Who is Daniel Schmid,
founder of the PULSIONS method?

A hands-on expert

While training at Pictet & Cie, Daniel Schmid discovered his passion for the banking sector:
“This sector is fascinating – it’s at the crossroads of all human activities.” After taking four years off to pursue his other passion, music, he joined Crédit Suisse Geneva as a department manager. His assignment complete, he was given a challenge: improve and develop employee skills at the bank, which at the time was hiring people with unequal skill levels, to support its growth. Working with trainers specializing in all banking activities and many experienced professionals, Daniel dedicated himself to helping employees increase their level of knowledge and skills. He was also assigned a novel task, assessing the potential of a person who would fill an executive position at the bank. His findings? “We had an onerous assessment process, but it couldn’t guarantee that the individual would be able to succeed in this type of position.” I realized one key point: “We were evaluating their skills, their personality, we put them in hypothetical situations to see how they would react… But we did not have any way to identify their operating profile as a whole, how they grasped the myriad of issues they might face in practical terms and to know in which situations the profile is effective or ineffective.” Daniel looked in vain for an existing method that could solve this problem: but he came up empty handed. The seed for the PULSIONS method was beginning to sprout.

The birth of PULSIONS

At this time, news of Daniel’s and his team’s assignment and their success began to leak out and he was recruited by a group of private bankers in Geneva. After working with them for eight years to evaluate, train and recruit all employees, he rejoined Pictet & Cie to support the bank’s growth. After four wonderful years, he decided to start his own company to expand his work on a larger scale and devote himself to developing the PULSIONS method. “I leveraged my experience and that of my customers to address a fundamental question: to be able to identify how a person will act and evaluate how well their way of working matches the challenges they must face.” This inspired the definitions of the different “pulsions” (drives): personal performance, usefulness, liberty, security, interest, ownership, novelty, social. An acronym that spells “PULSIONS.”

So where does this name come from? It comes from a parallel with an approach that was developed for marketing and sales analyses. This approach was called PULSIONS and it gave a good baseline definition of behavior adopted or not by a person, in this case a consumer. The comparison stops there, because all the elements that currently make up PULSIONS were developed by Daniel Schmid, surrounded by experts from fields needed to create this product: psychiatrists – computer scientists – mathematicians. After four versions, the method is sound and, above all, extremely accurate. It is available in multiple languages: French, German, English and Spanish.

Impressive results

PULSIONS revolutionizes interpersonal relationships and establishes concrete performance objectives. “When people learn their PULSIONS profile for the first time, the word we hear most often is ‘wow.’ We also frequently hear: ‘This is the first time someone has explained to me how I work!’, ‘I understand now why I cause this or that reaction in my subordinates, in my co-workers…’ explique Daniel. says Daniel. What is he proudest of today? “The autonomy that the tool provides. Being aware of and understanding how you work gives you the autonomy to determine your professional growth, to know in which situations you can express your full potential and those in which you can successfully learn to adapt. And that is invaluable!”