How to self-direct your talents and career with TIPS

How to self-direct your talents and career with TIPS

Category:
Business
Innovation Method
TIPS
Published On:
May 22, 2023

One useful thing you can do to learn more about yourself is to take an assessment test to profile your personality or cognitive style. Believe it or not, there are more than two thousand profiling tools out there for you to choose from/ While the various tools differ in their design and scope, they all offer you at least some pointers to better understand yourself. But gaining self-awareness about what makes you tick is only the first step. What’s equally important is that you act upon your results and use them to make a difference in your work and life. That’s why when we created TIPS, Thinkergy’s cognitive profiling tool for business and innovation in the 21st century, we focused on concrete applications on how you may act upon your results to make more contributions in business and innovation. (In two earlier blog articles, we gave you hints about what you can do after you got TIPS-ed and received your results). Today, let me share how we use TIPS to point you in a direction that allows you to make more meaningful contributions with your talents.

Learning more about yourself and how you can add value with your unique ways

When you take the TIPS test, you will find out about your TIPS profile and your related TIPS home base and dominant style that you need to focus on to make the most significant contributions. Our 36-pages-long TIPS profiling report also contains a couple of sections in which we aim to guide people towards a successful career path. One discusses the assets and liabilities linked to your profile. Another one explores what professional ecosystems are hot for your profile type, and what others you’d better avoid. And in yet another section titled “Developing my talents,” we want to help you put the different puzzle pieces together into an exciting picture of a prosperous future you based on your profile’s strengths and talents.

Of course, your talents vary based on the TIPS innovator type with which you profile. TIPS distinguishes 11 innovator profiles (which are in alphabetical order, the All-Rounder, Coach, Conceptualizer, Experimenter, Ideator, Organizer, Partner, Promoter, Systematizer, Technocrat, and the Theorist). Each TIPS profile is attracted by at least one of the four TIPS bases (Theories, Ideas, People, Systems) home. Each profile also has one dominant style (among the four TIPS styles to think, work, interact, and live) that most allows it to add value to a business. For example, as an Ideator, I call the Ideas-base home, and my dominant style is “flow.” Ideators like me are the most flexible type among all TIPS profiles, who thrive on drive change, innovation, and progress.

As such, each TIPS profile approaches the game of business differently based on its unique talent mix, just like the different players on a football pitch add a particular value and talent mix to a soccer team. So, in your TIPS profiling report, will you also get a detailed game plan with precise prescriptions about what exactly you need to do to activate and develop your talents to succeed in business? Nope. Here’s why.

Let questions be your guide

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” In line with Milos Kundera’s advice, we don’t believe in telling you what exactly you should do to best use the talents linked to a particular TIPS profile. Instead, we share with you a list of questions that aims to bring out your best in regards to both work productivity (actual results and tangible outputs) and work satisfaction (job happiness and enjoyment).

“He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers,” goes a Cameroon proverb. By using questions, we make you and your creativity an active part of the process. The questions invite you to dig deeper into your true self, so that you may discover latent interests and slumbering talents that you may have ignored so far, or failed to notice.

In particular, the questions may give you new insights into yourself if, after taking the TIPS test, you receive a profiling result and a TIPS profile that surprises you. Such an unexpected TIPS profile may result when you have suppressed certain aspects of your personality or have been trapped in a role or work environment that doesn’t allow you to play on your true talents. (Thanks to the unique design of the TIPS questionnaire, we’re more likely to make these hidden features visible).

What questions does TIPS pose to guide you towards success?

In our TIPS profile reports, the self-development questions vary for each TIPS profile, as each of the 11 innovator types embraces different concepts and thrives on different TIPS styles. So after neutralizing profile-specific aspects, here are six of the roughly two dozens of questions that you may find in your TIPS report to help you optimize your further talent development, career, and contributions:

  • Does your current work focus allow you to play on the natural strengths of your profile type?
  • Does your current professional role and responsibilities fit your TIPS profile? Why (not)?
  • Now that you are aware of your TIPS profile, do you think you work in the right professional role and ecosystem (business function/industry/organizational type)? If yes, congratulations and carry on. If no, what might be other roles or ecosystems to better facilitate and display your profile-related talents? What else? What else? What else?
  • What current work responsibilities or activities do you have that you dislike or feel you shouldn’t do based on your TIPS profile? Why?
  • Who —or which other business unit or function— could do those things you dislike better than you?
  • Now that you know your TIPS profile, where do you see yourself 10 years from now? Why?

Conclusion: Ask and you shall receive

How do we know that our questions-led coaching approach works? We received reinforcing confirmations from people who got TIPSed, searched into themselves to find their right answers to our questions, and then got richly rewarded for their efforts.

For example, a young lady who worked in an ad agency shared the impact of receiving her profiling result and thinking about our guiding questions as follows:  

“Looking at the TIPS results was like a personal “epiphany.” Suddenly, I became consciously aware of who I am and what I am made for. Moreover, after answering the guiding questions in the TIPS report, I realized that I want to make a drastic change in my career.”

She subsequently resolved to change her career, became a globally traveling Yogi for some time, and then started a successful entrepreneurial Yoga business in Germany. Another TIPS-ed person, a seasoned manager in a state-owned bank in Thailand, came to me in the break of a TIPS training workshop with his TIPS report, and, pointing to the page with the development questions, said: “Why haven’t you given me this report and asked me this questions 30 years ago?”

  • Have you’ve become curious about TIPS, and how you may profile TIPS? Get TIPS-ed now for USD 89.
  • Do you want to TIPS-profile your entire team or business, and perhaps also train them in how to apply TIPS for greater in business and innovation? Contact us to tell us more about your business.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2020. The article is published in the Thinkergy Blog on October 8, 2020.

Credits: Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels.