Are you an innovative and creative worker? Are you an adaptive roll with the punches contributor? Innovative and adaptive characteristics are two of the most telling measurements in defining your “business personality” and where you fit into an organization.
Dr. John Eggers, CEO and President of Proclivity LLC, has created the Creativity & Problem-Solving Style Inventory (CPS) as a method to measure a person’s innovative or adaptive characteristics. Dr. Eggers defines Innovative types and Adaptive types of people as follows:
Innovative Types:
Focus on doing things differently, prefer little structure, and are highly creative thinkers. These types are CEO’s, entrepreneurs, and trend setters. They are positive thinkers, flexible, driven, intuitive, fast trackers, with the ability to get noticed.
Innovative Disadvantages: This type is considered impatient, difficult to get along with, messy in their work, hate details, and often feel constricted by rules
Adaptive Types:
Work well with a set of rules or definitions, highly focused on tasks, methodical, concrete, practical, analytical, efficient, stable, and task oriented
Adaptive Disadvantages: Narrow minded, rigid, unimaginative, resist change, needs all the facts, and wants things done his/her way
The advantages of understanding how you rank in the CPS survey, whether innovative or adaptive, in understanding your strengths and weaknesses is invaluable. Armed with this self knowledge, you have the ability to find organizations that value your strength and you have a method of relating your skills to your prospective clients.
The CPS survey allows organizations to hire the right blend of innovative people and adaptive people to keep a company progressive, on target, growing, while staying focused on their task. If you are a broker investigating your mix of employees and their talents, measuring your employees may reveal a need for an innovative or adaptive type, give you a road map to a successful blend of talent, as well as provide a solid measurement building block for your company.
