The Birkman Method® Knowledge Hub for Asia

When all the world is leveraging AI, the #1 factor that differentiates you from your competitors is STILL the quality of your people. Only The Birkman Method® can help you unlock their full potential.

Overview

The Birkman Method (TBM) is a powerful tool for understanding people, allowing you to unlock potential at every level of your business or other organisation. It has been employed widely across Asia for more than 25 years, with excellent results.

Background

The Birkman Method (TBM) is arguably unique amongst assessment tools. It combines a non-judgmental approach, based in Positive Psychology, with a level of accuracy and objectivity unmatched by other assessments. Instead of feeling judged, end-users feel understood; and yet, the results are highly predictive of success or otherwise in a specific role, and of an individual’s likely reaction to specific situations and environments.

The Birkman Method was first used in North America in the early 1960s. In Asia, it became available in Chinese in the late 1990s, and in a number of other languages since then. See [link] Language availability for a table of all available languages.

Applicability across Cultures

An important question for any assessment developed in one culture, is “does it work across cultures”? In other words, will it give valid and reliable results to someone who comes from another culture.

This is a question which is revisited on a regular basis by those who develop and maintain the language versions of TBM. Here are some simple points to consider:

Face Validity:

In other words, do people recognise themselves in the picture painted by their report? Even in cultures with wildly different assumptions from the baseline Western Industrial Population (ie US and Canada), this appears to be consistently the case, based on evidence collected to date.

Population Norms and Distribution:

Each Birkman scale within an individual’s report is expressed as a percentile score. This allows statisticians to consider the distribution of scores within a population, and their means (ie the Norm for that scale in that population. In broadest terms, provided a population shows the something like expected pattern of distribution of scores, then some variance in norms is acceptable, and may well represent a genuine characteristic of that culture; but it is the distribution of scores (some very low, some low, some mid-range and so on) that validates that the Questionnaire is still measuring something real. (This is obviously a very simplified version of how statistics are run for TBM or any other assessment; if you are interested, you can download the Birkman Technical Manual [here].

Vocabulary Choices:

One area in which revisions are sometimes required is in the area of the cultural meaning assigned to particular terms. For example, in at least one Asian culture, the term Assertiveness (used in English to name one of the Birkman Components) has very powerful political connotations.

The constructs TBM measures always have some element of social desirability attached - but must also include the possibility that someone can answer against the run of social desirability. Inadvertent inclusion of such non-neutral terms can lead to skewed results, and are corrected when they come to light (usually in the beta-testing phase of a new language version of the TBM Questionnaire).

In Summary:

users of Asian language versions of the Birkman Method Questionnaire and Signature Report, consistently report high levels of face validity, suggesting that in general the versions are using appropriate language and producing the expected range of results; but those who maintain these versions are always open to new feedback.