Self-awareness through psychometrics

Motivation, management, communications, and relationships – focused on yourself or others – are a lot more effective when you understand yourself, and the people you seek to motivate or manage or develop or help.

Psychometric assessments are tools that can provide insight into self-awareness, strengths and how we work best. Completing personality tests with no knowledge of the supporting theories can be a frustrating and misleading experience – especially if the results from personality testing are not properly explained, or worse still not given at all to the person being tested.

Firgun utilise multiple assessment approaches to help you understand more about you and when you’re at your best.

“That’s such a ‘blue’ thing to say…”

Personality is incredibly complex – and not fully understood.
It combines individual inherent, internal factors (your traits), environmental factors (your state), and societal and social group influences (your “mates”).

Simplifying this down to a small subset of letters or colours (red, green, blue, yellow etc.), as some models do, not only reduces “you”, but it undermines how powerful these assessments can be when utilised appropriately.

These shoudl never be used in isolation or as the sole decision point in identifying talent.

Assessments

Trait & Type Assessments

DiSC is a personal assessment tool used by more than one million people every year to help improve teamwork, communication, and productivity in the workplace.

The DiSC model provides a common language people can use to better understand themselves and those they interact with—and then use this knowledge to reduce conflict and improve working relationships.

DiSC assessments are used in thousands of organizations around the world, from sprawling government agencies and Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits and small businesses. The reason is simple: DiSC profiles help build stronger, more effective working relationships.

The purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) personality inventory is to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people’s lives. The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment.

Team Assessments

The Belbin team roles model was developed in the late 1970s, and aims to balance teams comprising of people with different capabilities.

Belbin’s key book ‘Management Teams – Why They Succeed or Fail’, was first published in 1981. According to Belbin publicity (Belbin founded Belbin Associates, who produce and provide psychometrics (personality and behavioural testing) instruments and other related services based on Belbin’s theories) the Belbin Team Roles model is used by over 40% of the UK’s top 100 companies, and thousands more internationally.

DiSC Insights Discovery and DiSC Flow also provide some team and culture assessment capability, based on the psychology of Carl Jung, to help people understand themselves, understand others, and make the most of the relationships that affect them in the workplace.

The Insights Discovery methodology uses a simple and memorable four colour model to help people understand their style, their strengths and the value they bring to the team. We call these the colour energies, and it’s the unique mix of Fiery Red, Sunshine Yellow, Earth Green and Cool Blue energies, which determines how and why people behave the way they do.

Personality Assessments

Lumina Spark was designed to expand on the Big Five personality models by measuring both ends of a measurement scale separately, i.e., not ‘forcing choice’ on a subject. High scores in a certain area therefore do not necessarily mean low scores in another, and participants can claim qualities at opposite ends of a polarity.

The system also focuses on visual representation, creating engaging personality ‘portraits’ that are said to be easy for users to decode and use.

The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) describes normal, or bright-side personality – qualities that describe how we relate to others when we are at our best. Whether your goal is to find the right hire or develop stronger leaders, assessing normal personality gives you valuable insight into how people work, how they lead, and how successful they will be.