Interviewer: Mariham Magdy

We would not be able to learn if we didn’t identify our own biases and understand their impact on the different situations that we face in life…

Dr. Alaa Awad

Associate Expert & Consultant at Talent Bay

INTRODUCTION 

Job Psychological Engineering is a pragmatic proposal by Dr. Alaa Awad, Egyptian Physician and HR Expert, who is the first to introduce the concept on LinkedIn in 2017 after more than 21 years of applied-psychology practice.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/job-psychological-engineering-alaa-awad/

Dr. Alaa Awad masters a handful of profiling tools, namely MBTI, Keirsey Intelligence Types, DiSC Classifications (Certified International Trainer), Psychodynamic Personality Portraits, and applications of NLP.

He has been a Business Psychology Scholar since 1992, Management Researcher since 1995, HR & Organizational Learning Consultant since 1997, Business Lecturer & Corporate Trainer since 2000, Career Counselor & Coach since 2004, HR & OD Director since 2007, and Author of 5 scientific publications in Crisis Management & Organizational Learning.

With his triple background in Management, Psychology & Medicine, Dr. Alaa assists and trains Business & HR professionals not only to proficiently select the adequate profiles to perfectly integrate to both position & organization efficiency; but also he assists them to understand themselves & their deep personality traits, thus understanding points of strengths & best career paths to select to be appropriate to their personality.

THE INTERVIEW

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: Dr. Alaa it is really a great honor for me to interview your good-self. Thanks a lot for accepting my invitation & for enriching the HR community with your valuable studies & knowledge. Based on your extensive studies & practical experience; to what extent do organizations in Egypt have the appropriate awareness about “Job Psychological Engineering”?

Dr. Alaa Awad: Thanks to HR Revolution for this opportunity that I do appreciate, an opportunity to introduce Job Psychological Engineering® as an HR Technology; it’s a tool for job psychological requirements identification as well as team design, a complex tool that matches the complexity of the workplace. I would like also to thank the team of Talent Bay, an HR Consulting House that went global since its incorporation and gives me the ideal professional environment for the development of my pragmatic project.

Few organizations in Egypt use personality assessment for selection, and usually the tool of assessment is based on a single personality theory, and hence the shortcomings of such tools. But the pragmatic nature of the Job Psychological Engineering model allows the integration of many major personality theories in order to apprehend all the relevant psychological dimensions related to the job content and the job context at the same time.

The awareness about Job Psychological Engineering (JPE) is not yet established, and the first time I introduced this concept on LinkedIn in September 2017 I didn’t find the same term “Job Psychological Engineering” all over the internet. The uniqueness of the model is not only about its label but also about its eclectic content. Both scientists and vendors are necessarily referring to a single psychology school of thought. For instance, a Freudian scholar ought not to accept Jungian assumptions about human nature, and vice versa. Likewise a vendor promoting the DiSC Classification as a tool for personality assessment usually perceives the MBTI vendor as a competitor, and actually the DiSC promotion is based on a criticism of the MBTI. But out of pragmatism, the JPE model integrates different psychology schools of thought as they complement each other, and hence includes several concepts and tools, namely MBTI, Socionics, Keirsey Personology, DiSC Classification, the American Psychiatric Association’s Personality Classification, NLP Representational Systems, the Big Five Personality Traits, as well as the Cognitive Abilities related to the Intelligence Quotient.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: As a seasoned Human Capital Expert with an extensive experience throughout the Middle-East; how many organizations started actually to apply the “Job Psychological Engineering” concept in their hiring decisions, aiming to achieve the business goals & maintain a positive work environment? What success stories have you witnessed and can share with us in this regard?

