Geoff discusses the benefits of a person-centric approach to risk management which would aim to radically re-energise communication, co-operation, and personal responsibility and offer a personal development route to improved safety performance.

Read the full article here on the Safety & Health Practitioner

During the pandemic, we learned what it is like to see our domestic and work routines transformed. The interlocking timetables of family life and virtual teams and offices that had been waiting in the wings until they became essential for survival.

Initially, when we saw the loss of personal workplace relationships as temporary, it may have seemed an acceptable sacrifice. However, according to a Gallup study, colleague relationships contribute to self-esteem and the feeling that you’re achieving your full potential.

So how can we maintain this social capital whilst working from home?
Read the full article via the Actuary here to read more

Confidence is a very reassuring characteristic. Whether seeking advice or looking for leadership, we appreciate a response that is unequivocal and decisive. At times of uncertainty and anxiety, we look for someone who, at least in appearance, has a confident and optimistic view about what we should do. When the plane is being buffeted by turbulence on your holiday flight, chances are that you will keep an eye on the cabin crew; are they remaining relaxed, smiling and optimistic? A confident demeanour is always reassuring.

Psychological Consultancy Ltd (PCL) has been conducting research into personality for two decades. In its research publication, ‘Made to Measure’, PCL reflects the view that personality assessment is capable of very accurate descriptions of individuals and ‘confidence’ is a significant part of that picture. The appeal of confidence arises because, in personality terms, it is typically accompanied by optimism and calmness. Some people just seem to have it. For others it can seem a battle that is rarely won.

Self-confidence is one of those competencies often cited in job descriptions and elaborated as being socially self-assured, ready to express opinions and happy to take on responsibilities. However, our ‘Made to Measure’ research shows that self-confidence is one of the personality traits that can be hard to find. This is reflected by the choice of over 14,000 Amazon book titles on the subject – everything from self-help promises of improved self-esteem to success in public speaking, power and influence.

Confidence comes in different guises and its not all good news.

Some have the innate personality characteristics that support this behaviour. Calm babies, by and large, become calm and confident adults. At their best, these people are emotionally imperturbable and unreactive, so they weather any storm and keep their heads when others may be in a state of panic. On the down side they may seem insensitive to the needs of the more tortured soles that surround them – they never seem to quite understand what all the fuss is about. People like working with them because they are reliably consistent and predictable in their mood. Individuals know where they stand with them, and they seem even handed and fair because their demeanor is the same with everybody. Depending on other aspects of their personality, these characteristics are often viewed as fearlessness (unperturbed by risk) or insensitivity (showing little emotion).

A second group at this extreme end of the spectrum is also populated by those who’s confidence is fueled by a deeply rooted assertiveness and egotism. In a work situation they have a need to ‘trump’ others in any conversation in terms of their experiences and achievements and to assert their opinions and authority. This apparent abundance of confidence is likely to be rewarded by career progress. As managers they are likely to impress their superiors but their subordinates may regard them as arrogant, manipulative, blaming others and taking all the credit.

The third, broadest and largest category by far includes those who become confident through experience. People who are not naturally sure of themselves, even some who are low in self esteem, may become very confident because of their mastery in their own field. Such people often master the art of public speaking even though this is the top source of anxiety for most people. Becoming knowledgeable in a specialist area or skilled in some way contributes to self-esteem and success breads confidence (as any sports team knows). However, this kind of confidence is selective. Although there may be a general rise in self-esteem, the peak of confidence will remain in the domain where it was earned. The most confident and decisive may revert to being hesitant and unsure in less familiar territory outside their ‘comfort zone’.

These personality descriptions have implicit long-term predictive value. As we settle into our various roles, people are increasingly likely to display the dispositions captured by a personality assessment. By now, you will have some idea where you fall in this spectrum of confidence. So what, if anything, can you do if you want to change things? Whatever our personality characteristics, we are all able to control or manage our behaviour to some extent. We do this when we vary our behaviour to suit the circumstances – being very controlled at a job interview, or being wild at a stag party or hen night. Depending on our motivation (our interest, determination or experience), we can perform above or below our natural or most typical level.

