Sharon Birkman Fink - The Birkman Method: Your Personality at Work

Contents

Praise for The Birkman Method

Its critical to know the things that make a person tick. Once you understand the individuals you work with each day, you can give greater opportunity to your employees and create a more powerful team. The Birkman Method is an easy read that provides thought-provoking insights and understanding.

Steve Lufburrow, CEO, Goodwill Industries of Houston

The Birkman Method is a tool that provides awareness, understanding, and wisdom for anyone on a learning journey. The power of the Birkman is its ability to make sense of the stories we tell of our interactions with others, which forms the basis of who we are and how we act. This wonderful book shares these stories so that all can relate.

Kelly D. Bean, assistant dean, UCLA Anderson Executive Education

Beliefs and perceptions are such dangerous thingsthey can cost you so much. The Birkman Method helps me recognize them in myself and in others, but more important, it provides a framework for talking about them in an open, nonconfrontational way. I simply dont know what I would do without the Birkman.

Justin Parer, managing director, Pi Strategic Management

The Birkman Methods unique approach sets it apart from any other psychometric assessment tool. Eleven years and 4,500 completed assessments later, we continue to rely on it to add value to our companys individual development and team-building efforts on an ongoing basis.

Margie Poole, senior organizational development consultant, CenterPoint Energy

Building strong leaders and exceptional teams are table stakes for competing successfully in our industry. The Birkman Method has been an invaluable tool for us in supporting this mission for an extended period of time.

John Farrell, senior director of organizational development, Marathon Oil Company

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Birkman Fink, Sharon, 1950

The Birkman method : your personality at work / Sharon Birkman Fink, Stephanie CapparellFirst edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-20701-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-41937-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-42111-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-63759-3 (ebk)

1. Birkman Method of Personality Testing. 2. Personality. 3. Psychology, Industrial. I. Capparell, Stephanie. II. Title.

BF698.8.B47F56 2013

155.283dc23

2012049928

To Roger W. Birkman,

a man of vision whose genuine love for people

inspired him to spend a lifetime

perfecting a way for each of us

to see our full potential

and work together in harmony

Preface

Understanding and retaining people is most often cited as the number one challenge in business, and the top question leaders ask is: How do we hire, manage, and retain our people? While running a business may be hard, it turns out that managing people is even harder.

This is the reason people turn to the Birkman personality assessment: to improve their lives and their working relationships with those closest to them. For more than six decades, millions of individuals have used our positive-psychology tool in over fifty countries, and our client list has grown to include Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit groups, educational and faith-based organizations, mom-and-pop shops, couples, and families. As CEO of Birkman International, I receive e-mails daily from consultants around the world and across the United States.

The story of the Birkman Method begins with the story of my father, Roger Birkman. Growing up as the shy and thoughtful son of a Lutheran pastor, he was fascinated by people and a keen observer of them. As a B-17 bomber pilot during World War II, he saw the power of wide-ranging personal perceptions and the impact of different styles on people and their behaviors.

Returning from the war, he was swept into the booming field of social psychology. Alongside such figures as Benjamin Fruchter, Warren Bennis, and Abraham Maslow, my father was a pioneer in taking psychology to the workplace, a radical new concept at the time. He developed the Birkman Method by asking a variety of workers questions about themselves and how they did their jobs. These interviews of people in the workplace, from salesmen and truck drivers to janitors and top executives, formed the basis of his positive-psychology questionnaire, first called A Test of Social Comprehension.

By the 1960s, my father, who always loved technology, put the research data from his test takers responses on an IBM mainframe computer. These data enabled him to expand into the global workplace, tracking generational changes as well as shifting trends. Most important, the information shows how all individual employees shape corporate cultures and fit into a grander scheme.

But my father didnt do it alone. Soon after returning from the war in 1944, he was fortunate to meet a young woman in the Womens Army Corps at a Veterans Administration picnic. Margaret Sue Leath shared his passion for understanding people and believed in his mission from the beginning. They married a year later, and she worked alongside him until her death in 2007.