Is the CVI the Secret to Becoming a Better Leader?

Even if you aren't in a position of leadership, understanding the emotional hardwiring of yourself and others is tremendously beneficial. We all have opportunities to lead and inspire others, even outside the workplace. Being able to identify and understand the innate psychological needs of others will enable you to better navigate through relationships and interactions.

If you don't know the CVI profile of yourself and your team, you are leading blindly.

Leadership is More Than a Title

Leadership isn't necessarily a position or title. We all have opportunities to lead and inspire others, whether they be family members, friends, peers at work, or even children. We can also lead by example in how we conduct ourselves around others.

Leadership takes many forms. This article assumes the term leadership includes the ability to inspire and motivate others, communicate effectively, and even parenting and teaching.

To effectively lead others, you must understand others. You can't meet someone's needs if you don't know what they are.

The Core Values Index™ psychometric assessment helps you understand the underlying and hardwired emotional needs of other people. Are they creative or cognitive? Do they work best when collaborating with others or when working alone? Do they prefer to inspire and delegate, or is solving tough challenges their biggest thrill?

The first step to becoming a better leader is to understand your own emotional hardwiring. You might already have some inkling to your leadership potential and preferences. In groups, are you always the one to take charge? Or is your preference to stay out of the spotlight and let others take the lead? Perhaps you are somewhere in between, or maybe your choice to lead is dependent on the task at hand.

Even if you're the take-charge type by default, that just identifies your predisposition. The effectiveness of your leadership may still have room for growth. Read on.

The First Step to Becoming a Better Leader

When you take the CVI™, you gain knowledge about how you are hardwired. You begin to learn your innate desires and the kind of activities that make you happy or make you want to run and hide. When people take the CVI, they often find it confirms some of what they already know or suspect about their own psychology.

"I've always thought of myself as a creative person and my CVI report confirmed it."

Your CVI report can also reveal some new insights. For example, you may have already known that you prefer working with others, but the CVI can give you the reason why working alone has always been a struggle.

The Second Step

Learning what makes you tick is only the first step to becoming a more effective leader. Learning how to identify the likely psychometric profile of others and knowing how that influences their personal operating system is the second step.

After completing the CVI and reading your own report, it's a good idea to study the general concepts of how the CVI represents different personalities. Human psychology is far more complex than type A versus type B. We are much more than merely creative versus practical beings.

We all possess these various traits within us, they just exist in different amounts and ratios. Some of us are highly creative and that is our predominant mode of operation, but all of us have the ability to be creative in some ways and to certain degrees when needed.

Understanding how the CVI works and reflects human psychology reveals that each person has different amounts of four key personality types within them.

This knowledge and a little bit of practice gives you the ability to identify the relative amounts of those personality types in others.

If you are in a position of leadership, everyone on your team — including you — needs to take the CVI. Don't just take the assessment, though. Take the CVI Foundations Course so that you and your team get a fast and efficient understanding of how the CVI works and the ways it influences your personalities.

→ The CVI Foundations Course is the quickest and most efficient way to get your team up to speed on the incredible power of the Core Values Index.

When meeting with each of your team members one-on-one, discuss how their CVI profile drives the alignment between their psychometric DNA and their role — and where it doesn't align. Be open to shifting duties where feasible to accommodate this.

Stop asking your kicker to play in a linebacker position.

On your own, give thought to how you see the world and prefer to interact with it according to what you're learning about the CVI in general and your CVI profile in particular. Recognize that working with others that have different profiles than you can result in the occasional disconnect. You can easily overcome this.

Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own CVI profile, so remember that each person you interact with and lead will likely communicate with you based on their CVI profile, not yours.

Be open to identifying and honoring the CVI profile of your team members, and communicate with them based on how they operate. Each person on your team has a role to play based on their particular strengths. Discuss what their strengths are within the confines of their unique CVI profile, but also identify areas that are counter to their profile. Limit or completely eliminate activities that heavily rely on any of that person's low-score core values.

Everyone is a genius, but one does not berate the fish for its inability to climb a tree.

Once you and your team have completed the CVI, you can improve your leadership using the knowledge you have gained about your own core values profile and the profiles of your team members.

Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc.