I am an I/O psychologist and I approach MI from a change mangement perspective. I have offered MI trainings for engineers, energy managers, and HR professionals. I particularly like how MI focuses on interpersonal dynamics and that it helps students to understand how their own behavior affects the response of their conversational partner. I also focus on using MI for career counselors and within life coaching interventions.I
In my Phd, I have explored the use of principles and ideas from MI within a research-based planning project to improve energy-related behavior within organizations. I have developed MI demonstration conversations for energy managers. I have used these videos as training materials for energy coordinators as part of an organizational change project.
In my research, I have investigated interactional dynamics between change agents and change recipients from a MI perspective. I have translated the MI Skill Code into German and implemented it as a computer-supported coding instrument. This methodological improvement has helped to understand better how the behaviors of a change agent (e.g., therapist, doctor, facilitator, manager) affect the behavior of a recipient (e.g., client, patient, trainee, employee). I have extended this research to the observation of organizational meetings, and I am curious to develop time-sensitive behavioral and observational measures that help us to shed light on interpersonal dynamics in organizations (group meetings and team dynamics, leader-follower interactions, change agent-recipient interactions). Overall, I have studied theoretical principles from MI within my work and applied these MI principles in my practice as a trainer and group facilitator. As I had the opportunity to provide training about MI principles with Psychology students, engineers, managers and HR professionals, I found the use of reflective / directive listening and evocative questions to be most helpful. From a research perspective, I am also interested in different types of reflective listening and how this affects employees' voice behavior.
My teaching and training philosophy is strongly linked to the mindset and spirit of MI. I actively foster and encourage power sharing in the interaction with students so that their ideas can influence the nature of my training. I view my trainees as having the potential to move in the direction of the learning goal.
Overall, I believe that teaching is an interactive dynamic process. My main goal is to maintain a mindset in which students should be promoted to grow and unfold their capacities. By fostering students’ autonomy in learning, I ensure they develop an intrinsic motivation for the learning outcomes. My training philosophy is to collaborate with trainees rather than impose an expert role, promote trainees’ autonomy rather than control their learning outcomes, give students structure to help them reach their learning goals, use empathy to understand areas where they struggle with training contents, and evocate their knowledge and expertise rather than suffocate them with an overload of information.
