How I use MindSonar in my Business Coaching

Understand your client’s thinking to be more effective as a coach
Who we are has a profound impact on our lives and the decisions we make. It influences not only what we do, but also how we do it when we do it (or not in a lot of cases), and most importantly, why we do it.

Our identity shapes the relationships we build with ourselves and others and determines the outcomes and results we achieve in all the roles we perform, be that in business or our personal lives.

To know thyself
Socrates famously said, ” To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”This simple but powerful statement highlights the importance of self-awareness and self-knowledge.. By understanding who we are, how we think and what motivates us, we can make more informed and deliberate choices about how we live our lives, run our businesses and the relationships we create.

This is why, as a Business Coach I spend time helping my clients gain clarity on how they think so they can better leverage their natural ability to “get out of their own way” and quickly achieve better results.

Cognitive style
One aspect of who we are is the way we think – our cognitive style. Cognitive styles are ways that people absorb and organise information as well as how they go about solving problems and making decisions and communicating them with others. As an experienced coach, I am constantly and creatively combining different methods andtools to create unique strategies for my clients. Seeking out new approaches is the best way to ensure that every individual reaches their desired outcomes! That’s why I’m a big fan of Mindsonar.Tailoring my coaching to each clientMindsonar is a tool that measures two things: your thinking style and what is important to you. This information is invaluable in helping me tailor my coaching to each client. By understanding how my client thinks, I can better understand how to best help them change their thinking and behaviours and enable them to be more themselves.

Moreover, by understanding what is important to them and their cognitive style, I can be more effective as a coach in the way I communicate, challenge, and support them during our coaching sessions. I can help them create goals and action plans that are aligned with their values and how they naturally think.

What will work for them and who they are?
There’s no one-size fits all blueprint when it comes to success – individual approaches must reflect a person’s unique abilities and methods of thinking to be effective.Therefore, using the Mindsonar tool I can Identify the unique combination of methods that will work for them and who they are.In short, Mindsonar is a powerful tool that can help coaches facilitate real change in their clients, fast. By enabling our clients an understanding who they are and how they think they can better leverage their unique talents and abilities and be more effective and efficient in achieving their objectives.

As a coach, you want to help your clients unlock their true potential for success.Incorporating Mindsonar into your toolset is an excellent way to give them the edge they deserve. Unlocking greater understanding and clarity in just minutes – what could be better?

How Options Decimated the Amsterdam Mafia

Thinking ‘in options’ means that you like to explore many different possibilities. The counterpart to options thinking is thinking ‘in procedures’: sticking to a step-by-step plan. Most people in coaching, consulting, et cetera, are fans of options thinking. Options are creative. Options thinking makes new things possible. Procedures are for bookkeepers and menial workers….

Thinking in options however, can have its downside too.Continue reading

Amplifying your Team’s Advantages (Financial Industry)

AMPLIFYING YOUR TEAM’S ADVANTAGES

Understanding diversity in the financial industry and making it work for you

Financial institutions are pillars of society, secure and reliable institutions that take care of money transactions. Of course, the foundations of financial institutions are their employees, and these types of companies are extremely careful about who they recruit to positions within their organisations.

When we talk about financial institutions we are most familiar with banks, as we do business with banks almost on a daily basis. In doing so, we meet mostly with their sales departments. Far fewer people understand what else is needed in a bank’s inventory to perform safely and reliably. Hence banks employ a wide range of different team members who need appropriate qualifications in order to perform their work well. Staff members are provided with constant training, as banks are continuously evolving to offer their clients the most advanced and reliable services. As a business coach, I have worked with several banks operating in international markets and have trained heads of various departments, giving me the opportunity to recognise different ways of working, different ways of communicating and, of course, different thinking styles.

In my work, I use one of the best performing and effective profiling tools – MindSonar® – which allows professionals to identify their own ways of thinking and their most likely responses in specific situations. In this way, they are enabled to gain self-knowledge and to recruit team members who have different ways of thinking in specific contexts, which leads to creativity and the ability to solve even the most demanding challenges. Of course, an added benefit of knowing each other in this way is that they can more often avoid conflicts and resolve problems.

It is also true that understanding the diversity of team members gives the organisation, its leaders, teams and individual employees the responsibility to develop and strengthen their competences and thus enable each other to achieve the highest level of efficiency in communication, relationships and operations, provided, of course, that they are also suitably professionally competent.

