News from Stuart Robertson & Associates Ltd

One of the questions recently asked by one of our clients in the outplacement business was 'How do Quintax and CMi work together?' Here are some of the ways in which these two measures complement each other...

1) Quintax is a measure of basic traits and preferences for certain styles of behaviour based upon the 'Big 5' model of personality. CMi complements this by offering a measure of the drivers that determine our career goals or intentions. As a result one focusses on how we naturally like to behave at work while the other looks at what we tend to value and work towards in career terms.

2) This synergy helps us to recognise where our career goals may be realistic and well founded in our natural approach to things, and where they may be ambitions that will involve bigger personal challenges to achieve. Consider the following examples:-

Example 1: Jill is a retailer who has completed Quintax and her responses have fallen into the ELST-C type grouping. By using case to represent preference strength this comes out as ElSt-C, so she has clear preferences for an extraverted, structured and organised approach to things while being naturally very calm. On CMi she has identified Power & Influence, and Challenge as her most highly ranked Career Motivators. In this situation her ambition - to become a senior manager in a retail chain - looks highly credible given her natural styles and career motives. We might be able to advise her on what the upside and downside of the ELST-C style is for managers in this context - where she will find it easy to perform and what types of challenges might be more difficult. As we have evidence that ELST-C is a common and resilient type classification among retail store managers, this looks like a good 'fit' on the face of things, and maybe a useful point of discussion with Jill in feedback.

Example 2: Jack is an academic who has completed Quintax and his responses have fallen into the IPAT-V type grouping (IpaT-V when presented in terms of preference strengths). So he appears to have a strongly introverted and theoretical style, with a deal of emotionality in his reaction to stress or other work difficulties. Jack also aspires to a management role - in this case as Head of Department in his subject area in his University. His top 2 Career Motivators are Independence and Expertise, with Power & Influence low in his ranking. This suggests that his managerial ambition may not be grounded in a directly relevant motivation, and so it is harder to see how managing academics would provide satisfaction. Equally, his introverted slightly person-centred style combined with high emotionality suggests that managing a group of logical, and potentially challenging academics may be more stressful and difficult than he anticipates. On the face of things, it looks like a poor fit given the CMi and Quintax results. A case, perhaps, where some reflection is needed on the difference between ambition and motivation. Again, these might be useful areas for discussion with Jack in feedback.

All in all, Quintax and CMi used together can provide a lot of additional value (over the measures taken singly) in development and career counselling situations. This is reflected in the fact that we have now incorporated an exploration of CMi into our Quintax training programmes and case study illustrations!