Dr. Alaa Awad: In my capacity as Director of HR & Institutional Development, HR & Organizational Learning Consultant, Action-Trainer, or Research Worker, I dealt with more than 30 organizations in different stages of my JPE model development since 1997. And during these two decades, I spent six years in Canada. The most successful story of JPE application on an organizational level was that of an Egyptian Company in a manufacturing sector; during the period of my intervention as an HR Consultant for more than 7 years, this Company acquired a European Plant working in the same field and went international. The key success factor behind the implementation of JPE principles and the remarkable business development achievement was the psychological awareness of the Top Management; it was like a co-learning journey where we were using the same jargon, and the use of psychological tools became a part of the organizational culture. I remember the case of an important employee in this Company who changed his position according to a Job-Personality Matching and became so motivated afterwards; I told the business owner that I was so happy for this employee, so the owner responded: “Alaa! I am happy for the business!” It’s such awareness of the importance of Human Capital for the development of the business that would make the whole difference, it is also the conviction that there is no Human Development or Performance Management without Psychology.

On a single job level the most successful story was that of the psychological design of the profile of the right candidate for a technical position reporting to a chief executive level in an important institution, and the incumbent was recruited and selected accordingly out of 200 job applicants among them 11 were preselected and interviewed. The harmony between the selected candidate and his manager who is one of the most demanding business leaders I have ever met was remarkable and their collaboration continues since then with all the expected learning, development, and promotion for almost a decade so far. Such case shows that the problem is not about difficult personalities, if any, it is about bad matching; actually job psychological engineering ensures good matching between coworkers and between managers and their subordinates.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: How much do you think it might cost an Organization to lose as a result of not including psychometric assessments among their hiring assessments cycle?

Dr. Alaa Awad: Psychology helps understand, anticipate and influence human behavior, and this is the very essence of the role of any manager. The lack of psychological awareness will increase the cost of trial and error, and the opportunity cost of missing the right candidate should be big. It is documented that the intentional bad selection of the Ex-Soviet leader Gorbachev had induced the breakdown of the former Soviet Union; he was so influential and too idealistic, and hence lacking the political realism and rationality that are required for a superpower leader position in the special context of the cold war; in other words his type of intelligence was diplomatic not strategic. So the cost of ignoring the psychological requirements of the job will be bigger if the job has a big impact on the organization.

I can’t imagine that we still try to deal with human beings without psychological vision; in the States they profile Facebook users in order to predict their voting behavior, and in Singapore there are preschools for multiple intelligence, etc. Unfortunately we are far behind.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: As an expert in this field, what piece of advice would you give to HR professionals in organizations established years ago without consideration of “jobs’ psychological engineering” and have to deal with the results of that from an HR perspective?

Dr. Alaa Awad: I would like to start with a real example from another manufacturing plant. We have two engineers of the same background and experience, the first one is the Production Planning Manager, and the second one is the Production Manager. The latter is a very organized person with low tolerance for ambiguity, while the first one is a flexible person with a high tolerance for ambiguity. The production environment in this specific case involved a lot of emergent conditions and many exceptions made for special clients. The Production Manager was frustrated because of the planning delay and the many changes made to the production plan afterwards. The solution was so simple, a swap between the two engineers, the flexible one would be in charge of the production management, and the organized one would be in charge of the production planning, hence exceptions would become minimal, planning would be done on time, and at the same time the implementation would be flexible enough to tolerate the unpredictable conditions afterwards. It is not about conflict management, it is not about training, it is not about firing and hiring, it is as simple as a swap that could be done immediately.

So HR Managers have to profile people, review the job-personality matching of all key positions, and apply a smart job rotation in order to improve efficiency. When a person is in charge of tasks that don’t match his/her personality, he/she needs more effort to get the job done; job-personality mismatching decreases efficiency, and staffing review on a job psychological engineering basis would improve efficiency. Sometimes we need a complementary micro redesign of the organizational structure in order to optimize the job-personality matching. When I mention “job” I mean both job content and job context.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: From your valuable point of view what are the benefits of applying the concept of “Job Psychological Engineering” in newly established organizations, whereas hiring decisions are based from the very beginning on an accurate personality assessment for the candidates in relation to the typology of the job they shall do?

