Even with all the excitement around our transition to the New Year, many of the colleagues, executives and managers I speak with describe a feeling of mental fog and slowness, as well as hesitancy in gearing up for the coming year.

As one meme stated: "Before I commit to 2021 I am going to need to see a list of terms and conditions." 

For years, businesses and employees have debated whether working from home was a good thing. In 2020, that debate came to an abrupt end when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the decision. The traditional office environment gave way to remote work, whether or not that’s what you (or your boss) was prepared for.

Since then, some companies have returned to the traditional office setting, but flexible, remote, and hybrid-remote workforces are likely here to stay.

A study in the UK found that 82% of businesses there are considering changing their future working practices to allow more staff to work remotely.

And PwC’s US Remote Work Survey reveals that 83% of office workers want to work from home at least one day a week. That same survey also found that more than half (55%) of employers anticipate that most of their workers will do so beyond the pandemic.

As Certified Practitioners, one of the most common questions we ask is, “What’s next?”

After our Thinkers have taken the HBDI® and we go over their results and help them experience their own personal ‘AHA’ moments in a debrief session, where do they go from there? How can we help them continue on their journey of awareness and application of Whole Brain® Thinking on a daily basis?

These days, resilience is something that’s on all of our minds. We often hear it talked about in the context of how well we can “bounce back” from a setback or crisis. In some ways, though, bouncing back implies that we’re at the mercy of everything that’s going on around us. Or as Ann Herrmann-Nehdi put it in a recent LinkedIn post, “It feels like I am in a pinball machine.”

This article is a guest post from Ashley Blackburn, Director of Programs at Uncharted Learning.

Do you know what your brain “looks” like?

I didn’t, until about 3 months ago when I completed a Whole Brain® Thinking assessment (called the HBDI®) and participated in a debrief workshop as a professional development event led by our friends at Miami University’s John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship. Through this experience, I gained exciting new insight into my own thinking and that of everyone around me - students I’ve taught, colleagues I’ve worked with on teams, supervisors I’ve reported to, even my personal connections.

In this ongoing comparing assessments blog series, Anne Griswold, our Whole Brain ® Thinking Catalyst, is taking a look at the similarities and differences of many employee assessment instruments and how you might use them—individually and together—to achieve your business and talent development needs. For this post, Anne discusses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) and how it compares with Whole Brain® Thinking and the HBDI®.

As we take a look at another assessment, let’s start once again with the premise. The premise of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is psychological assessment with a focus on personality, and it measures personality preference on four scales: Extraversion – Introversion (E – I), Sensing – Intuition (S – N), Thinking – Feeling (T – F), and Judgment – Perception (J – P). These personality preferences are then reported through the MBTI tool and result in 16 different personality types.

The MBTI assessment is used as a part of work with individuals and teams to build self-awareness and help people understand differences. It is often used in leadership development to help leaders understand themselves, their behavioral motivations and the impact their differences have on others. It’s also used in areas like career planning, conflict management and decision making.

Want to know what your personality is? Or find out your “inner truth”? How about which “Game of Thrones” character you are? There are plenty of employee assessments and online quizzes out there that will reveal what box, character, style or type you fall into—the answer to the question: Am I a “this” or am I a “that”?

But when it comes to the HBDI®, we talk in terms of thinking preferences. No one is strictly a “this” or a “that,” because everyone has access to their whole brain, regardless of what your preferences are. You simply prefer (and in some cases, actively avoid) certain kinds of thinking over others.

So, what exactly do we mean by thinking preference? Well, it might be easier to start by explaining what a preference is not.

In this ongoing comparing employee assessments blog series, Anne Griswold, our Whole Brain ® Thinking Catalyst, is taking a look at the similarities and differences of different assessment instruments and how you might use them—individually and together—to achieve your business and talent development needs. For this post, Anne discusses StrengthsFinder and how it compares with Whole Brain ® Thinking and the HBDI.

One of the best starting points when looking at any employee assessment is its premise. As the name implies, the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment is a talent assessment with a premise rooted in identifying strengths. It’s based on Gallup research that shows that people succeed when they focus on what they do best.

Many companies think of employee assessments as performance management or recruiting and hiring tools. But this represents only a limited slice of the spectrum. Used properly and in the right circumstances, employee assessments can part of a powerful work toolkit, not just for evaluating job fit or lagging performance, but for helping people and teams work more effectively and accomplish their key business objectives.

Choosing the right employee assessment for your team or organization can be confusing. Many instruments overlap in what they measure and in how they’re used. So, we’re kicking off a new blog series to compare those different assessments and dive into how you might use them to achieve your business and talent development needs. This series is written by Anne Griswold, our Whole Brain ® Thinking Catalyst. Anne has been a facilitator, trainer and coach for over 20 years, working both inside companies and as an independent consultant. She is certified in many assessment tools and leadership trainings programs, including the HBDI, MBTI, DiSC, Hogan, Firo-B, EI 2.0 and Franklin-Covey Training Programs.

First up: Anne takes a closer look at the DiSC assessment and how it compares with Whole Brain Thinking and the HBDI.

DiSC is a popular employee assessment that is a good tool for understanding different styles, behaviors and perspectives of ourselves, of other people and how we respond in different situations. Like the HBDI, it’s a four-factor model, but in the case of DiSC, each color-coded letter represents a behavior trait: D for Dominance, i for Influence, S for Steadiness and C for Conscientiousness. Unlike the HBDI—which has a brain-based premise that considers, “How do I process information?”—DiSC is a behavior-based assessment that considers, “How do I behave in a specific situation and how do others perceive me?” DiSC, like most assessments, gives us insight. Those insights are focused on the impact of the individual’s behavior.