The LAB Profile: using to understand and motivate your employees

Most of us don’t really know how to pinpoint what motivates us at work.  Why do we enjoy some tasks and not others?  Why do we feel comfortable in some environments and not others?  Why do we get on with certain people and yet can’t get through to others? 

This is quite normal. 80% to 90% of who we are is unconscious and therefore analysing our actions, language and thoughts every second of the day in every context is not humanly possible.

What is possible is to understand and analyse our motivational and decision-making patterns in a specific context using the LAB Profile.

The Language and Behavioural Profile (LAB) is not a psychometric test that requires someone to complete an online questionnaire. It’s a personal approach that allows the candidate or employee to talk about their work in a relaxed manner. Just by listening to how they say things and learning how to decode what we hear, allows us to have immediate and invaluable insights into what makes that person tick.

What are the benefits of the LAB Profile?
The science behind the LAB Profile

In the late 1950s Noam Chomsky completed his Ph.D. thesis Transformational Grammar. In it he explained that there are three processes by which people make sense of the world: deletions, distortions and generalisations. These processes help us to create reality as we perceive it – because that’s all reality ever is – our perception of it. And our perceptions are limited by the amount of information we can hold in our awareness at one moment in time.

Should you want to describe an experience to another person, you would use only the words that you chose based on what you filtered in or out of the actual experience. It is estimated that you would only be giving about 2-7% of the details. Your listeners will then have to make up the rest based on their own filters and experience. Or if they are a skilled communicator they may be able to question some of your deletions, distortions and generalisations.

The only way we can tell what someone’s map of the world is like is by listening to the words they use to describe their experience. There is a wealth of information for the discerning listener in the form of the words people use. How someone says something is just as important to understanding them as what they say. In any given context there are usually only a few traits which make the difference between behaviour that is very effective and behaviour that does not provide the desired results or strains communication and relationships.

 

Noam Chomsky, photo via The Ethics Centre

Using the LAB Profile in your recruiting process

Get in touch!

If you want to build confidence in your ability to recruit and retain successfully, let’s have a conversation and explore how we can help you get there. Just email below or call us on +44 (0)1223 659988.