Resources

SPIM Members, please send your book titles, courses, job postings, and other resources for sharing to Mary Zahner at mzahner@cmaconsult.com.

RESOURCES FROM OUR MEMBERS:

o The Ethical Practice of Psychology in Organizations (2nd Edition) edited by Rodney Lowman, jointly published by the American Psychological Association and SIOP. Description: Applications of the APA ethics to issues in consultation, management, and IO psychology.

o Executive Wisdom: Coaching and the Emergence of Virtuous Leaders by Dick Kilburg, available through APA and Amazon. Description: It attempts to integrate classic views of wisdom with the best of contemporary psychological research while simultaneously providing case examples, exercises and methods that are hopefully useful to leaders and coaches alike in helping them to both think about and become more virtuous in their practices.

o Chapters by Arther M. Freedman (“Swimming upstream: The challenge of managerial promotions”) and H. Skipton (Skip) Leonard (“When leadership development fails managers: Addressing the right gaps when developing leadership”) in Robert B. Kaiser (ed.). (2006) Filling the Leadership Pipeline. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.

o The EQ Leader Program: How to launch and implement successful EQ consulting and coaching projects by Dana C. Ackley, Ph.D. (2006), published by MHS in July, 2006. Description: This book is a 336 page manual for a model program to build the emotional intelligence skills of leaders in organizations. It is based on the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i), the first, and so far, only measure of emotional intelligence to be favorably reviewed by Buros Mental Measurement Yearbook. The program has five steps: (1) a one day keynote seminar designed to win the interest and involvement of executives in their EQ development; (2) assessment/feedback processes that include a semi-structured interview, behavioral interview questions for each of the fifteen skills measured by the EQ-I, and detailed guidelines for the development of a personalized report that integrates E!-I and interview findings; (3) a ten step developmental planning process that creates a concrete, executable plan for each participant with measurable goals; (4) review of goals with the participant’s manager; and (5) executive coaching. The manual comes with a CD that holds key documents, such as the 60 page outline for the keynote seminar and menus of exercises for the development of each EQ skill. Those who purchase the manual purchase rights to download the documents, edit them to fit their own company or practice and to reproduce them. Thus, buyers can edit the keynote outline, PowerPoint and handouts to suit themselves. They can reproduce the menus of exercises for their clients and put their own letterhead on them. More details are available from Dana’s website: www.eqleader.net.

o Agility-Fast Feedback Leadership by Cynthia Scott for the Talent Solutions Practice of Lee Hecht Harrison. Description: It discusses the challenges of leading in a fast changing global environment. This research was presented at a session with the US Olympic Committee. Cynthia would be happy to send this to anyone who requests a copy (Cynthia.Scott@lhh.com). Also Cynthia is presenting Reflect-Renew-Reengage, a Discovery Retreat in San Francisco on December 8th. The sessions are focused on woman ages fifty or older who are navigating their second middle age. Featured will be Suzanne Braun Levine, the author of Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood. Cynthia continues to find her leadership role of developing a talent solutions practice inside a global organization to be challenging and invigorating.

o Leadership Lessons from West Point by Colonel Tom Kolditz is an edited volume from his department due to be published in mid-October. The project grew as a follow-on writing project from a successful nine article special issue of the journal Leader to Leader, also authored solely by his Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership. Publisher in both cases is John Wiley & Sons. That special issue just won the APEX Award in publishing in the Best New Magazine or Journal category.

o Individual Assessments in the Workplace: A Practical Guide for HR Professionals, Trainers and Managers by Len Goodstein and E.P. Prien. Published by Pfeiffer, 2006.

o Protocols for Networking by David Holmes, written for the Princeton Area Chamber of Commerce. Description: “Networking, like any interpersonal relationship, requires that a person have a high “emotional quotient” to be successful.” David provides a list of “Ten Commandments of Networking.” If you are interested in hearing or reading more, contact David at davidlarsonholmes@MSN.com

Summer 2007, The Kaleidoscope Project
Robert J. Sternberg
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences (Tufts University)

The overarching message of Tufts University is that we develop “new leaders for a changing world.” As Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and as a scholar of leadership, I am particularly interested in how we can implement this message (which I participated in crafting).

We have devised several means for executing on the message, including a Center that teaches teachers how to teach for leadership and a leadership minor that enables students to learn how to apply principles of leadership to their own leadership experiences. In this brief article, I would like to describe a leadership-based project concerning college admissions.

