Hoozyu: Preparing Yourself for Life and Marketplace Using the Birkman Method

By Jon Mason

Anyone in their late teens and early twenties knows that one question, spoken or unspoken, underlies just about every conversation they have with teachers, parents and friends: What are you going to do? The only problem, says Jon Mason, is that this may be exactly the wrong question. Instead of pressing you to know, ahead of time, exactly what you will do, he suggests we should be helping you to answer a rather different question first, namely: Who am I? Drawing on over 15 years of experience working with this data in the context of large multinational corporations, banks and other powerful brands, Jon sets out in this book to frame the big questions in life and to then show how hoozyu® can help anyone to arrive at an answer that is truly their own. Includes extensive reference section on the Birkman Method® scores used in hoozyu: Birkman Colors, Areas of Interest, Org. Focus, Life Style Grid®, Job Families and Job Titles. A resource for anyone using hoozyu to help themselves or others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elaura Asia Pte Ltd
• Release date: Sep 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9789810965617

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Hoozyu: Preparing Yourself for Life and Marketplace Using the Birkman Method

hoozyu:

Preparing yourself for life and marketplace with the Birkman Method

Copyright © 2015 by Jon Mason

Jon Mason asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-981-09-6561-7

Publisher:

Elaura Asia Pte Ltd

3 Bishan Place, #05-08 CPF Bishan

Singapore 579838

www.elaura.com

hoozyu® is a registered trademark of Elaura Asia Pte Ltd. The hoozyu app and all related materials are copyright Elaura Asia Pte Ltd, all rights reserved. This book and the hoozyu app are based on original work by the late Dr Roger W Birkman which is used by permission. Birkman®, The Birkman Method®, Life Style Grid® and other associated marks are registered trademarks of Birkman International, Inc. Photograph of Author courtesy of Stephanie Mason.

Dedication

Sarah, always

Preface

I have spent the last fifteen years of my life, building, alongside my wife, a business called Elaura. Elaura is all about helping people in the marketplace to relate, learn, work and simply to live, better. Since day one, our clients have included some of the biggest brands on the planet, as well as start-ups, family-owned businesses, colleges, universities, banks and government organisations.

No one has been more surprised than I.

I am not, however, complaining. One big ambition we have is to change the way young people, right around our global village, get to market - which is what hoozyu and this book is about; and that is clearly helped by having a footprint several shoe sizes beyond our expectations.

So thank you, to all who make this possible, including the clients who keep giving us the opportunity to change their world a little, too.

Introduction

This book is designed specifically with students and young adults in mind, although I hope anyone could profit from reading it. It addresses some of the big questions that face us as we get ready to enter the marketplace (the world of work and of earning a living).

You may, of course, be facing those questions, having already got to the marketplace; now you are wondering what on earth you have got yourself into. No problem; this book is still for you.

There is a wider group of stakeholders to whom I hope this book will also be of benefit. As my team and I have worked to develop a programme that would genuinely change the experience of young people on their journey to market, we realised that the well-known African proverb applies here as well. In other words, if it takes a village to raise a child, then we would need to be equipping all of the global villagers who are stakeholders in this getting young people to market process as well. So whether you are a parent or carer, or local authority officer or lecturer or educational administrator or minister of state or potential employer or youth worker or mentor; this book is for you, too. Our aim is to help you, to help them.

The stories related in this book are mostly ones to which I have been a witness, just as the majority of  ideas expressed in this book are ideas I have either had myself, or which have stuck to me on the marketplace journey I have undertaken. However, there is one really big idea at the heart of this book that is absolutely not my own (I just embrace it like crazy).

Dr Roger W Birkman, who died in 2014 at the age of 95, had the idea that people are not (just) who they think they are. He observed how people reacted to stressful situations (beginning with his fellow B-17 pilots and crews during the Second World War) and ultimately realised that you could only understand why we all misperceive reality and react to situations in the ways that we do, if you first understand that ‘who we think we are’ is only part of ‘who we really are’.

This book is built around the tool that Dr Birkman and his team developed, the Birkman Method®, and in particular, the package my team and I have built around the Birkman Method, which we call hoozyu.

For that reason, to get real value out of this book, you will need to have completed a Birkman Questionnaire, either as part of the hoozyu package or directly from a Birkman Consultant. From here on, I will often refer to hoozyu for convenience (rather than saying hoozyu and Birkman every time). Please note that the vast majority of what I say will cross-reference to your Birkman report, if that is what you are using. (Job Titles in Chapter 8 are the one exception; at the time of writing, Birkman doesn’t expose these as a distinct ranked list,  only as ranked results within each Job Family; hoozyu does present these scores directly).

The book is structured in four parts.

