At Mental Toughness Partners we assist individuals and organisations to measure how and what people are thinking with regards to their approach to work and their overall mental toughness. Using a simple but scientifically valid psychometric tool, MTQPlus, or one of its related measures, helps provide hiring managers with clues on thinking style and how that can play out in behaviour with regards to the position in question.
For most positions you are seeking an individual who is structured, focused, conscientious, reliable, calm, adaptable and confident although different positions require a different mix of these qualities . MTQPlus measures all those thinking styles and their relationship with each other.
This measure is the forerunner of the brain scan and I was really interested to listen to some commentary by ‘About My Brain’ CEO, Silivia Damiano on the HR Daily webcast. Silivia believes that perhaps within the next 10 years, “people will be submitted to brain scans – when the scans become more available – to see the health of the brain.”
Silivia continues “The quality of people’s decisions and work behaviours – and the coherence of their actions – largely depends upon the health of their frontal cortex, she says. And people with an ‘unhealthy’ brain are more like to be impacted by people in positions of power”.
Take, for example, politicians or CEOs, Damiano explains. “The negativity, or the way they speak, really affects and impacts on whoever is following them. That’s a lot of responsibility to put on someone’s brain that is not working effectively.”
As new technology around brain scans becomes more readily available and cheaper to use, Damiano says it will also raise ethical considerations for employers, especially as many employees or candidates won’t want to know, or want their employer to know, what’s going on in their brain.
“I’m not saying it’s good or bad,” she says, “but we spend a lot of money recruiting people, and while people get to the position of, say, general manager, if that person is affecting the lives of 50 or 100 people, that has enormous financial implications for the organisation.”
As Silivia says it would be an incredible breakthrough although with all kinds of ethical and practical issues.
In the meantime MTQPlus provides some really useful insights for hiring managers as well as those requiring personal development or change related guidance.
For more on mental toughness and MTQPlus contact us.