A colleague recently asked me about a FEBI report for one of her clients – we’ll call him Richard – that puzzled her because every pattern on the overall energy profile registered “Very High” – virtually pegging the meter. “How could this be?” she asked. “And how do I debrief it?”
While this may seem like a non-result, it’s actually quite revealing, and there’s much to learn from it. But let me start by saying it’s a good example of why we don’t recommend using the FEBI for job selection! Now it’s fine for career counseling when somebody sincerely wants to figure out where their strengths lie. But we don’t try to make the instrument hard to fake. We encourage people to answer honestly and tease out their preferences by how much they indicate that they “almost always” do something vs. “often” do it and so on. If someone takes the FEBI and almost always answers “almost always”, as Richard did, he or she will score Very High on all of the patterns. Only the Work Behavior part of the instrument forces one to make choices, and there, preferences often make themselves clear, as they did for Richard. But the overall part of the instrument, consistent with 5-factor-type instruments such as the NEO or Hogan suite, assesses each pattern (factor) individually. So yes, one can score “Very High” on all of them.
Now what does it mean? Well, clearly it’s a big, high energy profile. Our early research comparing self-reported FEBI results with impressions from others in 360 data show that people with such a high energy profile (where all patterns score >100) are more likely to be seen by others as highly effective leaders. So if Richard is, in fact, almost always using the right pattern at the right time, his life should look pretty darn good, and it would be obvious when coaching him. Other people should perceive him as a powerful, lively and engaging leader. What I recommend to people like that is keep going! - now with added pattern awareness.
There are other possibilities, likely closer to the truth. In the Work Behavior part of the FEBI, Richard had rated all of the Collaborator behaviors in the top half, along with nearly all of the Visionary behaviors. Organizer behaviors were rock-bottom. Now sometimes even people with an Organizer Home pattern will take their Organizer strengths so much for granted (or delegate these tasks) that these behaviors still show up at the bottom. Was Richard a needing-to-be-perfect Organizer trying to be all things to all people? Or a dramatic, Collaborator Visionary answering everything from a place of abundance? We can’t be certain just from the data, but we can easily test out both possibilities as a coach. “Do you feel like you have to get it right?” I might ask to test out (or rule out) the first possibility. “Do you carry a lot of responsibility?” Or I might just feel for the held presence and rigidity of someone who is truly a Very High Organizer. Because that person will feel nothing like a Very High Collaborator, who will be talking most of the time, telling stories, gesturing dramatically, and probably moving around. Far more likely that Richard is the dramatic, Collaborator Visionary who answered the FEBI in a characteristically BIG way. If this is the case, his life should look large, but cluttered, with a pattern of grand ideas that die on the vine. My coaching recommendation would be help Richard bring in enough Driver to cut through the excess and enough Organizer to nail down the most important. But make it fun and dramatic every step of the way!