Part One (Chapters 1-3) is mostly about getting clear in your head, the big questions facing you as you prepare to this journey to market. (Chapter 2 is about questions too, but in the sense of how to approach the Birkman Questionnaire.)

These big questions may seem trivial to you, but you are not going to have a happy ride if you arrive in front of potential employers with your head full of the wrong questions. If I just work here for six months, do I get to keep the iPhone? would be an example of a particularly bad question. The reason it is so bad, though, is not just the obvious (naive and greedy). It may not even be what your (no longer) potential employer thinks is obvious, namely that a potential employee who is already planning on becoming part of the ‘churn’ figure for this financial year is not, in fact, an employee we will employ. No, the real problem is that you are fixated on an issue other than whether you and your talent ‘belong here’, and whether ‘here’ will give you, and it, an opportunity to grow and develop.

Part Two (Chapters 4-7) is an exploration of how the Birkman data that powers hoozyu can help us to answer those big questions. Quite deliberately, this section doesn’t explain the data, component by component (see Part Three for that). Instead it looks at four big, powerful aspects of the data: what motivates and engages you; what could possibly derail you; the value of your unique perspective; and the predictive power of resemblance, that is seeing who you most look like, in terms of the roles they do.

Part Three (Chapters 8-12) is an in depth look at the data itself. These chapters are your essential reference guide to the Birkman Colours, Areas of Interest, Organizational Focus, Life Style Grid and Job Families and Titles. Some chapters are short, some are a little longer: the Areas of Interest, for example, take up over one quarter of this book. That is an accurate reflection of their importance for our current purposes.

Part Four (Chapters 13-14) adds one more Question - where do relationships fit into all of this? - and then attempts to connect all the ideas in the book for you. Ultimately though, this is about you, listening to yourself; so you are the only person who can really ‘put it all together.’

As ever, my deepest gratitude to the late Roger and Sue Birkman for the lifetime they devoted to helping people of all kinds and from all walks of life, to understand who God might have made them to be; to their daughter Sharon Birkman Fink, who now leads the Birkman organisation; and to all their colleagues, past and present, at Birkman International, as well as the global family of Birkman Consultants, who also mean so much to me. One individual in particular deserves special mention: over the years, Lynn Greene of Performance Enhancement Group in Houston TX  has turned on more Birkman lights for me, and preserved me from more egregious errors, than I care to mention. Any errors herein are entirely my own.

One last note on language. I’m confused, okay. As a New Zealander who studied in UK and Australia and has lived and worked in both those countries as well as Singapore, and who regularly works with groups everywhere you can think of, from the Maghreb to Tokyo, Cardiff to Auckland, and Houston to Moscow, my English should be pretty close to the global mean. Of course, the reality is just that I am foreign everywhere (especially whenever I get back to NZ). Words matter. I apologise if I spell it colour instead of color, and speak of Maths instead of Math or use idioms differently from the ones you know. I also apologise for any bits of slang and jargon that may have slipped past my reviewers[1]. I come in peace. Honest.

You will find I say Organizational Focus as the name of the Birkman scores, since Birkman use American spelling, but organisational the rest of the time, since (as a far-flung member of the British Commonwealth) I generally like to spell things with an S and to save all my Z’s for my homeland. I am sure someone will still pick up inconsistencies, but that one, at least, is deliberate!

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[1]    And an enormous round of applause, please, for my Elaura colleagues, Tim, Déborah, Michael and Sarah, who did such a brilliant job of proof-reading and reviewing the manuscript.

Part One: Big Questions

This first section is all about asking the right questions, on your way into life and the marketplace.

Chapter One

What are you doing (for the rest of your life)?

A person’s late teen years and early twenties are a time dominated by one question above all: what are you going to do? Every adult who gets alongside of you, whether it is Aunt Beth, or Mrs Bertram from next door, or your course tutor or your youth worker or mentor; and especially any parent or carer; wants to know the answer. They mean no harm. Actually, you really, really want to know too, if only to have a good answer for Uncle Rashid, next time you see him. And of course there is a more fundamental reason you want to know: the end of the conveyor belt is in sight. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?

By the time you are in the marketplace, the question changes, though not very much. What do you do? Listen in at any drinks evening or networking event and you will see what I mean. The repeated refrain of What do you do? is more insistent than the bass-line in the trance track that rumbles on for ten minutes at a time. Business cards are just an aid to answering that question on those occasions when the music is too loud to really hear each other.

Now as it happens, I have always, genuinely, been interested in what people do. I liked, and like, nothing better at a party than getting someone to explain to me what their job is, and what it involves. So I was somewhat thrown when I heard a good friend suggest that this was a terrible thing to do, a kind of establishing the pecking order activity for those with an empathy deficit.

In fact he tells a very funny story about being at a party when a brash young executive joins the group and demands that everyone say what they