Recruit, Retain, Retrain

In today’s dynamic work environment, the focus extends beyond mere recruitment logistics. It’s about securing the right talent at the right time, equipped with the requisite skills. 

However, there’s an additional layer: the imperative to streamline costs and embrace diversity. One solution lies in acknowledging what often escapes our notice—our thought processes. Our thinking patterns intricately shape our behavior and responses to specific roles. Understanding how we think, along with our values, forms the linchpin for aligning expectations with the purpose of a role. 

Furthermore, fostering an environment that encourages both autonomy and responsibility propels organizational advancement. How can we embark on this journey? By delving into the realm of measuring thinking styles. MindSonar, a tool that goes beyond surface-level personality assessments, becomes instrumental in identifying distinct thinking styles and values within any given scenario. MindSonar can play a role in various stages of the employee lifecycle—recruitment, retention, and retraining. 

Here’s how:

Recruitment

Identifying Suitable Candidates:

•  Use MindSonar assessments during the recruitment process to identify candidates whose thinking styles align with the requirements of the job. This can help you find individuals who naturally think in ways that are conducive to success in the specific role.

Enhancing the Interview Process:

  • Tailor interview questions based on the MindSonar results. This can provide deeper insights into a candidate’s cognitive preferences and help you assess their fit within the team and organization.
  • Through an articulate understanding of thinking patterns, one can tailor questions to identify strengths and blindspots in the different scenarios a candidate may encounter.

Reducing Turnover:

  • By understanding the thinking styles that thrive in your organization, you can select candidates who are more likely to be satisfied and successful in their roles, reducing the risk of turnover.

Retention

Team Dynamics:

  • Use MindSonar® to understand the thinking styles within your existing teams. This knowledge can be leveraged to build well-rounded teams with diverse cognitive approaches, fostering a collaborative and productive work environment.

Personalized Development Plans:

  • Tailor professional development plans based on individual thinking styles. This personalized approach can enhance job satisfaction and motivation, contributing to higher employee retention.

Conflict Resolution:

  • MindSonar® results can provide insights into potential sources of conflict within teams. Use this information to address and resolve interpersonal issues, creating a more harmonious work environment.

Retraining

Identifying Learning Preferences:

  • Use MindSonar to identify employees’ preferred learning styles. Tailor training programs to match these preferences, making the learning process more effective and engaging.

Career Development:

  • Understand the thinking styles required for advancement in specific roles. Use MindSonar to guide employees toward training and development opportunities that align with their cognitive strengths and the organization’s needs.

Adapting to Change:

  • During times of organizational change, use MindSonar® to understand how different individuals may respond. This information can guide change management strategies and support employees in adapting to new situations.

If you would like to measure how you or the staff think, contact Ian at 01455241204. Please remember, that while MindSonar provides valuable insights, it should be used as part of a holistic approach to recruitment, retention, and retraining. Combining these insights with your existing tools and methods will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of your employees and potential hires.

Enhancing Team Dynamics with MindSonar®: A Powerful Tool for Understanding Each Other

Effective teamwork is the cornerstone of success in any organisation. Teams that collaborate harmoniously tend to be more productive, innovative, and resilient. However, building and maintaining strong team dynamics can be challenging, especially when team members have diverse backgrounds, communication styles, and mindsets. In fact, you could argue a team is like a collection of different animal styles having a party! To overcome these challenges, many organisations want a more granular measurement that gets to the heart of problems and show the team a new way to communicate and collaborate. Organisations need skilled zoo keepers to do this or they could use a tool called MindSonar. MindSonar helps teams understand each other better and improve their overall performance.

We have been using Mindsonar in the UK for Team development in many organisations because it is adaptive and does what it says. It uncovers what is beneath that we cannot immediately see.

MindSonar is a psychological assessment tool developed by Dutch psychologist Jaap Hollander. It is designed to provide insights into how individuals think and make decisions in various contexts, which is immensely valuable in team settings. MindSonar is built on the principle that every person has a unique thinking profile, shaped by their beliefs, values, and cognitive strategies. By mapping these profiles, MindSonar helps teams understand each member’s perspectives and communication preferences.

Understanding MindSonar’s Approach

At its core, MindSonar assesses an individual’s thinking style based on the Thinking Styles theory. Thinking Styles are mental filters that influence how we perceive the world and make decisions. They cover areas like motivation, decision-making, social orientation, and communication. MindSonar identifies an individual’s dominant Thinking Styles and represents them in a visual profile, allowing teams to gain deep insights into their members’ cognitive preferences.

How MindSonar Enhances Team Understanding

Improved Communication: MindSonar helps teams decode each member’s communication style. For example, it can reveal if someone is more focused on details or prefers a big-picture approach. Understanding these differences enables team members to communicate more effectively and reduces the risk of misunderstandings.

Conflict Resolution: By pinpointing potential areas of conflict, MindSonar allows teams to proactively address and resolve disputes. When team members understand each other’s motivations and triggers, they can navigate disagreements with empathy and find common ground.                     

