The Birkman Assessment: A Powerful tool for personal and professional growth
Recognize your strengths and turn them into superpowers.
That’s what coach Lauren Miura had to say about the power of the Birkman Assessment. And she’s right. At Bonsai, we use the Birkman Assessment because it is a powerful tool for personal and professional growth grounded in positive psychology.
The Birkman Assessment is a work personality test that helps individuals understand their own unique strengths, as well as how they interact with others. It is based on the premise that personality is a complex and dynamic force that shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Used by businesses, organizations, and individuals for over 65 years to improve communication, teamwork, and decision-making, it is also a valuable tool for your career development and personal growth.
What is the Birkman Assessment?
The Birkman Assessment is a 298-question self-report inventory that measures 12 personality dimensions. These dimensions are grouped into four perspectives.
Motivation: How you are motivated and what drives you to achieve your goals
Self-Perception: How you see yourself and your strengths and weaknesses
Social Perception: How you perceive others and their motivations
Mindset: Your general outlook on life and how you approach challenges
The Birkman Assessment also provides a score for each dimension, as well as a percentile ranking that compares your score to the scores of other people who have completed the assessment.
How Bonsai uses the Birkman Assessment
Several of Bonsai’s consultants and career coaches are certified to administer the Birkman Assessment and we utilize it within two major areas of our work: recruiting and coaching.
Harnessing the Birkman Assessment as a recruiting assessment
Bonsai is on a mission to create nonprofit workplaces that work for everyone. Much of that work begins on the ground level, through placing candidates in a job that is the best fit for their skills and strengths, at a healthy, thriving organization.
Our recruiters utilize the assessment regularly when sourcing candidates for a professional position, which helps candidates:
Identify strengths, which can provide valuable insights into how they may perform in the job. Employers can use this information to make more informed hiring decisions and identify potential training needs.
Provide insights into personality traits, communication style, and motivational needs to match with candidates who are likely to thrive in the company's work environment.
Assess how likely they are to interact with other team members, which can be useful in building cohesive and effective teams.
Recognize leadership potential by gauging their leadership qualities, communication skills, and motivational needs.
When organizations express a desire to become more diverse, we look to Birkman as step 1. The Birkman Assessment is a valuable tool for promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace by helping individuals and organizations better understand each other's unique strengths, interests, and personality traits. When organizations identify and leverage diverse talents and perspectives, we create more innovation and creativity in service of our missions.
It can also help individuals and teams better understand their own communication styles and preferences, ultimately promoting better communication, collaboration, and understanding among team members.
For example, the assessment can help professionals identify whether they are more comfortable communicating verbally or in writing, and whether they prefer to work independently or as part of a team. Articulating this information can help decision makers create a more inclusive work environment by prioritizing different communication styles.
In addition, the Birkman Assessment can help nonprofit leaders develop a better understanding of their own leadership style and how it impacts their team. By doing the work of identifying their own areas for growth and development, leaders can promote a supportive work environment where everyone feels valued and respected.
The Birkman Assessment and coaching
Our coaches employ the Birkman Assessment as a way to self-reflect, discern career moves, and plan for the future, among endless others. The results help both the coach and the client to brainstorm and better understand ways forward in the challenge that the client brought to the coach.
For coaching clients, the Birkman Assessment offers a number of benefits that promote introspection, reflection, and action, including:
Gaining a deeper understanding of yourself and your personality
Drilling down on their strengths and weaknesses
Developing strategies to improve work performance
Building stronger, more meaningful relationships with colleagues and clients
Making more aligned career decisions
What is the experience of taking the Birkman Assessment?
The Birkman Assessment is a self-paced, online assessment that takes about 45 minutes to complete. The questions are multiple-choice and cover a variety of topics, such as your work style, communication preferences, and problem-solving style. The results are confidential and are only shared with you and the administrator.
If you are interested in taking the Birkman Assessment, there are a few things you can do to prepare:
Take some time to think about your personality and how you interact with others
Be as objective with yourself when answering the questions
Don't overthink, just answer the questions as honestly as possible with your first instinct
Curious about how this work behavior test can help you or your organization? Get in touch with us today.