About 1,880 Words on Skillscope

With my mind awhirl with thoughts regarding my grad school plans and my eyes gone half-blind with digging deeper into department web sites for more specifics of program curricula, admission requirements, and current grad student profiles/vitae (as a guide to how I stack up against the types of students they enroll, which, let me add, is not a very joyful exercise when looking at top 10 programs), I decided I needed to take a step back. So I am taking a little different approach to this today by getting a bit more holistic and a lot more self-assessing. I was considering doing a SWOT analysis on myself – this is a standard methodology often applied in the business environment to a company or brand, but also I think could be helpful on a personal level – to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in the context of successfully getting into a choice graduate program and excelling there. (Yes that is hopelessly wonky.) But even before doing that, I thought it would be nice to look at some more fundamental personal characteristics re: “who I am” and “who I seem to be” in a professional (i.e. not hanging out with my friends) environment. (However, I would expect that many of these characteristics are common across these contexts.)

As part of management training I took last year (which was excellent, by the way), we took a number of different assessments. One of these was the Skillscope test, a 360 degree feedback instrument in which your supervisor, direct reports, and peers in the organization (anonymously) rate you on various attributes covering 5 major managerial areas: information skills, decision making, interpersonal skills, personal resources, and effective use of self. You also rate yourself. I cannot vouch for the psychometric credentials of this test, but it looks reasonable and appears to cover the types of attributes that are commonly believed to be related to career/managerial success. The brochure claims that is based on “extensive research” and I am willing to propositionally believe that the industrial/organizational psychologists and other social science researchers who developed it knew what they were doing enough that looking at the results of the assessment will not be actively dangerous.

Here are is the explanation of how the scoring worked:

“Raters were asked to mark as a strength only those items that are definitely characteristic of you and to mark as a development need only those few items you especially need to work on. The absence of a response is ambiguous and intentionally designed into Skillscope. It can mean that the rater did not think the item applied to you, or it can mean that the rater could not clearly identify the item as a strength or development need.”

One thing I have to recognize when looking at this is that it is going to be a reflection of the salient characteristics most associated with my particular job. There are going to be areas that show up as neither a strength or weakness because this aspect is simply invisible to them or because it is not something that applies to my specific job but that may be a strength or weakness if I were in a position that requires it. For example, no one (including me) rated me for several characteristics that I more strongly associate with a person in a greater personnel management/leadership role: “Effective at managing conflict,” “Brings out the best in people,” or “Able to inspire, motivate people.” I did get ratings on the other 95 characteristics though. In many cases, only a couple of people termed them a strength or a weakness, such as “Introduces needed change in the face of opposition,” “Skilled at relating to many different types of people,” and “Good initiative.”

For each item, I could see how I scored myself, how my boss scored me, and how others scored me. Following the instructions, I categorized the items in four categories.

Good news and not surprising: You said an item was a strength and others agreed [I included only those with at least 4 of my 5 raters marking it as a strength.]

Probes, digs beneath the surface, tests validity of information (5/5)
Creates order out of large quantities of information (5/5)
In a new assignment, picks up knowledge and expertise easily; a quick study (5/5)
At home with graphs, charts, stats, budgets (5/5)
Logical, data based, rational (5/5)
Shows mastery of job content; excels at her function or professional specialty (5/5)
Good public speaker; skilled at performing, being on stage (5/5)
Isn’t abrasive; doesn’t usually antagonize people (5/5)
Has good relationships with peers (5/5)
Listens well (5/5)
Collaborates well with others (5/5)

Defines problems effectively; gets to the heart of a problem (4/5)
Adept at disseminating information to others (4/5)
Strong communicator on paper; good writing skills (4/5)
Structures direct reports’ work appropriately (4/5)
Has good relationships with direct reports (4/5)
Has good relationships with superiors (4/5)
Takes ideas different from own seriously, and from time to time changes mind (4/5)
Creates good give-and-take with others in conversations, meetings (4/5)
Willing to admit ignorance (4/5)
Has integrity; trustworthy (4/5)

- To me, this is saying that I am empirically oriented, I interact with people in an effective professional manner, I communicate ideas well, and I have a good level of credibility. For those of you who haven’t heard the speech before, credibility in the workplace is a highly significant concept for me. Credibility is the thing responsible for that wonderful EF Hutton experience: when you talk, other people listen. The great thing about focusing on credibility, rather than say authority or genius, is that anyone can develop it.