Over many years of professional practice, the PCL team has identified four key strategies for personal development. These are not mutually exclusive and any development programme will embrace one or more of the following:

Strategy 1 – Build on your strengths
The easiest way to make a difference is to focus on the approaches and methods that you are already good at. These will, almost by definition, be strategies that you have a natural potential for. The question is, “do you know what your strengths are?” Surprisingly, people often don’t. When something comes very naturally to you and requires little effort, there is a tendency to under value it’ to assume that it is ‘normal’ for everyone and unexceptional. Some people have a ‘natural’ potential for spelling. You may have met people who seem able to spell everything, and with little effort (even exhilarate, acrylic and diarrhoea)! Others can sing, write well or are artistic, yet never exploit these talents.

Strategy 2 – Push the Boundaries
Strategy Two then, is to raise our game, to use feedback or assessment results to build self-awareness and to focus on improvement. Although you won’t change your basic nature, you may be able to improve within the specific conditions of your work. For example, a shy, quiet person cannot be turned into an extravert, but they can learn how to deal with the specific social requirements of their role very effectively – even exceptionally well. Familiarity with the role, its specific focus, knowledge base and routines all help to create a ‘comfort zone’.

Strategy 3 – Compensate and work around
Strategy Three is concerned with developing “work arounds”; techniques or arrangements that compensate for the part of your make-up that is difficult or impossible to change significantly, or enough to make a sufficient performance difference. Again, the first step is self-awareness. You cannot change unless you recognise the need to change and personality assessment will help you to appreciate where your talents lie and where your temperament will be at odds with the demands of your role. Strategies will usually involve approaching the job in a different way, or working with colleagues in a different way, or changing the balance within a role so that you are playing to your strengths. You may do more of this, but less of that, and achieve your targets in that way. Or, you may exploit related aspects of a role to minimise dependency on the characteristics that you are having difficulty in developing.

Strategy 4 – Reign in the excesses
Strategy Four is concerned with the tendency to ‘over play’ ones strengths; or ones perceived strengths; recycling the strategies that have worked for you in the past in the expectation that success will follow as it did before. Just as we may take the most effective aspects of our personality for granted, we also tend to be deaf to criticisms about our less effective characteristics. In fact, people are often quite indulgent of the features that are a turn-off to others. Some psychologists have suggested that parenting may have played a part in this, indulging, encouraging and rewarding behaviours that are ‘cute’ in children but monstrous in adults!

Of course, in practice, all of these strategies will complement and reinforce each other in promoting the desired goals. There is no quick fix for developing self-confidence; it requires commitment to self improvement and a sustained effort. The benefit of psychometric assessment is that we can identify for ourselves our key personality characteristics. Knowing who we are is the first step in understanding how to find a particular role or a career that draws on our strengths and supports and brings out what we are naturally good at. Equally, we can identify the challenges; addressing those elements of our personality that might be holding us back.

You are who you are in the sense that you have a unique combination of natural dispositions. On the other hand, you are also a free agent, a sentient being with free will. How you play the hand that you were dealt with is up to you – it will also write your autobiography.

Geoff Trickey, Managing Director, Psychological Consultancy Ltd (PCL)

Fist Publication: Fresh Business Thinking 2015

Have you been asked to complete a Happiness questionnaire yet? Happiness for everyone is apparently the new political currency – so, if you haven’t already you soon will. In 2010, the British Prime Minister announced that subjective wellbeing would be a major government goal; “We’ll start measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life,” (David Cameron). A UN resolution of the following year encourages member states to pay more attention to the pursuit of this goal. And launched its World Happiness Report in April 2012.

Of course, similar aims have been addressed in the US constitution since July 4th 1776 with its declaration of the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. In fact, the debate has to be at least 2000 years old. The pursuit of happiness was also high on the agenda for the philosophers of ancient Greece. Aristippus of Cyrene considered pleasure as the sole intrinsic good and introduced us to Hedonism. All the major religions, of course, also address the happiness issue with aspirations for ultimate bliss in the afterlife and through a joyful life of service and self-sacrifice.

