Assessments

How Your Family & Upbringing Shape Your Leadership Style (Rewriting Your Leadership Code) – Shlomo Ben-Hur

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Nature versus Nurture?

The oldest debate in the world is the question if we have free will (my take on this: It is probably useful for yourself and others to pretend you have one), the second oldest about nature (DNA) versus nurture (Upbringing).

In my perception, it is not a question of Nature versus Nurture but of nature and nurture. I am a strong believer in the ‘Big Five’ and a strong believer (as well as an ‘Expert by experience’) in the role that upbringing and family structure play in our development as leaders.

However, given the fact that we cannot change our DNA, that makes our need to analyze the impact our upbringing and family structure played in our development more important than ever.

The best book I ever read about this topic was ‘Rewriting your Leadership Code’ by Shlomo Ben-Hur and Nik Kinley.

This book posits that our core instincts originate in childhood, creating neural pathways that act like the code of our internal operating system (OS). This OS determines how we process events, make choices, interact with others, and influence our teams. While professional composure usually masks these deep-seated traits, high-pressure situations strip away that filter and reveal our true reactions. Ultimately, leading through crisis exposes both the strengths and flaws of our fundamental character.

I recently had the pleasure of having a conversation with Shlomo about this book. In our conversation, we discussed:

  • The Leadership Code
  • The importance of Self-Awareness for Leaders
  • How Leaders can increase their Self-Awareness
  • Three critical capabilities for Leaders
  • The Big Themes: Free Will and Nature versus Nurture
  • Childhood Traumas and Executive Coaching
  • Rewriting our code?

► You can watch or listen to a podcast with our conversation on:

► No time to watch or listen to the podcast now? Here is a short summary of the key points of our conversation:

Continue reading →

Book Review: ‘What’s Your Type?’ – The history of the MBTI

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Because I extensively use the MBTI when coaching executives, and because of my general interest in the work of the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), I was looking forward to read ‘What’s Your Type? – The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing’ by Merve Emre.

For those not familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the MBTI has been developed by Katherine Briggs (1875-1968) and her daughter Isabel Myers (1897-1980) on the basis of Jung’s Personality (‘Type’) Theory. It enables the categorization of individual personalities in 4 dimensions, resulting in the (well-known) 16 different ‘types’ (e.g., ‘ISTJ’ or ‘ENFP’).

Function PreferencePreference
Energy I – Introversion (ideas) E – Extroversion (people)
Perception S – Sensing (data) N – Intuition (intuition)
Judgment T – Thinking F – Feeling
Attitude towards outside world J – Judging P – Perceiving

Until a decade ago, the MBTI was one of the most popular personality assessment instruments, and, although it is far less popular today than it used to be, it is still extensively (ab)used.

For this reason, I was very curious to read the book. Unfortunately, I found it a mixed bag.

What I do not like about this book

Continue reading →

How FOUND is Disrupting Recruitment – Interview with Victor Akwunwa

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

In many recruitment processes, human beings are reduced to commodities, and human dignity has become an afterthought.

More often than not, recruitment has become a volume-driven exercise, where metrics like ‘time to fill’ have replaced the craftsmanship essential for identifying the best candidate for the role. As a result, candidates often find these processes unsatisfactory, as their potential unique contributions and value to organizations are not adequately recognized.

FOUND, a Swiss-based start-up company, wants to disrupt this traditional approach to recruitment. I recently interviewed Victor Akwunwa, the Chief Sales Officer of FOUND for my Leadership 2.0 podcast.

During our conversation, we discussed the following topics:

Continue reading →

The Corporate Recruitment process is ready for Disruption

Dirk Verburg1 Comment

I coach several people who are looking for another role, and it seems that the user satisfaction with the average recruitment process is even worse than in 2018, when I wrote a blog post with the title: ‘Recruiters should stop spraying and praying’.

In this post I wrote ‘We should therefore not be surprised if, in the near future, recruitment will become an AI-fuelled war between recruiting bots used by corporate recruiters, and application bots used by candidates.’

Today it looks like my predictions have become reality.

A ’sub-optimal’ candidate experience

What are the frustrations on the supply side of the market i.e. from the candidates? Here are the things I hear from my coachees:

Continue reading →

MBTI practitioners: do not shoehorn your clients into a type — do this one thing instead

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

In my previous post about MBTI I stressed the importance to review the outcomes of this personality assessment with clients, to make sure they understand the outcomes and recognize themselves in their type. However, often practitioners become stuck in these reviews if clients do not indicate their preferred behaviors. Although it is tempting for practitioners to try to shoehorn clients into a specific type, doing so is likely the least productive and helpful approach.

What was the MBTI again?

Continue reading →