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 Entrepreneurs Playbook. Today I want to talk to you about the Birkman Personality Profile Test. Now many of you have probably heard of Birkman, many of you may have even taken the exam. There’s been many copies of it afterwards; the discs, and Meyer’s Briggs, but Birkman’s been around for the longest, about 60 years. We use it here for hiring executives, for coaching, for conflict resolution and things like that. It’s a very in depth tool. So let me just give you an overview of it.

With Birkman, you have three components basically: you have usual style, which is your reputation, the way you are with people on a normal basis; your needs, and that’s how you need people to relate to you and things like that, and then your stress behavior, and what you want to do is try to stay out of your stress behavior. So how do you stay out of your stress behavior? By getting your needs met. And so I tell people when I’m going over assessment, if you hear nothing else today, hear that you need to hear what your needs are and figure out how to ask for them. So how does that look like? Our usual style, if you can see it kind of looks like I’m drawing a picture of a productive person with usual style, getting things done through people. Our stress behavior kind of looks like this: we may be getting things done, it’s kind of helter skelter, but we’re leaving a wake of bad relationships and hurt feelings in our way.

So what we want to do is stay in our usual style, stay out of our stress behavior by getting our needs met. We’re going to be talking more about Birkman and I’m going to give you some of the component parts of it, and there are 11 of them, and how they relate to you, how you relate to people in the workplace. Again, my name is Byron Hebert, this has been another Tool Time update brought to you by PKF and your friends at The Entrepreneur Playbook.