We have recently prepared and delivered workshops with an HR department of a banking organisation.  The workshops are intended to strengthen communication and relational skills and raise emotional intelligence.  Analysis of a team’s MindSonar® group profile demonstrated a strong pattern of how individuals, specifically in the positions of sales managers, are similar in thinking styles in specific contexts. This is of course, logical, as a position of a branch manager or a sales manager requires a certain approach, and therefore, it makes sense for the organisation to either recruit or develop a co-worker who will cope with the challenges this position brings. At the same time, we discussed with these leaders how they value different thinking patterns in their teams. Despite relationships that sometimes require more input, it is precisely different patterns of thinking that strengthen and enrich a team, especially in the sense that it can achieve above-average efficiency and when it comes to financial management, appropriate returns.

Recognition that professionals need high-level communication and relational skills for their optimal functioning is crucial for both the development of the individual as well as the organisation. In identifying this, financial institutions, as the most technologically and security-wise advanced companies, are at the forefront of modern corporate operations.

An effective and widely useful tool enabling the profiling of diversity of thinking styles – MindSonar® enables identifying differences in thinking and facilitates guiding the development of individuals. Using MindSonar® means skilled trainers and profiling practitioners – MindSonar® Professionals – can assess individuals or entire teams and show them where and how they can progress, accessing coaching and specialised workshops. Organisations and teams can develop optimally and achieve maximum prosperity.

Developing Leadership in the Dutch Military

For many years, when an officer in the Dutch military was being prepared for a high ranking position, they started a leadership development training, working on their communication, strategic skill, and leadership competencies.

At the beginning of the training a MindSonar profile was made and the candidate defined their own strengths and weaknesses as a high ranking officer. Their MindSonar profile was related to the competencies they wanted to develop (they chose five from a list of twelve competencies defined by the military).

The Thinking Styles and criteria in their MindSonar profile were seen as a ‘lever’ to better enable them to develop these competencies. An officer might, for instance, want to develop a thinking style that had stronger ‘towards,’ ‘general,’ ‘people’, and “structure” Thinking Styles, combined with more ‘yellow’ criteria (personal development and systems overview). During the year the officer had several conversations with the MindSonar professional. At the end of the course, another measurement was done to determine if the target competencies had indeed been developed.The MindSonar professional running this project was Marjan Kos (Netherlands). Look her up in the Registry.

Improving Diversity in the Workplace

Improving Diversity in the Workplace

Words by Levitha Biji

Leicester business owner opens up about her experience of racism, which led her to start a business based on equality, diversity and inclusion 

Experiencing racism once – in a new business owner’s life – motivated Minakshee Patel to start her own consultancy firm. 

Whilst at a Polytechnic in the mid 1980’s, she stood in an election for the Students Union. She wrote history being the first female as well as the first Asian during the election. However, there were some individuals who believed she didn’t have a place there, she told us: “They used a derogatory term to describe me because I am Asian, I was shocked.” Being the character she is, the experience made her more determined to win the election, which she did. She said, “It was more about them than me.” She eventually started her own consultancy business, Minakshee Patel Consultancy. 

She turned this experience into a positive one and now Minakshee, who has 16 years’ experience, wants to make a difference by adding value regarding equality, diversity and inclusion to other organisations and ensuring their employees have a voice. This business owner’s goal is to be a catalyst in her clients’ journeys to help them reach their goals by using MindSonar®. 

MindSonar® measures cognitive diversity and the insights gained enables staff to perform at their best and improve diversity & inclusion within the workplace by helping to address unconscious bias, leading to a competitive advantage for your organisation.

Cognitive Diversity: a Workforce needs a MindSonar® solution

Only a few weeks ago I was reminded about diverse thinking. I coach Colts Rugby and had, for my sins, agreed to help the under 7s team. Being prepared for herding cats, I planned a session to finish with a game. One 7-year-old explained how I could improve the game. I reluctantly entertained his idea and it was a hit. I had fun, the kids had fun and we were more productive in achieving the same outcomes of evasion, pace and teamwork.  

So let me ask you to stop and think. Yes, stop and think.  How many people do your clients have in their workforce that look like them, agree with them and act like them? The other rugby coaches did not question the game I had proposed. They look and sound similar to me.  