Good news and surprising: You said an item was a development need but your raters viewed it as a strength

Seeks information energetically (5/5)
Works effectively with other people over whom she has no direct authority (5/5)
Can organize and manage big, long-term projects; good shepherding skills (4/5)
Implements decisions; follows through; follows up well; an expediter (4/5)
Resourceful; can marshal people, funds, and space required for projects (3/5)
Action-oriented; presses for immediate results (3/5)
Team builder; brings people together successfully around tasks (2/5)

- People are giving me a lot more credit for project management and team management skills than I thought I had. Any success I have with marshalling people and building task-based teams, I attribute primarily to treating people with respect, having an aura of competence, and basically having my shit together so people don’t think I’m going to waste their time. I am certainly not getting it done by calling on a significant network of people who are just willing to do anything for me because I’m so friendly and nice or have some high level of charisma or political astuteness or status. As for “pressing for immediate results” – I hope they mean that in a good way.

In addition, some people (3/5 or better) did rate as strengths some areas I thought were neutral that could be categorized as “Good news and sort of surprising/heartening.” We didn’t go through the exercise of gleaning these from the list during my class, so this is actually new information to me; don’t you feel privileged to be here as I let these unknown strangers toot my horn:

Sets priorities well; distinguishes clearly between important and unimportant tasks (5/5)
Flexible; good at varying her approach with the situation (5/5)
Good coach, counselor, mentor; patient with people as they learn (4/5) [!!!]
Capable, cool in high pressure situations (4/5)
Establishes and conveys a sense of purpose (3/5)
Can translate strategy into action over the long haul (3/5)
Builds warm, cooperative relationships (3/5) [no, I did not make that up]
Thinks in terms of trade-offs; doesn’t assume a single best way (3/5)
Deals with interruptions appropriately; knows when to admit interruptions and when to screen them out (3/5)
Optimistic; takes the attitude that most problems can be solved (3/5)
Capitalizes on own strengths (3/5)
Learns from own experience; not set in her ways (3/5)

- The idea that I am patient with people as they learn surprises me quite a bit. This is not how I view myself and not, I think, very true of me in the past. But upon reflection, I can see that I have done a fair amount of training/educating at this job either in more formal talks/presentations to various groups of people on areas in which I am a subject matter expert or in one-on-one situations, so perhaps it’s not strange for this to be a salient aspect of my behavior. And I am glad to get feedback that I am being effective in helping people figure stuff out. Maybe one thing that helps here is that I am adamantly opposed to any style of training or instruction that treats people as they though they are morons just because they don’t happen to know something that I know. Ignorance is not stupidity. (As I recently told Robert, it would be like some Korean person treating him with contempt because he doesn’t speak Korean; even toddlers have mastered such simple things as that!) This is particularly true in a work environment. I mean, yes, it would be easy to get impatient trying to get non-technical people to understand technical concepts, or having to show the 9th person some basic thing in Excel, or explain yet again that target sample size is not based on a percentage of the population, but somehow, I actually don’t. I don’t know if I’ve said this before in this venue, but I am a firm believer that treating other people like idiots for not knowing the things I know is simply another way of denigrating my own skills and abilities. Even if I didn’t think it so critical as a matter of policy to treat other people with respect, I at least have enough self-respect to acknowledge that there are many things I know due to my own experience, study, and particular mental strengths that are non-obvious to the average person. I am much more patient with others than I am with myself, actually, and that’s pretty screwed up. I need to work on that.

Bad news and not surprising: You said an item was a development need and your raters agreed

Has vision; often brings up ideas about potentials and possibilities for the future (2/5)
Spots problems, opportunities, threats, and trends early (1/5)
Manages the process of decision-making effectively; knows who to involve on what issue (1/5)

- It’s unfortunate that I am lacking in some of this “big picture” stuff; in some ways, this is a reflection of my current job, which is mostly about execution rather than planning. (Hence the irony of my job title: Planner IV.) But I do think that I could do better in these areas; there’s not any real barrier holding me back from it.

Bad news and surprising: You said an item was a strength but your raters viewed it as a development need

NONE [woo hoo!]

- Many of my colleagues were really dismayed by the number of items that fell into this category for them. I was pleased to see that I don’t have any obvious blind spots where I’m oblivious to my ineffectiveness or negative image.