Past Issues
Mat, 2005
Keep The Good Ones
Employee Retention Techniques
April, 2005
What We Measure Part III
Why we measure Sociability.
March, 2005
What We Measure Part II
Some perspective on Readjustment.
February, 2005
Are You Being Served?
Profiling in the Restaurant and Hospitality Industry.
What We Measure Part I
A deeper understanding of Ascendency.
Motivating Termites
Selecting the most motivational rewards for job performance.
We Don't Care What Your Think
Because We Measure Behavior Instead.
Of Course It's Legal
To Use Personality Profiling in Hiring.
Do Unto Others (Or Not)
Good Advice for Sales People.
The Paul Principle
Give employees what they need to succeed.
After I'm Gone ...
Using Profiling to sell or buy a business successfully.
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The MRA Team Spirit Newsletter - October, 2004
We Don't Care What You Think ...
By John Loven
President
MRA Team Spirit
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Psychological tests, like Myers-Briggs, talk about inner processes and
unconscious urges, but make no dependable predictions about behavior. But isn't
anticipating behavioral patterns what hiring, career management and training
are all about? In business, you want a tool like the MRA Leadership Matrix that helps identify what a person is
going to do, rather than what they're going to think.
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I recently profiled a woman - the president of a service club - who
was interested in how the MRA Profiling works. She completed the Leadership Matrix,
the proprietary MRA tool for measuring and describing behavioral traits. For those
who are new to MRA, The Leadership Matrix asks you to look at a list of 100
descriptive words and select all the words that other people have used to describe
you. You are then presented with the same list of words and asked to select those
which are truly descriptive of you.
After completing the Leadership Matrix the lady send me a note:
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“Interesting choice of descriptive words. I found that the words I chose
for myself are those I feel best describe what I feel, not what I try to
appear to be and work to be. As I say, 'what you see is pure sham...many
times.' How did you put what I 'work against within myself to be
an effective person’ in a descriptive list of words?
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Like many people, she had become interested in her inner process of selecting
words, and wondered how MRA could possibly anticipate the complexity of such a
personal process. I wrote to her that :”We don’t know what you were thinking
and we don’t care.” I was only flippant because I know her well, but I went
on to explain the origin of the Leadership Matrix.
How the Leadership Matrix was Developed
Several hundred people from many walks of like were recruited as test subjects.
They engaged in a series of activities with each other while they were observed by
trained researchers. The observers knew all the details of the four behavioral
traits which the Leadership Matrix measures:
- Ascendancy (A): Assertive response to challenge
- Sociability (S): Introversion/extroversion
- Emotional Accommodation (E): Emotional response to the environment - active/calm, variety/stability
- Readjustment (R): Degree of adaptive behavior to authority and structured situations
The observers were trained to recognize how these traits play out in interpersonal
behaviors. The subjects were ranked high or low on the four traits based on observed
interactions with others.
After lengthy observation, the subjects were then asked to choose, from a list
of about 200 descriptive terms, words that others had used to describe them and
words that they felt were accurate descriptors. The results were subjected to detailed
statistical analysis to determine which words "cluster around" the individuals who
are high and low on the four traits. Words that didn't cluster were excluded. When
two words had almost exactly the same clustering tendency, one was removed to
reduce redundancy. The result is our list of 100 words had a scoring method that
measures the strength of the four behavioral traits.
The Inner Process
I have described the research process to make the point that the Leadership Matrix
says nothing about anybody's inner processes. We don't even speculate on what makes
people choose certain words - we don't have any data about that. In a sense, we don't
even want any data about that. What we have is a very strong set of statistical
associations: people with certain traits do choose certain words. The Leadership
Matrix produces results that are acknowledged to be very accurate more than 90%
of the time.
Over years of profiling, I’ve heard many different accounts of what went on in
the subjects’ minds. Some, like the lady who wrote to me, took a careful and analytical
approach, carefully observing and categorizing their own word selection process. On
the other hand, lots of people tell me it's no different than being asked to name
the colors of their living room furniture: It's just an exercise in memory. For yet
others, it's an existential exercise in "who am I supposed to be?"
The bottom line is that, for all the varying accounts of the inner process, the
accuracy remains very high. In most of my experience, when the profile is not
accurate, the subject was under extreme stress or was not doing the exercise honestly.
The Power of Statistical Association
Here are a couple examples of strong statistical association - scientifically sound
and well regarded - without any identified “inner process”:
- Numerous studies covering 140 years have shown that married persons tend to have
better general health and, in fact, live longer than their unmarried counterparts.
To this day, no one has definitively explained the mechanism behind this phenomenon,
but it is established fact.
- A recent study of diet and drinking patterns published in the American Journal
of Clinical Nutrition reveals that people who drink wine tend to choose foods that
are healthier for the heart. No one has put forward a reason for this, but it is
considered a possible explanation for the strong association between moderate wine
drinking and better cardiac health.
The excellent accuracy of Leadership Matrix is another example of a strong statistical
association: people who are high or low on the four behavioral traits choose certain words
far more often than others. The resulting system is predictive and stands
up to statistical rigor, but without making any assertions about the subjects’ inner process of word selection.
We don’t care what you think, and that’s good!
Questions or comments are welcome.
-John Loven
Questions or Comments? Let Me Know.
Copyright © 2004 John Loven
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