The graphic charts the prevalence of the term ‘happiness’ in printed texts in America since 1800. Can this really mean that interest in happiness has actually been declining? The downward trend is so distinctive that it certainly demands some kind of explanation. Or, is this simply a function of some statistical anomaly? As with any debate about ‘happiness’, there are many reasons why it may be difficult to come to any clear or consensual conclusions.

Happiness Methodology
The methodology of the big players in happiness research, like the Wellbeing Programme at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), involves the assessment of ‘subjective wellbeing’ by the use of surveys and questionnaires. CEP considers that happiness can be captured by four questions related to: 1. The individual’s overall satisfaction with life, 2. Whether they considered the things they were doing to be worthwhile, 3. Their recent experiences of happiness, and 4. Their experiences of anxiety.

Within HR and business psychology, the expression of this interest has focused particularly on job satisfaction and employee engagement. The principle methodology is the use of questionnaires and surveys completed by the employees.

There are issues, of course, about subjectivity (what counts as happiness in the mind of any individual) and relativity (compared to what past or recent experiences are they rating the present). There is no consensual definition of happiness, or agreed taxonomy of happiness factors. The challenges for Happiness research are considerable.

Semantics
The fist problem concerns semantics and the sheer breadth of meaning associated with the term. My online thesaurus finds 46 core synonyms for the word ‘happiness’ and a very extensive further vocabulary linked through over 60 other closely associated terms like Bliss, Humour, Comfort, Ease, Ecstasy, Satisfaction, Jubilance, Effervescence, Nirvana, Enjoyment, Exultation, Well-being, Merriment, Luckiness, Optimism and Exultancy. All of this extensive lexicon relates to the concept of happiness and furnishes a wide spectrum of nuanced meanings.

Cognitive traps
In his Ted Talk, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman states:

“‘Happiness’ is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things… [there] is a confusion between experience and memory; it’s between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life… Those are two very different concepts, and they’re both lumped in the notion of happiness” Daniel Kahneman (2010).

Kahneman describes a series of ‘cognitive traps’ that make happiness very difficult territory to navigate. He argues that it is almost impossible to think coherently about Happiness (his TED talk well worth viewing).

Psychology of Personality

The Positive Psychology movement has provided much of the up-beat momentum behind the current optimism about creating a happier world. Martin Seligman refers to the good life as “using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification”. This reference to ‘signature strengths’ implicitly recognises that the happiness agenda is unique for each individual. This is an important point; in the search for happiness we do not all set out from the same starting place. We have each been dealt a different hand of cards at the point of conception and, through nurturing, experience and life circumstances, these cards may be either enhanced or diminished in equipping us to meet the life’s challenges.

Some important individual ‘happiness’ related differences are identified by personality research. Measures of neuroticism make a particularly useful contribution. Also referred to as low Emotional Adjustment, it is a personality characteristic that has well understood involvements with both neurological and physiological mechanisms of emotion. It has implications for the way that life is experienced and coped with. It has an obvious influence on the day to day ‘subjective wellbeing’ of individuals. It is associated with strong feelings; passion, anxiety, fear, moodiness, pessimism and self-doubt at one end of the scale and, at the other, calmness, optimism, self-confidence and evenness of temper. Any attempt to address subjective happiness surely has to recognise these individual differences in personality?

PCL

Whilst investigating the relationship between competence at work and job satisfaction, the implications of potential personality effects in measures of happiness have been picked up in our own research at PCL. We were surprised to discover that expressions of job satisfaction may have more to do with the personality of the respondent than with the ‘goodness of fit’ with their work role. We had expected that high competency scores would be associated with greater job satisfaction and that job satisfaction would therefore differ from job to job. The intriguing finding was that those reporting the highest job satisfaction, whatever the job, tended to be well adjusted extroverts.

This observation is congruent with the ‘Happy Employee’ concept which differentiates between those disposed to view a challenging job as an opportunity while others are more likely to view it as setting them up to fail (Locke, McClear & Knight, 1996). This is also reflected in our work with Risk Type, differentiating those who are alert to the opportunity in any situation in contrast to those who are more alert to the risk.