During the final years I was IBM Professor of Psychology and Professor of Management at Yale, I collaborated with close to two dozen individuals on the implementation of the Rainbow Project (Sternberg & the Rainbow Project Collaborators, 2006). The Rainbow Project, funded by the College Board, involved creating an assessment to supplement the SAT that would, we hoped, increase prediction of academic success and decrease ethnic-group differences. The assessment contained measures of analytical, creative, and practical intelligence, based on the theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, 1999). In a sample of 13 colleges, ranging from unselective to highly selective, and almost 100 participants, we found that we could double prediction of freshman grades and very substantially decrease ethnic-group differences by adding the Rainbow Assessment to the SAT. Similar procedures were implemented in supplementing the GMAT for admission to business school (Hedlund et al., 2006) and the Advanced Placement tests for measuring college-level achievement in high school (Stemler et al., 2006).

This project served as the basis for a new one. This past academic year, we implemented the Kaleidoscope Project at Tufts.

The Kaleidoscope Assessment was done in collaboration with Linda Abriola, Dean of the School of Engineering, and Lee Coffin, Dean of Admissions (Sternberg, in press). Unlike the Rainbow Assessment, it was not a separate test. . The questions were included in the college application mailed to all of the more than 15,000 students who applied to Tufts. The application contained questions based on an extension of the theory of successful intelligence, the WICS theory of leadership (Sternberg, 2005). They measured wisdom, intelligence (academic/analytical and practical), and creativity synthesized. The idea of the theory is that leaders need creative skills to form a vision for their leadership, analytical skills to ascertain whether it is a good vision, practical skills to execute the vision and convince others of its worth, and wisdom-based skills in order to ensure that the vision is for a common good, not just the good of oneself or one’s family or friends. For example, a wisdom-based question asked how the student might apply some passion developed in high school for a common good. A practical question asked how you had persuaded a friend of some idea that he or she did not initially accept. An analytical question asked about what book you would want to have in your library and why. One creative option was to write a short story with a title such as Confessions of a Middle-School Bully or The End of MTV. Another was to imagine some event in history, and say what the world would be like today if it had come out differently. A third option was to draw a new product or an advertisement for a new product. It was optional to answer the questions, and about half the applicants did.

The Kaleidoscope Project was used only in a “positive” way. In other words, if an applicant attempted to write a creative essay and was not very successful, that attempt did not keep him or her out. Rather, the essays were used as bases for putting people into the class. We found the essays most helpful in the middle of the distribution of applicants. Very strong applicants tended to be admitted regardless of what they wrote in the Kaleidoscope Project essays and weak ones to be rejected in any case. But in the middle two-thirds of the distribution, where applicants look rather similar, the essays were very helpful.

The results for the first year were heartening. Some people were worried applications would go down because adding the new questions made for more work. In fact, applications went up. Other people were worried that assessing creative, practical, and wisdom-related skills might decrease the academic quality of the applicant pool. In fact, all measures of academic prowess, including the SAT, showed gains. A third worry was that promises of increased diversity would not pan out. In fact, the applicant pool accepted was the most diverse ever. The number of African-Americans matriculating is double that of last year. Most importantly, we received tremendously positive qualitative feedback from applicants, who felt that Tufts had shown itself to be a school that cared about more than just GPAs and SATs—that it really cared about the individual as a whole person.

So we have shown that it is possible to develop and operationalize an assessment of leadership based on the WICS model. And the results have been even better than we expected. This kind of assessment might prove useful to others who wish to test skills that go beyond the traditional range of skills measured by conventional ability tests.

References
o Hedlund, J., Wilt, J. M., Nebel, K. R., Ashford, S. J., & Sternberg, R. J. (2006). Assessing practical intelligence in business school admissions: A supplement to the graduate management admissions test. Learning and Individual Differences, 16, 101–127.

o Stemler, S. E., Grigorenko, E. L., Jarvin, L., & Sternberg, R. J. (2006). Using the theory of successful intelligence as a basis for augmenting AP exams in psychology and statistics. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 31(2), 344–376.

o Sternberg, R. J. (1999). The theory of successful intelligence. Review of General Psychology, 3, 292–316.

o Sternberg, R. J. (2005). WICS: A model of leadership. The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 8(1), 29–43.

o Sternberg, R. J. (in press). Rethinking college admissions for the 21st century. Chronicle of Higher Education.

o Sternberg, R. J., & The Rainbow Project Collaborators (2006). The Rainbow Project: Enhancing the SAT through assessments of analytical, practical and creative skills. Intelligence, 34 (4), 321-350