developed from the “Big 5” Personality traits, which have been deeply researched and widely recognised in the Psychology Community. You may remember recent BBC/Open University TV programmes and interactive research on this subject. Starting from this base, the publishers of Quintax developed a profiling system that applies these traits to the world of work. It is both designed in Britain, and the growing norm group is British based. It therefore is particularly sensitive to our local culture. That’s great for locals, who don’t have to be irritated by American turns of phrase and also for relocating leaders coming to work in the UK, who can test themselves against the cultural norms of their new colleagues; calm in Spain may not be the same as calm in the UK!
Moving beyond self-awareness, Quintax goes on to identify strengths and development areas and to suggest tips for development, supporting the process of identifying an agenda for change.
A further value in psychometrics is that it supports a leader’s understanding of others. Quintax looks at traits on bipolar scales. For example, one scale measures the approach to work planning spanning from Adaptable: where you may prefer to deal with things as they arise and like to start the new before the old is finished; to Structured: where you may prefer to schedule and plan and enjoy finishing tasks. We and those around us appear at different points along this continuum. Recognising these differences can unlock a lot of misunderstandings and conflict at work. It can help in staff development and in selecting and bonding teams.
So using psychometrics in coaching offers a lot of benefits. It can of course never be a completely accurate picture, but this is not the point. In identifying tendencies and preferences it gives us a starting point, a framework and the language to support a deeper and far-ranging coaching project.
Interested in psychometric testing or coaching? Then get in touch for a no-obligation discussion at Linda@CreativeVectorsCoaching.co.uk.