Last week I had the privilege of taking part in the open Predictive Index Management Workshop™ at The Oliver Group with a variety of Oliver Group clients. The PI Workshop is an intensive all-day two-day course where you learn all about the Predictive Index, including the vocabulary associated with it, how to understand and analyze it and how it can be used as a tool in business.

I entered the program excited to learn, but not really having any idea what to expect. The main reason for my eagerness is that my fellow Oliver Group employees use the terminology associated with the PI frequently when talking to each other. Having no background in the terminology it might as well have been a foreign language. According to my PI, I am highly extroverted and have a deep need to interact and connect with people, so you can imagine that it was pretty frustrating for me to essentially be on the outside looking in on these conversations.

The Oliver Group is lucky to have several extremely bright and talented consultants. I had the opportunity of having my class taught by Michael Wohl, who made the learning experience extremely interesting and as painless as possible. Michael knew every detail of every person’s PI that was going through training at the Open PI Workshop and used this information to make sure that he was catering to everybody’s needs as best as possible.

Take my word for it that a class with Michael is extremely impressive. It was hard enough to just remember my own PI. Michael began the class with a question that really got my brain spinning. He asked us “Do you have a true sense of self?” I found this question very intriguing because my perception of myself and others could be completely different than the actual reality. I was surprised that he was asking this type of question because I thought PI was just a business tool. Michael explained that as a business tool the PI helps businesses to make clearer decisions by substituting metrics for intuition or emotion-based decisions. This is the main purpose of the PI, but Michael wanted us to understand that the PI is not just creating some dots on a paper. It is measuring the motivating behaviors of an individual to understand his needs as a person and employee.

Michael filled our brains with a wealth of knowledge about the PI that I could write several pages about, but these are some of the basics of understanding what the PI means. The PI is a personality survey that measures four primary factors: Dominance, Extroversion, Patience, and Formality. The PI tells you whether you are low (have a less than average expression) or high (have a greater than average expression) in regard to each of the 4 factors. Where you are measured in regard to each factor shows you what your motivating behaviors and needs are, and there thousands of variations in patterns. With the 3 patterns that the PI creates, the Self, Self-Concept and the Synthesis, the PI can tell you much more than what someone’s personality is—it can predict performance, measure morale, help with hiring the best “fit” for a role, and much more.

It was really fun to get training on the PI. Seeing how different my PI was to some of the people training was really interesting. Recognizing that everybody has different motivating behaviors and needs is important because you understand why people act the way they do, including myself. I need to keep practicing my PI skills to continue building on this knowledge, and I look forward to “talking PI” with my colleagues and Oliver Group clients soon!

By Nick Judah, Marketing Assistant at The Oliver Group