Recognizing that a large percentage of the industry reads this blog, Identimap has reached out to me. In brief, they want to offer their personality assessment tool free to court reporters and they also want to offer a free trial of their Trek42 team management tool to all court reporting businesses and court reporting managers.
I’ve created a short video to show off what the personality assessment looks like, and I’ll add that to the bottom of this post, but I really want to dive deeper and give a more comprehensive view of what we are talking about when we say personality assessment.
The Assessment Tool
When you log into the app portion of the site, you get a screen that looks something like this.
As you can see, you have a self-assessment option, a comparative analysis option, and the option to see previous scores. Let’s start with the self-assessment tool. It presents you with a large list of words and asks you to select whatever you feel describes you. It is a very simple point-and-click tool.
Using your response, the tool scores you, and you get an assessment that looks something like this.
It scores you on four traits or personality types, the Achiever, the Encourager, the Analyzer, and the Listener. These correspond to the four temperaments theory. Obviously, each of us feel differently day to day. If you take the assessment on a day that you’re feeling elated or optimistic, you’ll get wildly different results than taking the test on a challenging or difficult day. But using this tool gives you a peek at your current mindset and the strengths or weaknesses you may have.
When you take the assessment, you have the option to compare it to various career paths. It is a fun add-on. Of course, I immediately checked to see their assessment of an attorney versus my assessment of myself.
As you can see, the self-assessment tool is a lot of fun and free for everyone. Just to quickly review the comparative analysis, that is something where, if you are sitting down with someone on the same session, you can choose what words you feel describe you, the other participant sitting with you then gets to decide what words they feel describe you. Then you get to compare notes, and it gives you something like this.
How can the personality assessment tool help court reporters? Knowing ourselves, knowing each other, and knowing how each person in a unit thinks of another can help identify strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately help us find ways to work together. For example, let’s say you have a court reporting mentoring group. You want the encourager paired with the analyzer because the encourager will push those introverts to open up about the important things they are analyzing. Placing two achievers on a team might lead to leadership disputes. This is one way the field can evolve from “go into room five and take the job” to “we will create court reporting services designed for the best customer experience.” There may even be other experimental applications, like assessing student personalities and seeing if there are self-assessed traits that make students more likely to graduate their court reporting program.
The Trek42 Team Tool
Now, we have all these assessments, and that’s great, but what do we do with them? Identimap has the Trek42 tool, which allows you to put people on teams and sort them by traits. I’ve been assured that court reporting businesses / managers that ask will get several months of free trial time, and that the company will take feedback from its users to build the tool in a direction that is useful for them. I say put them to the test. Ask them for the free trial. Get Identimap President Kelley Judd or one of his reps to open this tool up to you. It’s easy and intuitive. You gather the assessments of your team members, assign them to teams, and get quick and easy visuals as to how each team member might complement the others. If that’s something you see value in, e-mail leadership@identimap.com, let them know that you are a court reporting business or manager, and let them know you want the free trial.
We have seen as a field the power of business-to-business relationships. This is a chance for our community to form a relationship with this startup and help it build its tool in a direction that’s useful for us. My gut tells me Identimap will keep its promise to remain no risk and low pressure for my audience, and if they do, I hope you’ll give their tool a try.