omeone about to enter a Masters program in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology recently contacted me asking for advice about what "top skills and high demand tools" he should focus on in his Masters program.

This seems straightforward but it is not an easy question for me for two reasons.

First, I/O Psychology is the broadest discipline within the field of Psychology because all the other fields of Psychology are fair game in your quest to help individuals, groups, teams and organizations improve their performance: Human Factors, Sensation and Perception, Cognitive Psychology, OD, Psychometrics, Org Behavior, Personality, Social Psychology, Behavioral Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Differential Psychology, Clinical Psychology, etc.

There are at least two broad dimensions for one to consider: do you lean towards Quantitative or Qualitative work? And do you want to work with Individuals vs. working at the Organizational level?

If you are lean towards the quantitative side, you can concentrate on measurement and assessment (cognitive, personality, physical/social skills, etc) for individuals. Or leverage that quantitative focus at the organization level doing job analysis, measurement, and test validation for selection and placement work. 

Or you can lean towards the qualitative side and do training or coaching work for individuals or, at the organizational level, OD work aimed at improving group and organization performance and producing large system change.

And, of course, within these two broad axes, there are thousands of flavors and shades in between. So while there is an answer that is right for him based on his interests, there really is no objectively right answer here.

My interests were decidedly on the Qualitative and Organization ends of those two continua and, be forewarned, that profoundly affected the recommendations that follow. The good news is that I/O Psychologists continue to be in high demand, so he should be employable whether he follows my advice or not.

Second, I am not sure I am the best person to give advice about how to be a good I/O Psychologist. After completing my dissertation I worked as an OD manager and then HR Director as the company and the entire mini computer industry it was a part of augered itself into the ground. We weren't exactly transforming the organization, unless you call downsizing year after year a transformation.

Human Resources started to make my skin crawl and I also realized I needed to learn a helluva lot more about what business really is and how it works if I wanted to be able to say with a straight face that I was a "business partner" and could help "develop organizations." So I joined a management consultancy, which led to me eventually taking on operational roles and P&L responsibilities in larger companies.

In other words, asking me what classes to take to be a good I/O Psychologist may be like asking the prodigal son for investment advice.

That said, I was asked my opinion and, surprise(!), I had a recommendation...eight of them to be exact. Here is what I told him, including links to some of my articles on these subjects:

1) Take as many statistics classes as you can, especially experimental design. As we were fond of saying in graduate school, "In god we trust. All others bring data." Data influences leaders to do what you want them to do. Moreover, experimental design and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) in all its forms (including machine learning, which are currently the third and fourth word out of everyone's mouth) is the coin of the realm right now. Thus, it will give you options and make you employable if you get sick of HR and I/O Psych work like I did.

2) Either take a class that uses or just read my colleague and friend Gordon Curphy’s book Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience. This book takes almost the entire field of Psychology and applies it to one thing: Leadership. The insights and applications are profound. Read it multiple times actually...and then sleep with it under your pillow.

3) If you envision working on staff for a company that sells products or services, take some business classes that allow you to develop a theory of organizational performance. You are trying to help business leaders produce results, not optimize the maze running performance of rats. Be able to draw linkages between individual and group functioning and outputs CEOs and CFOs actually care about.

4) If you are interested in working more at the organizational level, you absolutely have to get your head around what corporate culture is and how to “nudge” it. I am sure you have heard the story about the old fish saying to the two young fish swimming by, "Enjoy the water today boys." They blew the old fish off and then said a few minutes later, "Hey, what's water?"

Culture is the water everyone in the company is swimming in. It influences organizational behavior as invisibly and inexorably as gravity influences our movements. You have to know that "culture water" exists, be able to define and measure it, and be able to help leaders nudge it and align it to support the strategy.

In my opinion, most people are suffering from massive rectal-cranial inversions in their views on culture and culture change, including many of your professors, since more than likely they never worked in a real company and never undertook a culture change effort. But just take some classes to get you starting to think about what culture is and how to move the needle on it so you can be ready if you ever get a shot.

5) If there are any classes or opportunities to learn about how facilitate group meetings or assist with conflict resolution or team building, take them. You will likely end up facilitating hundreds of planning meetings and leadership events and you have to be good with a group. Most of these situations are straightforward especially since most in corporate America tend to play nice. But many of these meetings can get red hot. It really gets challenging when there are diverse stakeholders, levels of management, demographics, party line opinions and "minority" viewpoints, gut-level conflicts about priorities, and long simmering rivalries.

A good I/O OD person should be able to stand in the fire of those disagreements and add value by getting the polarities to interact, really hear one another, and get to win-win. Had Morton-Thiokol had a good facilitator/OD person in the room when they were trying to decide whether to give NASA the green light, an unspeakable tragedy might have been avoided. Get good at this and maybe it will be you who saves lives or just steers organizations and teams through the rocks.

6) If you envision yourself on staff in a large organization or being a consultant vs. sitting in a back room getting intimate with large data sets, sign up for any opportunity to stand on your feet and present publicly. OD people are change agents. If you want to be a change agent you have to be able to communicate effectively and influence others, which usually means you have to be great on your feet in front of a room. At the end of the day, in my opinion, influence is much less about what you know and much more about who you are, your convictions, and your ability to communicate.

7) And to that point about who you are, if there are any classes that allow you to develop more knowledge of yourself…not book learning, and no, not the Enneagram or other typologies of its ilk…real group dynamics (with you in the group!!), with real, in your face, feedback from others, where you learn how others perceive you and what it is like to work with you, take them. If you don’t know how you come across, how others see you, and what your blind spots are, you are a loose cannon and your lack of awareness will produce resistance in the people you are trying to influence. You simply won't be able to influence and lead effectively.

The title of the article is a riff on Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, where a budding author asked Rilke (pictured above) about writing and he responded to him. Part of Rilke's advice was to implore the young poet to ask himself if he really had to write and if he did to follow that impulse:

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. ~From Letters to a Young Poet

My final advice to him:

8) Trust your intuition about what classes to take and follow it. It is not a curriculum vitae. It's Vitae. Your Vitae: you're unfolding your very Life.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is the President of Adsum Insights and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get off to the best possible start in their new job.