Dr. Timothy Anderson, Ohio University Clinical Psychology professor and researcher, said it best: "Interpersonal skills are the learned emotional and interpersonal patterns of behavior that allow some people to be more effective at navigating through difficult and complex interpersonal situations."

Leveraging our technology partner and sister company, Skillsetter.com, we expose business leaders to simulations of challenging team dynamics and using their webcam, they record responses. Highly trained experts review their responses and using a precise coding manual, assign a score for each of the MFIS dimensions.

In the world of counseling psychology, researchers asked the question: "Of all the helping professionals, what characterizes those who consistently get better outcomes for their clients?" With a cleverly designed research study, Dr Timothy Anderson concluded that Facilitative Interpersonal Skills are predictive of client outcomes.

Having spent over a decade in the field of executive and leadership coaching, Zarango's founder Stephan Wiedner noted the overlap between FIS and the behavior goals of most business leaders participating in a coaching program.

We hypothesize that if FIS lead to better outcomes in counseling, MFIS lead to better outcomes in a business team. Since every business team measures effectiveness differently, we use psychological safety as a proxy for outcomes because psychological safety is known to correlate with team effectiveness. 

Maybe. It depends on the interpersonal challenges that emerge during the meeting.

Measuring MFIS requires taking a snapshot of performance with the goal of predicting long-term performance in all situations. Therefore, the snapshot needs to be a challenging interpersonal situation that helps discriminate between high and low levels of MFIS.

For example, if you were trying to assess intermediate piano players, asking them to play a simple song such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb" would not likely help you glean much insight.