Assessments – Healthy Growing Leaders

“Why do people act as they do?” Dr. Greg Wiens has invested most of his life in attaining four degrees and in six different professions trying to answer that question. His approach is an attempt to understand people from seven divergent disciplines: psychological, theological, cultural, economic, social, behavioral, and physiological. After over four decades of research, Greg has come to realize that humans are more beautiful and sophisticated than any single field can adequately appreciate or explain. Likewise, any attempt to accurately assess someone must approach the individual from several different perspectives.

Assessments have the capacity to set us free to be who we were created to be – if they are used correctly

Whether you use our assessment instruments (TrueWiring®), some other group of instruments, or a combination of the two, our main objective is to encourage you to appreciate the complexity of human beings and avoid relying on any single instrument or set of scales.

In our contemporary culture of narrowly specialized fields of study, each of the seven disciplines mentioned above too quickly discounts the significant contribution of the other six in describing why we do what we do.

We are convinced that everyone has a sweet spot, what we call an A-game, a place where they can excel in being who they were created to be. Everything in their lives can be used to hone their uniqueness: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The goal of the assessment process is to identify personality traits, behaviors, and tendencies that uniquely describe an individual’s contribution to this world. Effective assessments also help the individual come to grips with the implications of their unique wiring, both their hardware and their software. Hardware attributes are those traits that are more permanently wired into your persona. Software attributes are those which have been scripted through your culture or family of origin. Understanding the difference between hardware and software attributes is the beginning of the assessment process. This is what we call the art of assessing people.

Healthy Growing Leaders is an organization dedicated to improving the health of leaders through effective assessment processes.

Healthy Growing Leaders Assessments

As creative assessment architects, we design, develop, and debrief assessments for individuals and organizations. Assessment instruments can be purchased individually or as a package. We offer free introductory videos to explain the importance of the assessment process as well as an overview of each of the instruments we offer.

We approach assessments from both the hardware and the software perspective. Individuals have hard wiring (hardware) that causes them to lean into behavioral patterns that seldom change significantly throughout their life. However, individuals are significantly influenced by their software. These are the influences of their culture of origin, their social networks, significant emotional experiences, and so forth. Our assessment instruments, as well as others we may employ, help us measure both hardware and software tendencies of individuals. Our assessments use results from the selected instruments to articulate the influence of many factors on a person’s behavior.

Our goal for each of the levels of assessment packages is to identify the unique intersection of hardware and software which produce a preferred environment, the person’s A-game. Our goal is not to find out whether a person fits into a specific slot. Instead, our passion is to find the unique roles where this person would thrive and then compare all of the unique reasons why or why not they would fit into a specific role. This is our unique strength as creative assessment architects. Beyond offering individual instruments, we have developed three packages: TrueWiring®, Level One, and Level Two.

TrueWiring®

TrueWiring® (https://truewiring.com/) is a package of four instruments developed for businesses and nonprofits to help in equipping employers and mobilizing volunteers. By adding a Spiritual Gifts instrument, we extend the suite into a package we call TrueWiring® for Churches (https://truewiring4churches.com).

The TrueWiring® instruments are intentionally designed to identify an individual’s unique natural and gifted wiring that will impact how and where they serve best. Some of the instruments also identify issues that may impede their capacity to perform well.

Instruments Employed:

DISC (DISC^w)
Emotional Intelligence Inventory (EQ^w)
Conflict Profile (CP^w)
Conflict Profile 360 (CP-360^w)
Motivators (M^w)
Spiritual Gifts (SG^w) ^{[for Churches]}

Understanding Your Results

The reports generated by each of these instruments provide broad insight into helping the individual interpret their results.

Level One Assessment

The Level One assessment process leverages the results from the TrueWiring® instruments plus one or two other instruments depending on the desired outcome. The first step in the assessment process is to identify the target role. The target role defines the position in terms of skill sets, knowledge base, and behaviors. All of the instruments of the candidate are interpreted in light of this target.

Instruments Employed (based on the desired outcome):

DISC (DISC^w)
Emotional Intelligence Inventory (EQ^w)
Conflict Profile (CP^w)
Conflict Profile 360 (CP-360^w)
Motivators (M^w)
Spiritual Gifts (SG^w) ^{[for Churches]}
16 Primary Factors (16PF)
Career Development Report (CDR)
Financial Health Assessment (FHA) ^{[Fall 2019]}

Understanding Your Results

Once the data is collected from the instruments, a two-hour online video-based assessment debrief is scheduled to unpack conflict resolution skills, behavioral needs, emotional intelligence inventories, values, motivators, team/task assessment, and the leadership style potential of the person being assessed.

The process compares target scales identified through the various instruments. The Level One Assessment is a relatively inexpensive assessment package to compare the potential match of a target role to the attributes of a candidate. The Level One Assessment debrief usually produces a coaching report of approximately 15 pages.

Throughout this process, it’s critical to understand how each instrument maps to one another. The various scales of one directly impact the interpretation of the scales from the other instruments. This process provides a quick look with a high degree of predictive probability.

Level Two Assessment

The Level Two assessment builds on the framework above. In this assessment, we evaluate specific competencies, as well as the life and history of the candidate. The process is designed to reveal the software issues of the candidate that potentially affect performance in the role identified. In other words, we take the assessment process to a much deeper level.

If married, we assess the spouse with the candidate for further insight. Other tools (i.e., 360 assessments & Couples Reports) are added to confirm or challenge the self-report nature of some of the previously named instruments. Heuristic and life-planning tools are used to assess past behavior and relational health under stress (i.e., Behavioral Assessment & Family History Analysis).

