[Sophie Buhrs]

Q1. What catches your attention about the shape of Jack’s profile?
Jack moves along the bottom line of the triangles from right to left. He starts interactions by sharing his personal view. Based on the context he then moves into an advise or challenge voice. Jack’s less used voices are inquire, diagnose and articulate.

Q2. What impressions do you find yourself forming about Jack from his profile?
Jack is confident in speaking about the subjects he’s an expert on. He positions himself by advocating based on his expertise and experience and then, based on the reaction of his audience, will move into advise or challenge. Jack doesn’t use the exploring voices very much, maybe he feels he doesn’t need to when the explorative questions are answered through his own reading and desk research.
I think Jack might see himself as a reliable narrator on his topics of expertise and doesn’t see the need to use the diagnose, inquire and articulate voice because he expects his audience to either have the same level of understanding or trust his expertise.

Q3. Which aspects of the context do you think might be important in this case?
Cultural differences (America – South East Asia), age, self-perception.
There is also something about his work now being occasional assignments on short term contracts. I can imagine in the past he was well known throughout the industry, however now he is having to build new relationships at the start of each contract.

Q4. What issues might you be looking to explore with Jack?
I would want Jack to think about the situations where he moves from either his first advocate voice to either advise or challenge. I would also want to explore how he views the dysfunctional sides of each voice and ask him which dysfunctional voices he finds it difficult to engage with. I would then get him to think about how he would like to be perceived and then get him to compare that to how he may be perceived when he uses the negative side of his top 3 voices.
I would get him to think about what voices are useful when building trust and how he can use the inquire and diagnose voice to ask questions which build trust, confidence and takes him out of judgement mode (challenge, probe) and jumping to conclusions.

Somewhere in this, I would also ask him why he thinks he was asked to complete a VoicePrint profile.