Assessing Individuals

By now you are curious what you are: a reactive or a proactive. Or worst case, a metamaniac or a metamoron. Here is an informal quiz you can use, or adapt to your own organization. It tells you where you align yourself, on a scale of ranges describing change potential.

You can test yourself. If you are on a team that is really comfortable with one another, you can also score one another's change quotients, and then compare how you scored yourself versus how they score you.

Most people taking this test are very generous with assessments of themselves; and much less generous assessing others. This is a great way to start a fist-fight, so have a care.

A third way to use the test is to fill it out as if you were another person, observing you.

On each line are seven circles, marking your attitude from one extreme of a continuum to the other. If a 1, 4, or 7 statement sounds too extreme, but close, mark an in-between circle, a 2, 3, 5, or 6.

Answers falling on the left side of the bell curve suggest an inelasticity of personality; answers on the right indicate way too much elasticity. The far left is the realm of neurotic control, in which the will perpetually frustrates itself. The far right is the realm of no control -- an intense unfettered region similar to clinical psychosis.

 

The value of this test is that it begins the necessary process of familiarization. The resuls are informal, so the point is not to file them away in a confidential cabinet, but to use it as a conversation starter. People should test and score themselves, and discuss with their team whether they agree or not with the results. It is not pleasant, even with an off-the-record tests like this, to be told you are any kind of maniac, much less a moron. But it is important that people who do have constitutional problems with change acknowledge the fact. It alters their expectations, and the team's expectations of them. It may even serve as a Push tool to get them thinking about ways they can do better.

Ideally, you will want yourself and your team to score generally close to the middle. It's not a catastrophe if there is a spread; you can balance out one another's proclivities. It probably is a catastrophe if you are all lumped on one end, or if there is no strong center.

 

Scoring: There are 8 questions and 7 possible points per question, a top score would be 56. You don't want that. Here is the range:

     Expanding the Change Space

Return to the metaphor of fixing the lightning rod during a lightning storm while being attacked by beeshornets. The storm was the global change engulfing your organization. The lightning rod was the organizational change implemented to meet the global change head on. The hornets were workers' individual change stressors, distracting them from and making the organizational change more difficult.

The more stress your situation piles upon you, the smaller your change space becomes. It is a paradox: instead of getting better at change, the more of it you are asked to do, the worse you get at it. Piled-on change, with no time allotted for reenergizing, causes most people's change potential to diminish: burnout.

Interestingly, this is less true for proactives. The reason is that metaphiles and metamaniacs are so constituted that they do not let everyday change stress to snowball into intolerable distress.

Now is a good time to point out that it is a good thing we are not all metaphiles, as they can be reckless and insensitive. But we can all learn a few tricks from them.

 As you increase a person's stress levels from any of the three sources of stress mentioned earlier, make sure people are able to re-energize their stress tolerance reserves. Use active methods such as focus group discussions to share feelings of anxiety produced by the change. Encourage people to make time for exercise, to follow a diet that helps combat stress, and to adopt relaxation techniques like meditation or catharsis.

Other stress-reduction ideas:

                 ƒ  Be optimistic. Most metaphiles stay aloft because they are engrossed in a positive, enjoyable way with the change occurring around them. When other people see manure, metaphiles know a pony must be nearby. They survive change in large part because they have pledged allegiance to it.

                 ƒ  Be pessimistic, sort of. Accepting may be a better word. In its simplest form, it is simply a shrug. Most change is not fun. But if it is unpleasant, and unavoidable, why not adopt an attitude of bemused fatalism about it? "You can't stop progress" is both an American anthem and an American elegy: the natural metaphile makes the best of a substandard situation.

                 ƒ  Focus on the trunk. Change weakens ordinary people because we try to grasp all of its implications at once, and it causes our brains to heat up. Like writing a book, it can only be done a chapter at a time. The blind men of Industan could only describe an elephant in terms of the part they were currently touching. Their elephant descriptions were never complete, but at least they were not trampled by the elephant's totality. There is sanity, even in the world of total participation and cross-functionality, in knowing your part and focusing on it.

                 ƒ  Vent. Create and make frequent use of your support network -- whatever combination of people from among your bosses, co-workers, subordinates, friends, family, and if all else fails, your dog. They are there to talk to and to cry on the shoulder of. The more, the merrier. It is surprising how much stress we can put up with if we just have the occasional opportunity to complain. Bitch about it, then get it behind you. Every parent knows there are two kinds of children: the child that complains about having to take out the trash, but then does it, and the child who utters no sound of disagreement, but doesn't take the trash out, either.

                 ƒ  If stress is preventing your team from addressing change needs, maybe you need to address your lunchpail first. A common reaction to stress is rising blood pressure. People under stress often cope by ingesting fatty and salty foods -- the very things that drive blood pressure higher. x