The Attentional and Interpersonal Styles inventory (TAIS) was originally developed to help Olympic athletes and elite military units optimize performance in high-pressure situations. Every day, these individuals must make critical decisions under pressure with less than perfect information. Since its introduction, business leaders have recognized that their people face similar, if not identical, problems and have made the TAIS their own.

Derived from the principles of performance psychology, TAIS is a 144-item questionnaire that explores the fundamentals of human performance. Looking at a TAIS profile, PCI's experienced coaches can identify:

• environments and performance situations in which you will thrive and excel
• when and how you are most likely to make mistakes
• what you can do to ensure you will perform well under pressure

While other assessment approaches (e.g. 360 feedback, personality inventories) are effective at identifying problem behaviours, TAIS focuses on the building blocks of performance. It is the only instrument available that can help individuals improve across a broad spectrum of activities by identifying the drivers and limiters of their own performance. This comprehensive approach helps people look past the present to anticipate the situations in which they could struggle, and prepare an effective strategy for developing their capabilities.

The TAIS instrument is tightly integrated into PCI's S.W.O.T. Yourself program. Participants complete the TAIS in advance, and the results - debriefed by a PCI TAIS coach, and detailed in a personalized report - provide a powerful input that helps to drive the S.W.O.T. Yourself process.

Articles about the TAIS:

Can You Perform Under Pressure? (From Fast Company, Nov. 1997)
Testing, Testing (From Inc. Magazine, June 2004)