It is virtually impossible to know to what extent one person’s experience of happiness equates with another’s but it seems that even in the most awful situations, some will see hope where others will see only doom and gloom. We know too from research into questionnaire design that some people actually prefer to respond ‘yes’ to a question and some prefer to say ‘no’. They are referred to as Yea-sayers or Nay-sayers. Quite literally, the odds are stacked one way or the other before you even ask a question. Asking people whether they are happy, satisfied or engaged in their job is not as revealing as you might think. These ‘response style’ differences illustrate the ways in which personality differences permeate people’s outlook on life.

Any campaign promoting ‘happiness for all’ would be difficult to resist, as would any populist mainstream trend designed to better the human condition. The impulse to sweep aside the irksome detail of scientific discipline to grasp the possibilities offered through refreshing and exciting new lines of thought can seem irresistible and appealingly radical. Promises of savings in public spending are also extremely attractive and support for the happiness campaign has partly been justified by pragmatically economic and political motives; the expected cost of mental health care and loss to productivity.

But the trouble with happiness is how do you pin it down; is it an opinion, a philosophical question, a scientific fact, a belief? To what extent is it cultural, psychological, mental, spiritual, physical or meta-physical? The assertion that ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it’, attributed to the late Peter Drucker, makes an important point. Should we really invest heavily in the idea that we can either achieve objective measures of happiness, or realistically re-deploy already scarce psychological therapeutic techniques and resources on a scale to address issues of national and international unhappiness?

Happiness is a delightful concept of course, who wouldn’t embrace it? But the reasons for unhappiness are innumerable, highly complex, endemic and intransigent. This is not a battle that will be won by optimism and euphoria.

First published on Engage Employee.

This is a really important book that should be required reading for anyone consciously grappling with RISK in any serious way, or in any professional capacity. John Adams sets out modestly but determinedly to seek enlightenment about a subject that everyone knows something about but of which no one has yet given a comprehensive and coherent account. He picks up the baton of ‘RISK’ passed on through the literature of the old masters of sociology and anthropology; the writings of Durkheim, Marks, Malinowski, Parsons, Thompson, Wildavsky and others. He does a wonderful job in challenging the received wisdom and consensus of the last 50 or so years. He dismantles one assumption after another to reveal the serious flaws, contradictions and short comings and limitations of today’s risk management practices.

Through his expositional approach, he helps the reader to discover unexpected fragilities within widely accepted risk metrics and processes. He turns his critical attention to the conceptualization of risk, its definition, research and the debate about professional applications. His critical analysis of the many ways in which risk judgements find expression in people’s behavior at work and in their everyday lives and in social and industrial policies is honest, painstaking and forthright; truly illuminating, often surprising and occasionally shocking. Confidence in once unchallengeable institutions is called into question; not only the banks and insurance companies, but the compliance and safety bodies, international corporations and even the Royal Society. In his journey of discovery he finds fragments of truth, articles of blind faith, distorted logic and bureaucratic gobbledygook that contribute to a disconcertingly confusing picture.

The author doesn’t claim to offer a complete resolution to these issues, but through his concepts of risk compensation, risk thermostat and the positioning of risk as culturally determined, he does a remarkable job of tidying things up. He identifies the main issues and suggests the kind of approach required to continue the task. The author is an academic a geographer and a philosopher applying a creative and enquiring mind to problems that challenged Fyodor Dostoevsky, Max Born and Albert Einstein.

As a personality psychologist, it isn’t surprising that I would see things from a different perspective but there are many ways of conceptualising and interpreting observed behaviour. How people behave and why do they do it is a matter of everyday concern to everybody and we each come to it from our own perspective. Teacher, social workers therapists of all kinds, volunteers in homelessness centres, thoughtful and aware people; all will be observing behaviour and asking themselves ‘why?’. The fact that thoughts and insights can be expressed differently doesn’t necessarily lead to profound disagreement. We are all talking about the same things, the same observations, the same subject matter but in different ways. The source material, behaviour, is the same for every one and the most prominent features of human nature are likely to feature in all those insights and formulations.

Geoff Trickey, March 2018