Instruments Employed (based on the desired outcome):

DISC (DISC^w)
Emotional Intelligence Inventory (EQ^w)
Conflict Profile (CP^w)
Conflict Profile 360 (CP-360^w)
Motivators (M^w)
Spiritual Gifts (SG^w) ^{[for Churches]}
16 Primary Factors (16PF)
Career Development Report (CDR)
Financial Health Assessment (FHA) ^{[Fall 2019]}
Couples Counseling Report (CCR)
Behavioral Assessment (Interactive, in-person)
Family History Analysis (Interactive, in-person)
Psychographic Analysis (Interactive, in-person)

Understanding Your Results

The complexity of the Level Two Assessment requires an eight-hour, face-to-face gathering. Typically, this includes the couple and at least one of the sponsoring agency representatives, but no more than six people. We provide a much more in-depth and interactive approach with the instruments than the Level One to allow for exploring detailed findings and software aspects of an individual or couple. Software aspects are those facets of our complex personalities that can change through effective coaching, or perhaps professional counseling.

We recommend a Level Two assessment for executive positions or positions where significant financial or emotional investment is being made. The Level Two Assessment process allows for much greater insight into the candidates A-game, and therefore, a more detailed coaching report, between 25-30 pages, is provided.

Conclusion

These three assessment packages are designed to meet specific results based on over 30 years of experience and refinement. The privilege of being creative assessment architects is that we design, develop, and debrief assessments depending on the context or need. For that reason, we seek to understand the unique desired outcomes and can design a process with different instruments or even develop unique instruments.

We love what we do and enjoy approaching the whole venue of assessments from a creative and yet practical perspective. This is how we view and practice assessments differently.

We offer different levels of assessments for different needs. We can even develop an assessment instrument for your unique need!

We offer a much more in-depth assessment for leaders in different venues. Often these may be business leaders, executives, staff, entrepreneurs, etc. We use six primary assessments for our Level-One Assessments; which involves a two-hour video-driven debrief and review. Each of these assessments identifies different domains of a leader. They are DISC^W, EQ^W, Motivators^W, Conflict Profile^W, 16PF, and Leadership Competencies. Our Level-Two Assessment which involves a full day onsite debrief and coaching session. This Assessment builds upon the six LOA instruments with five additional assessment/exercises.

Other assessment and debrief packages are customized to your needs as the client. Dr. Wiens can develop instruments and processes needed to meet the particular need of your situation. One size does not fit all, especially when it comes to assessments. Don’t be fooled into using someone else’s standard assessment to meet your particular needs.

EQ^W—is a measure of one’s ability to understand and appropriately know how to use emotions in life. The instrument we use currently uses 7 scales and is uniquely equipped to identify a bias on the part of the person taking the instrument:

Identifying own emotions
Identifying others emotions
Managing own emotions
Managing others emotions
Using emotions in problem solving
Emotions under stress

Most of us have never really thought of intentionally developing the specific skill sets of each of these constructs. EQ measures how developed each of these constructs are in a person’s life.

CONFLICT PROFILE^W—(CPThis is a self-reported instrument where the individual scores how they see themselves handling conflict in a particular role. This does not represent how others view them in conflict. There are three conflict engagement modes: Solving, Accommodating and lastly Winning. Solving represents when a person is trying to truly reconcile an issue or is seeking to compromise. Either way one is engaging the conflict. Accommodating shows when one avoids or yields the conflict. Winning is when one wins the conflict.

Looking at the break down of five constructs for handling conflict, from Jaime’s perspective his top approach in his work environment is Resolving (69.2%), followed by Avoiding (65.5%), Compromising (61.8%), Winning (50%), and lastlyYielding (46%). None of the five different approaches to conflict is better than another because there are appropriate times to use each of these. Winning is when one is most concerned about the solution. Resolving is a win-win scenario. This approach holds a high view of the relationship and the solution. Compromise is when two people want two different things and they meet in the middle. Yielding is viewing the relationship higher than the solution. Avoiding is not valuing either the relationship or the solution.

16PF—is like the DISC on steroids. It measures five global factors: Extraversion, Independence, Tough Mindedness, Self Control and Anxiety. Each of these global factors are constructed through the combination of four or five of 16 Personality Factors (thus the 16PF). For instance, one’s Extroversion score is a combination of Warmth, Liveliness, Social Boldness, Privateness and Self-reliance. The Independence factor is composed of Dominance, Social Boldness, Vigilance and Openness to Change. Tough Mindedness is composed of Warmth, Sensitivity, Abstractedness and Openness to Change. Self Control is composed of Liveliness, Rule Consciousness, Abstractedness and Perfectionism. Finally, the Anxiety factor is composed of Emotional Stability, Vigilance, Apprehensive and Tension. Some of the strengths of this instrument are it’s validity scales as well as it correlation to the Holland vocational scales.

We have created a Level One and Level Two assessment process to support organizations in their candidate selection process. The Level One assessment process includes the TrueWiring® suite of instruments, plus others depending on the needs of the organization, followed by a one- to two-hour virtual debrief of the instruments. Level Two assessments go even deeper, include more instruments, and require a face-to-face debrief that generally lasts about eight hours. The assessment instruments are all administered online. The debriefing process provides a detailed coaching report that summarizes the results with recommended next steps.

The attached PDF provides a summary of all three assessments for businesses and churches: PDF Handout for Businesses and PDF Handout for Churches

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