Psychometric Instruments

The suite of surveys available within the Team Management Systems portfolio enables leaders and members of teams to understand their strengths, preferences, values, risk profile, team orientation and much more. It also enables teams to explore what is working for them and potentially what’s working against them.

The TMS tools have been used more than one million times across 160 countries. They provide a great framework for assessing the current state of play in teams and identifying what needs to happen to achieve high productivity in the future.

The Team Management Profile is one of the key elements of the TMS suite; it is a 60-item assessment focused on enhancing understanding of an individual’s approaches to work.

Based on responses to the profile questionnaire, the personal Team Management Profile provides constructive, work-based information outlining an individual’s work preferences and the strengths that an individual brings to a team.

Life Style Inventory

The LSI is enormously popular within Australia and overseas for understanding how our behaviours (as distinct from our preferences) impact our outcomes. You will find below two useful product sheets on LSI 1 (which is a self-assessment of your behavioural impacts) and LSI 2 (which is feedback from others regarding their perceptions of your behavioural impacts).

Organisational Culture Inventory / Organisational Effectiveness Inventory

The OCI and OEI have been used by major corporations in the public and private sectors to set targets for superior performance for the organisation and to track these over time. Empirical evidence demonstrates the high returns this can yield for organisations over the space of even a couple of years.

Leadership Impact

The Leadership Impact instrument examines how your particular leadership style influences others to behave; does it make them act constructively or more defensively? It is an excellent tool for leaders with other team leaders reporting to them as it provides an indication of your leadership multiplication effect.

Group Styles Inventory

The Group Styles Inventory is a great tool for teams to use in examining team member perceptions of their team’s effectiveness and in ascertaining how the predominant behaviours of the team are playing out. Are the behaviours working constructively for the team or causing sub-optimal outcomes to be realised?

The MLQ report provides an excellent framework for interpreting the impact of a leader’s behaviours. It examines these behaviours in light of various leadership styles, such as transactional, laissez-faire and transformational leadership styles. The tool is very well researched and results provide a summary against universal norms.

Key features of the tool are:

It measures, explains and demonstrates to individuals the key factors that set truly exceptional leaders apart from marginal ones
It differentiates effective and ineffective leaders at all organisational levels
It assesses the effectiveness of an entire organisation’s leadership
It is valid across cultures and types of organisations
It requires only 15 minutes to complete the questionnaire
It is extensively researched and validated
It provides an excellent relationship between survey data and organisational outcome
It is the benchmark measure of transformational leadership
It provides a comprehensive leadership developmental report to support goal setting.

The Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation–Behavior™ (FIRO-B®) assessment is used in a wide variety of applications including:

• Leadership development
• Team building
• Individual interpersonal effectiveness
• Retention

It provides information on a person’s need for inclusion, affection and control when dealing with others, as well as preferences for initiating or receiving interaction with others. For interpersonal or team based interactions, developing an understanding around these needs and preferences can significantly enhance the potential for successful outcomes.

Denison uses normative scoring to present survey results. An organisation’s raw survey data is compared to a global database of nearly 1,000 organisations (from multiple industries, regions and sectors) and a graphical profile provided that conveys the results in the form of percentile scores. This method enables you to benchmark your culture scores against other higher and lower-performing organisations worldwide. Thus, the Denison Organizational Culture Survey provides a measure of your organisation’s progress toward achieving a high-performance culture and optimum results.

By implementing the Denison Organizational Culture Survey, organisations are able to:

Assess the strengths and weaknesses that are impacting their performance
Identify areas of focus for improvement
Align their culture change and leadership development initiatives when leveraging both surveys
Create action plans

Benchmarks is a comprehensive 360-degree assessment tool for experienced managers that measures 16 competencies deemed critical for success, as well as five possible career derailers. Benchmarks offers an in-depth look at development by assessing skills developed from a multitude of leadership experiences, identifying what lessons may yet to be learned and helping the executive determine what specific work experiences need to be sought out in order to develop critical skills for success.

Through the Benchmarks process, participants:

Learn how others perceive their strengths and development needs.
Learn how they compare with similar managers in other organizations.
Focus on skills and perspectives critical to being effective and successful.
Design a plan that links needs to specific developmental experiences.

The Benchmarks product:

Provides normative comparison of results with other successful managers as well as optional industry norm comparisons
Provides ratings for both importance and competence
Provides information on potential career derailers
Offers a Development Planning Guide, helping participants focus feedback and develop a strategy for change

Experience Point is not really a psychometric instrument, but we have included it here for your reference because it is a tool that’s really worth considering if you are involved in managing change processes.

What Experience Point is, in fact, is a world-class simulation designed to bring participants together to tackle a real-world change initiative. In the simulation, participants become Change Consultants engaged by the CEO to implement best practice change in an organisation which is siloed, not customer focusing and financially underperforming.

Participants work in teams to develop and implement change initiatives and to monitor organisation impact. They then bring their analysis back to the group for a case dialogue. An in-depth discussion of best practice follows and the following seven stage model for managing change is explored, based on the work of Kotter, Bandler and Lewin:

Understand the Need for Change
Establish Change Leadership
Develop Vision and Strategy
Create a Sense of Urgency
Communicate Vision
Take Action
Consolidate Gains

Emphasis is placed on applying this universal set of change principles and developing an appreciation that different situations often call for different approaches.