Dr. Alaa Awad: This is really the perfect phase to apply Job Psychological Engineering. Once the results of the feasibility study of the entrepreneurial project are revealed as positive, the Organization Design should be done and the Job Psychological Engineering should follow accordingly. This will simply save the cost of change management, as everything may be done the right way since day one. The Business Development Agenda, Organization Design, Job Psychological Engineering, and HR Planning should be aligned and the best moment to do it properly is in the startup phase; it’s all about Design Thinking.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: If it might be costly to some organizations; is it correct in this case to limit using this approach to senior positions only? Is it wrong not to use personality assessments for junior or blue collar positions?

Dr. Alaa Awad: Job Psychological Engineering ought to be applied to every position in the organization in order to reach the best possible harmony with the maximal efficiency. Blue collars psychology is more important than we may imagine, but their routine tasks are easier to analyze. For instance in the manufacturing sector, if you want to build a culture of quality, the right character of blue collars will make a difference. Regarding junior positions, it is necessary to assess the personality of the candidates in order to evaluate their potential and identify talents despite their little previous experience.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: Throughout your experience Dr. Alaa, was it common to meet with CEOs who are aware about the crucial importance of “Psychometric Assessments” & want to apply them not only in hiring but also in other business dealings? How can this influence the future of a business & professional partnerships?

Dr. Alaa Awad: Yes, it was one of my best clients who invited me more than once to meet a potential business partner in order to assess the pattern of interaction between them, i.e. the psychological feasibility of the business partnership. This ought to occur in a casual setting where the client as a common friend invites the potential partner and me to dinner, for instance, without revealing my professional background.

I was also asked to assess the personality of the purchasing manager of the client of my client in a B-to-B setting. Such assignment needs a special arrangement.

Without reducing the factors affecting the business relations to the mere psychological dimension of things, the knowledge of the psychological context of the business if well identified and described would help manage the other factors effectively and efficiently.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: Apart from the application of this science in HR practices; as a career coach & counselor, how is it necessary for each person to have an accurate understanding for his/her personality type? And how this can benefit him/her to succeed more in life?

Dr. Alaa Awad: Self-knowledge is a must for experiential learning, i.e. learning from life experience, we would not be able to learn if we didn’t identify our own biases and understand their impact on the different situations that we face in life. And if we learn we will be able to improve our pattern of interaction with our environment. It is also necessary to know one’s points of strength in order to gain self-confidence. Finally success is a matter of choice, choosing the right domain, the right way, the right person, etc… and choice is a matter of matching between your nature and the nature of the field or persons that you will be dealing with. So Learning, Change, Matching, Confidence, and Success are all about Self-Knowledge.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: To what extent do you believe that a low “self-awareness” might cause people to pursue wrong career decisions and thus fail to realize their personal & professional fulfillment?

Dr. Alaa Awad: This is unfortunately one of the most common professional failure factor, career mismatching! It starts from the bad choice of the field of study due to a lack of self-knowledge. For example, the mentality of an architect should differ from the mentality of a civil engineer; it’s the opposition between abstract thinking and concrete thinking respectively, likewise the mentality of a creative designer should differ from the mentality of an accountant, etc. The magic click (fit) between the natural aptitudes of the candidate and the cognitive and behavioral requirements of the career is the secret of career fulfillment.

  1. HR Revolution Middle East: Finally what valuable piece of advice would you give to HR professionals, responsible to manage recruitment plans throughout a region and sometimes have to distantly assess candidates from different countries and with different nationalities; could written psychometric assessments be enough in this case?

Dr. Alaa Awad: Written psychometric assessments or questionnaires have limited reliability and are good for group assessment only; individual assessment needs a face-to-face setting and this may be done through video conference. I use Skype sometimes, and for very important candidates we arrange a short trip paid by the eventual employer.

I also advise the beginner personality assessor to use the questionnaire but not to consult the results but after the interview, so he/she may compare the interview findings with the results of the written assessment taken into consideration the limited reliability of the questionnaire versus his/her points of indecisiveness regarding the profiling of the candidate.

THANK YOU