Byron: Hi, my name is Byron Hebert and this is another Tool Time Update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and the Entrepreneur’s Playbook. In the last Tool Time Update I talked to you about Birkman and how we use it in coaching our clients, hiring, conflict resolution and all the things that come up from the people side of our business, which as we all know is very important. Within Birkman there are 11 component parts and these component parts make up our personality if you will in how we come to work every day and it’s really am accumulation of our life experiences. The first one I’m going to talk to you about is esteem. Now esteem, not to be confused with self esteem, is how we relate to each other on a one on one basis. So the predominant style usually people are fairly direct communicators; you’ve got a low esteem score, means you’re going to be a direct communicator. You may sound blunt to some people you’re so direct.

If you have a high esteem score that means that you may be more cautious in the way you talk to people, maybe a little bit more sensitive to what people are hearing. And do there’s not a good or bad, there’s not a right or wrong, it’s just the way we are hard-wired if you will.

So we also have a need in esteem and our need in esteem is how people are going to communicate to us; how we hear people and how we want to be communicated with. The interesting thing is the predominant score on this is that people have a fairly low esteem – they’re fairly direct communicators – but their need may be that they don’t want to be talked to that directly. And so it’s interesting to find that out about someone so you know how to communicate with them, and this is the power of Birkman. All these things you’ll learn about someone over time, but with a tool like this you can learn it much quicker. And so what we want to do, again, is make sure that we know what people’s communication style, what their need is, so we’re meeting that so we keep them out of their stress behavior. Stress behavior is what we want to avoid because it’s destructive behavior. We’re going to be going over more component parts in more Tool Time Updates coming.

Again, my name is Byron Hebert, this is another Tool Time Update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and the Entrepreneur’s Playbook.