Enhanced Decision-Making: MindSonar assists teams in making better decisions by considering a broader range of perspectives. Teams can identify which Thinking Styles are overrepresented or underrepresented, helping them balance their decision-making processes.

Increased Empathy: Understanding the thinking profiles of team members fosters empathy and respect. Team members are more likely to appreciate each other’s unique strengths and contributions, creating a positive and inclusive team culture.                      

Tailored Leadership: Team leaders can adapt their leadership styles to better suit the needs and preferences of their team members. This leads to more effective leadership and improved team performance.

Implementing MindSonar in Teams

Assessment: Team members complete the MindSonar assessment, which typically consists of a series of questions or scenarios. The results are then analysed to create individual thinking profiles.

Team Workshops: Teams can participate in workshops facilitated by a MindSonar practitioner. These workshops help team members understand their own profiles and those of their colleagues.

Application: Once the team has a clear understanding of their thinking profiles, they can start applying this knowledge to their daily interactions, communication, and decision-making processes.

Ongoing Development: Teams can periodically revisit their MindSonar profiles and reassess their dynamics as they evolve. This ensures that teams remain adaptable and continue to improve their collaboration over time.

 Conclusion

In a world where teamwork is essential for success, tools like MindSonar offer a valuable means of enhancing team dynamics. By helping team members understand each other’s thinking styles, communication preferences, and motivations, MindSonar promotes effective collaboration, reduces conflicts, and ultimately leads to improved team performance. As organizations increasingly recognize the importance of psychological insights in team development, MindSonar stands out as a powerful tool for fostering understanding and cohesion among team members. Hire a zoo keeper or use MindSonar

What are Thinking Styles?

Definition
Thinking Styles are thinking patterns. For instance: Are they focussed on the details or on the big picture? Or: Do they want to achieve things, or do they want to avoid problems? You can recognise people’s meta programs in what they talk about and how they talk about it.

Thinking Styles combined with values make up someone’s mindset. Their mindset determines their  behaviour and their emotions. And those, in turn, determine their results.

Synonyms for ‘Thinking Style’

  • Thinking Styles
  • Thinking patterns
  • Thinking Style Qualities
  • Ways of thinking
  • Mindset elements
  • Cognitive-perceptual preferences

List of Thinking Styles measured by MindSonar

Set 1: Proactive versus Reactive
Proactive = a preference for acting quickly and taking the initiative.
Reactive = a preference for waiting, considering, and reflecting.

Set 2: Towards versus Away from
Towards = a focus on achieving goals
Away From = a focus on avoiding problems.

Set 3: Internal Reference versus External Reference
Internal Reference = using one’s own standards in evaluations.
External Reference = using other people’s standards in evaluations.

Set 4: Options versus Procedure
Options = a preference for many different possibilities.
Procedure = a preference for step-by-step planning.

Set 5: General versus Specific
General  = a focus on the broad overview
Specific = a focus on the small details.

Set 6: Matching versus Mismatching
Matching = a focus on what is good and correct.
Mismatching =  a focus on what is bad and incorrect).

Set 7: Internal locus of control versus External locus of control
Internal locus of control = a focus on how someone influences their circumstances)
External locus of control (focus on how someone’s circumstances influence them).

Set 8: Maintenance versus Development versus Change
Maintenance = a preference for things staying the same.
Development = a preference for gradual change.
Change = a preference for fast and radical change.

Set 9: People versus Activity versus Information
People = a focus on people and what moves them
Activities = a focus on activities being done
Information = focus on information; facts and figures.

Set 10: Concept versus Structure versus Use
Concept = a focus on essentials and principles.
Structure = a focus on relationships between elements.
Use = a focus on practical applications.

Set 11: Together versus Proximity versus Solo
Together = a preference for working closely together with shared responsibility.
Proximity = a preference for mutual support with individual responsibility.
Solo = a preference for working alone).

Set 12: Past versus Present versus Future
Past = a focus on past events.
Present = a focus on the “here and now”.
Future = a focus on future events.

Set 13: Visual versus Auditory versus Kinesthetic 
Visual = a focus on images and movies.
Auditory = focus on sounds and words.
Kinesthetic = focus on feelings and movement.

If you want to see examples of these patterns in famous quotes, click here.

How do thinking style, filters, feelings and actions work together?
There is a dynamic relationship between thinking (meta programs and Graves drives), perception, emotion and behaviour.

  • How your mindset influences your perception and vice versa
    Mindset, consisting of thinking styles (Meta programs) plus motivational types (Graves drives), determines perceptual filters; what someone does or does not notice. And it works the other way around too: once in place, these filters tend to strengthen the thinking style and the motivational type they are based on. For example: someone uses the meta program ‘Procedure’. They think in terms of sequences that need to be run in a certain order. So when they look at a desk they will notice a stack of manuals. Manuals are full of the kind of procedural information that they like. If they would have had the meta program ‘Options’ active, they would probably not even have noticed these manuals.

