Tools of the Trade - and the One Tool You Shouldn’t Leave Home Without
The exact toolkit you assemble will depend a lot on where you are landing in terms of offering, and the problems you are setting out to solve.
For example, if you are focussed on solving the need for managers and leaders to develop, and are planning to achieve that via Coaching, then you are going to want to make sure you can present yourself as a credible Coach.
We have just used Coaching as an example; if you are planning on specialising in, say, Facilitating Team Workshops, then there are no end to the available frameworks you can learn off the shelf - or again, develop yourself.
Other solutions, such as Recruitment Selection Support need not only frameworks but also a knowledge of applicable legislation in your jurisdiction(s), as well as cultural knowledge.
Some solutions are like Coaching in that there are recognised Accreditations available; others such as OD (Organisational Development) have more diverse sources of ‘accreditation’, ranging from Tertiary Degrees to programmes offered by Professional Bodies for HRM, such as CIPD in the UK and elsewhere.
If coaching is your thing
Check out Accreditation from:
ICF (International Coaching Federation)
EMCC (European Mentoring and Coaching Council)
Lots of providers of Coaching Training are accredited with one or both of the above
The one tool not to leave home without
There is one part of the toolkit, we haven’t yet referred to: measurement and reporting. If this site was about building a Financial Planning Business, we would doubtless have a section on everything from Excel to Trading and Analysis platforms; if we were talking about building a Data Visualisation business, we would discuss Tableau and PowerBI, Qlik and DataWrapper. But this site is about the People business; and who measures people?
And the answer of course is, lots of assessments of various kinds. Reports suggest there are somewhere between 1500 and ten times that number in use in the global workplace. Some are definitely better than others; a surprising number appear to have started life on the back of an envelop or in a classroom discussion. Some which claim “extensive scientific research”, have never been within shooting distance of research, let alone anything like a scientist.
Introducing the best tool to measure what matters to people: The Birkman Method® (TBM).
Bad measurement will only make your job harder; but accurate, objective, reliable data, will give your business proposition a unique selling proposition that is hard for competitors to combat. And TBM is the best there is.
TBM allows you to understand individuals, to compare and contrast them with one another, and to look at people in small groups or large functional or organisational settings. It is a tool which is flexible enough to support all of the applications we have discussed, which is based on actual empirical research (rather than a theoretical hypothesis), tested and validated across languages and cultures, calibrated (so that comparisons between individuals and teams are meaningful), synoptic and scaleable (able to look at any sized group of people, and able to zoom in on an individual our right out to see a whole organisation).
Why does this matter to you, as you look at building your business as a People Specialist?
On the Home Page we talked about having a language to allow people to express and explain themselves without fear of misunderstanding: TBM give them that language. There are no “good” or “bad” perspectives in TBM; just perspectives that vary greatly from person to person. Comparing and contrasting those perspectives without making value judgements allows diverse people to work effectively and productively together.
Why does this matter? People are notoriously hard to read. Whether you look at Recruitment, or internal promotions, or HiPo programmes, or Coaching engagements, or anything else within the People space, the number one excuse you will hear attempting to cover a failure or other unforeseen disaster is “we had no way of knowing they would do that”. Using TBM, you can help your customers go beyond this.
TBM is a very powerful guide to how people are likely to react to particular people and situations. It is not about reading minds; it is about knowing how someone with a particular set of perspectives and motivations will respond to a given situation.
This ability to understand, predict and explain lends a credibility to your practice that no number of other certificates can duplicate. So don’t dismiss this part of your toolkit. If your work is predicated on starting from an accurate, positive and non-judgemental understanding of the people you are helping, using TBM will give that a solid, objective and accurate basis.
For more background on TBM you can visit https://elaura.com or informational sites such as https://birkman.nz
To find upcoming Birkman Certification options near you, go to https://birkmancertification.com
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