Rate Your Own Employees’ Level of Cognitive Engagement …

Return on payroll is all about cognitive engagement. It’s about switching the corporate culture from cognitive deficit to cognitive surplus.

Here’s a simple audit for you, as CEO, to rate your own employees’ level of cognitive engagement in just 20 questions.

VALIDATION: SOT has validated this checklist with thousands of members globally for more than 20 years. It was designed by Dr Eric Bienstock who is Vice-Principal of SOT in New York. Eric holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and a Ph.D. from New York University where he studied Mathematics, Education and Learning Theory. He based this checklist on the SOT’s Learn-To-Think Coursebook and Instructors Manual (Michael Hewitt-Gleeson & Edward de Bono, Capra/New 1982).

Cognitive engagement–thinking–is all about the management of attention. How well do your employees pay attention?

Use these 20 questions to asses the quality of daily thinking across your own enterprise …

INSTRUCTIONS

Answer each of the 20 questions overleaf, scoring either 3, 2, 1, or 0 points for each answer depending on your personal estimate of how your enterprise, as a whole, actually does what is stated on a daily basis. As CEO use your best guess of these criteria for scoring:

3 — 90% OF THE TIME (nearly always)

2 — 70% OF THE TIME (mostly)

1 — 40% OF THE TIME (often)

0 — 10% OF THE TIME (hardly ever)

Please don’t panic, this is NOT a scientific test. Self-rating can be notoriously unreliable so your ratings may be way off depending on your mood and other factors. However, time has proven this to be a valid audit to help you take stock of your enterprise thinking, their attention skills, your own view of their cognitive engagement. Food for thought!

Every day the output of your peoples’ brainpower is decisions. This is your return on payroll. They make hundreds of decisions a day, sometimes more. The quality of these decisions not only has a direct impact on the quality of your business and shareholder value but also on your employees’ personal life, their family, their business and their friends. If you can raise the quality of their decisions you can raise their quality of life.

A properly trained thinker can direct his or her thinking and use it in a deliberate manner to produce an effect. To a trained and engaged thinker, thinking is a tool that can be used at will and the use of this tool is practical. Results. This ability to use ‘thinking as a skill’ is the sort of lateral thinking that is required to get things DONE.

THE AUDIT

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INTERPRETATION

– If your total score in this test was between 51 and 60 points, your enterprise may already possess superior brainpower.

– If you scored between 31 and 50 points, your thought-leaders may have better than average brainpower.

– If you scored between 0 and 30, you may possess no additional enterprise brainpower other than the natural thinking ability that most untrained people have.

Please don’t panic, this is NOT a scientific test. As you know, self-rating is notoriously unreliable so your ratings may be way off depending on your mood and other factors. However, it is a valid audit or checklist: to help you take stock of your enterprise lateral thinking, their attention skills, your own view of their cognitive engagement.

APPLICATION

Every day the product of your payroll is decisions. The brains you are leasing on a monthly basis make decisions based on input and output. Across your enterprise each one of your employees makes hundreds of conscious decisions a day, sometimes more. The quality of these decisions has a direct impact on the quality of their personal life, their family, their business and their friends. If they can raise the quality of their decisions they can raise the quality of their life and their work.

A trained thinker can direct his or her thinking and use it in a deliberate manner to produce an effect. To a trained and skilled thinker, thinking is a tool that can be used at will and the use of this tool is practical. This ability to use ‘thinking as a skill’ is the sort of thinking ability that is required to get things DONE.