If you are a coach or consultant, a large part of your success in helping clients depends on how well you understand how people’s minds work.

The more you know about fields such as psychology and Neuro-linguistic Programming, the more effectively you can help businesses create more effective teams, make better recruitment decisions and improve their communications.

The problem sometimes is that this ability is seen as a ’soft’ skill that potential clients find hard to evaluate.

That’s why many successful coaches and consultants have added some form of psychometric testing to their toolkit and this increases their potential earning power dramatically.

With science and technology developing at an unprecedented pace, it’s perhaps surprising that the most commonly used systems of psychometric testing have been around for so long and are often based on even older concepts.

Some of the most influential work in this field was done by Carl Jung in the 1920s and his ideas remain dominant today.

The widely-used Myers-Briggs instrument, for example, was directly built on Jung’s ideas for understanding and assessing personality. It originated in the 1940s and it has since been used by millions of people around the world.

Another popular system widely used in business is DiSC, which is based on the theories of Dr. William Marston from the book Emotions of Normal People, published in 1928. Inscape Publishing expanded on these theories to create a commercial system.

The name comes from the fact that it rates people according to their degrees of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance.

As the most common psychometric tests are based on concepts from the early 20th Century, it’s not surprising that there has been demand for something more up to date.

In recent years, fields like Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and applied cognitive psychology have added a great deal of new insight to understanding the human mind – and of course, much has changed in the world of work.

The NLP field has contributed to the debate in various ways, including the concept of Metaprograms.

Our metaprograms are deeply unconscious perception filters and they explain why two people think, act and communicate differently in the same situation.

One of the drawbacks with metaprograms is that there have been various views about issues such as exactly how many metaprogram patterns there are and it has proved difficult to measure them in a robust and scientific way.

One approach that has worked well is the Language and Behavior Profile, which was created by Rodger Bailey and popularized by Shelle Rose Charvet through her book Words that Change Minds.

However, the LAB Profile relies heavily on observing and listening to people answering a series of questions so the ability to use it on a large scale is limited.

I’ve recently come across one approach that seems to address the need to combine the depth of information available from metaprograms with more scientific validity and the ability to be used with large groups of people.

This tool is known as the inventory for Work Attitudes and Motivations or iWAM for short.

It was developed by Patrick Merlevede, a Belgian cognitive scientist and management consultant and author of 7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence.

It seeks to identify an individual’s preferences for work organization styles, primary areas of interest and motivations and attitudes at work, through the 48 primary metaprograms.

I found out more about iWAM, and how it can be used in business, from David Klaasen of UK consultancy Inspired Working.

David is running a seminar about iWAM in the UK to explain to coaches and consultants how they can benefit from using this approach in their businesses.

One of the key benefits is that it focuses on results in a specific context and at a set moment in time so is ideal as a before/after test for the effectiveness of a change program, for example.

David explains more in the interview, which you can listen to here and also offers further information and a free report on the benefits of iWAM.

 

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