A lot has been written about diversity in the past 25 years and much has been concerned with demographic diversity. That is, diversity which is based on colour or race, sexuality, gender, age and culture.  Rightly so.  Demographic diversity is a must. It has been proven many times that an organisation that does not actively engage in diversity can limit ability and productivity. Organisations with a diverse workforce have the ability to be more productive. The Royal Academy of Engineering identified research into culture and inclusion in engineering and found that ‘inclusion benefits the performance of individual engineers, with 80% reporting increased motivation, 68% increased performance and 52% increased commitment.’

Failure to engage with people who are diverse has led to well documented disasters such as the 9/11 bombings in the USA. The CIA at the time was populated with highly intelligent men, ‘the best of the best,’ white, Ivy-League educated men. They overlooked the warning signs of a terrorist attack. Why? Because they could not perceive the threat or signs of build-up in terrorist activity. Despite the high entrance examinations and psychological assessments to become an agent for the CIA they lacked diversity and reference experience beyond their world. They lacked understanding of an impending problem. Their perception in the context of attacks in the USA was: it will never happen, they cannot win.  The CIA agents were all from a similar mould and this had served the CIA well. 

However, while the agents lacked demographic diversity and reference experience to a problem, it has also been argued they lacked understanding and had little cognitive diversity within their group. As MindSonar® professionals we can explain the measurement of others against ourselves as thinking differently or being cognitively diverse.  We know this in simple terms as how you think and what you value, what drives or motivates YOU is different to ME. Neither is good or bad, it’s how that style serves us at that time in a specific context.  Our cognitive style, as we know, is not our personality. Our style is not fixed but it is flexible.   

Let me give an example that might prove helpful for clients.  You know when you have experienced a problem and you have contacted a friend or called a wise parent who has provided new insight to your approach because they experienced the same or a similar problem before?  I suspect you can recall how grateful you were for their input and how much time it saved you. Imagine doing this always in the work environment.   Imagine if the CIA had access to MindSonar® measurement for building a team of diverse thinkers?

So back to our problem: the skills of MindSonar® can help – instead of dialling a friend or colleague, why not advise a client to dial internally and ask some questions about what approach would be more helpful from referenced experience? What options or steps could be useful here? What could go wrong or what do they need to solve this? By using the opposite of your meta programmes you gain access to a range of new answers. Jaime Leal uses this approach with teams by leaving them with a MindSonar® coach in the room poster – a set of questions that a team can ask of themselves to manage their blind spots. 

It would be fair to say fostering demographic diversity gains different views, but it is not targeted at thinking differently.  Yes, we may gain some advantage if we have people from different backgrounds but if they attended the same school, and the same training programmes, they are likely to act like each other.  So demographic diversity only partly meets the world of change we face with artificial intelligence which poses many challenges to our work. 

With complex problems we need a variety of views on how to approach and understand information or to solve problems. Price Waterhouse Cooper identify that we are living through a fundamental transformation in the way we work. Automation and ‘thinking machines’ are replacing human tasks and jobs and changing the skills that organisations are seeking in their people. These momentous changes raise huge organisational, talent and HR challenges – at a time when business leaders are already wrestling with unprecedented risks, disruption and political and societal upheaval. 

Now we know the problems, it is fair to say we have one of the best solutions available: MindSonar®.

If we are going to meet the demands of the future, we need to share how we can develop understanding of  a workforce in others so that workforce can be more productive, solve problems more effectively and challenge each other to gain results. Perhaps we need organisations to develop a change in what they ask when seeking the right people for the roles they have. Instead of asking: who do we need? Perhaps we could encourage organisations to ask: what do we need in terms of thinking style and values against our long-term needs and gaps in the organisation?

Organisations by their nature in these unprecedented times and rapid development want success regardless of their motivators and the quickest way to gain success is by harnessing the right workforce to do the right job at the right time. The workforce that understands and harnesses different styles through understanding will be the workforce that lasts and WE  have the key to unlock their success.  

After over 20 years of coaching rugby, a diverse, uninhibited thinker, aged 7, brought fun and energy to my coaching. Cognitive diversity in the workplace to meet future demands is so important because #thinkingmakesitso when we use MIndSonar®