  • How mindset and perception determine your how you feel
    Mindset plus the resulting perceptual filters affect somebody’s mood and emotions and vice versa. For example: Someone is working with a particular household appliance and they are focused on ‘Procedure’. They encounter a problem. They feel frustrated. Then they find the appliance’s manual on the kitchen drawer. They start to feel better: “Ah, there must be a solution somewhere in there!”

  • How your mindset, perception and mood determine your behavior 
    In the same example: The person sees the manual. Because they are focusing on ‘Procedure’, a manual with step-by-step how-to information makes them feel better. So with a sigh of relief they take it off the shelf and start reading (behaviour). They figure out how to solve the problem. Now they feel satisfied. At the same time this emotion reinforces their meta program (Procedure) and their Graves Drives (Blue for ‘doing things as they ought to be done’  and orange for ‘Being successful and winning’).

Meta programs and NLP
Thinking Styles originated from NLP (‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’), a model for studying and transforming subjective experience. NLP was developed from the late seventies of the last century in the USA, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. For the development of NLP they borrowed concepts from: 

  • Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy)
  • Milton H. Erickson (Hypnotherapy)
  • Virginia Satir (Family therapy)
  • Alfred H. Korzybski (Linguistic Philosophy)
  • Vaihinger (Philosophy of ‘As-if’)
  • Miller, Galanter and Pribram (Cybernetics)
  • Gregory Bateson (Human evolution)

Supporting a Bank developing an Entrepreneurial Attitude

A large Belgian insurance bank defined a new corporate strategy, in which it was important for their insurance brokers to develop a more entrepreneurial attitude.

A central factor in this development was the relationship between the insurance brokers and the local insurance agents in the community. The company defined a list of key competencies for their brokers related to dealing with these agents.

All brokers were profiled with MindSonar. Surprisingly, after a statistical analysis, it turned out that there was no significant relationship between thinking style, criteria, and key competencies on the one hand and sales volume on the other hand. Further analysis revealed that this had to do with the targets that were being set. Because targets were set at a relatively low level, their MindSonar profile did not make a lot of difference. It did not matter much how brokers thought or what they found important. The volume of sales was determined mostly by demand from the local insurance agents and the efforts of the brokers seemed to have little to do with it.

This finding led the company to change the system of setting targets. After targets were adjusted, thinking style did make a difference. A training program was developed in which brokers were trained in those competencies that their MindSonar profile showed them to be lacking in.

For this project the company won a prestigious training award.

The MindSonar professional running the project was Chris Minne (Belgium). Look him up in the Registry.

How a Mining Company Solved an Internal Conflict

A mining company had serious communication problems in their community relations team. This problem persisted, even after several group trainings and coaching sessions. The majority of the team members had great difficulty with one person. This person had even been nicknamed “Don Pesimo” (“Mister Horrible”) because every time they proposed a solution, he would disagree and point out everything that could go wrong with that proposal.MindSonar was filled out by all team members and a workshop was organised explaining Thinking Styles and Graves Drives. At the end of the workshop the team scores were discussed. The team and the leader of the company, who was also present, could clearly see that their predominant Thinking Style was ‘matching’ (focusing at what is good and correct), except for “Don Pésimo”, who scored very high on mismatching (focusing at what is not good and incorrect).Simply explaining to them that their teammate was not a negative person, but rather using a different thinking style, was very helpful. He was relabelled as an internal consultant, being the one person with the ability to show them the dangers and pitfalls they could not see.

Today this person sits at the head of the board of directors when they meet. He has an important role in evaluating both team decisions and team processes.  The MindSonar professional running this project was Mónica Castañeda (Peru). Look her up in the Registry.

Debt Collectors getting Results in a Socially Responsible Way

Flanderijn is a major debt collection agency in the Netherlands. In recent years debt collection has changed. Creditors used to only be interested in getting their money as quickly as possible. Today most creditors feel a social responsibility too. So there has been a change from “When do I get paid?” to “What’s happening with my customer?”

Debt collection is done most successfully by phone. At Flanderijn, on a daily basis, almost 400 employees have telephone contact with the customers of their clients. It is not an easy job. Most people and companies pay their bills. If they don’t, there is some kind of problem. So most of the time the employees work under stress and sometimes they face aggression. That’s why debt collectors are trained frequently. 

Mindsonar is used to get an alignment with the wishes of the client. Every two years Flanderijn management selects their best debt collectors. The ones that not only have a good collection results, but also have a high score on customer satisfaction and debtor satisfaction. These experts are modeled and the Mindsonar results are used to sharpen the content of the trainings.

For example in recent years we have noticed a shift in meta programs from highly internally referenced, very proactive, and procedural to more externally referenced, more reactive and more options oriented. In general criteria changed have from ‘results’ to ‘contact’.

The MindSonar professional running this project was Kees Over de Vest (Netherlands). Look him up in the Registry.

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