As co-founder and president of Selection Research International, Inc., Barry Kozloff, AB '69, provides comprehensive character evaluations to a large pool of companies with employees considering international work.

Barry Kozloff, AB ’69, felt his jetlag set in a little deeper when American Airlines told him he’d flown over three million miles … and that doesn’t include the 200,000 miles he’d traveled in Europe. But then, with a convivial laugh, he brushes off his jetlag. Kozloff’s personableness – a trait that has prompted people to confide in him – communicates itself in every interaction.

As co-founder and president of Selection Research International, Inc. (SRI), Kozloff provides comprehensive character evaluations to a large pool of companies with employees considering international work. He and a team of psychologists and management consultants study personalities, skills, and cultural adaptation factors –the biggest influences on individuals who undertake foreign assignments. The idea for SRI arose in 1978 while Kozloff was on a year long business trip in Iran. “I talked to a lot of people. I guess I’m a good listener because people felt comfortable spending hours telling me about their experiences,” he says. “One company in particular had hired a person outside of the company to be the head of their organization in the Middle East. He was an alcoholic, and his wife had generalized anxiety. The company knew the man had the technical knowledge and experience for the position, but had not evaluated him and his wife to see if they had the right personalities. The company assumed – because the man interviewed well and because his wife had lived in Europe before World War II and had a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies – that they would do well.”

This trip led Kozloff to the realization that corporations need behavioral sciences to help choose suitable employees, taking into account any spouses and families. He and SRI co-founder Edmund Gaydos engaged in a four-year research study to determine the factors and conditions predicting international success or failure. The team developed a nine-hour interview evaluation called the International Assessment Procedure (IAP), validating it at McDonnell Douglas’ Peace Sun Saudi Arabia program. After IAP is conducted, clients receive a verbal summary and a formal written evaluation of such areas as international competency, employee–job suitability, emotional maturity, interpersonal style and skills, motivation and attitude, and ethics.

With the success of psychosocial evaluations and at the request of corporations, SRI began developing paper-based and online tests to serve as a “first blush” self-assessment tool for employees and spouses to explore their readiness and suitability for international assignments. SRI’s first international test, the Foreign Assignment Exercise (FAE), was developed for SBC-AT&T in 1992 and given to a pilot group of 250 couples. After completing the FAE, 190 couples decided not to pursue foreign assignments; the FAE was then made available to the company’s 16,000 managers. SRI then developed tools for Verizon, Dow Chemical, and DaimlerChrysler in Germany.

“SRI exploded the myth that international assignments are long-term holidays. They enrich a person’s life and relationships with family members if a person has the internal resources and right support for adapting.”

The accuracy of Kozloff’s work stems in part from his own skills. When he flew to Iran in 1978, Kozloff arrived a day earlier than expected. Without a company representative waiting for him, Kozloff realized that getting through customs might prove difficult: “I didn’t have butterflies in my stomach; I had Harpy Eagles!”

Rather than waiting in line, he stepped to the side, reading a book until the area cleared out. “I had seen the guards with machine guns. I figured it would be like shark and chum in the water; they see less chum, they go to sleep.”
Kozloff experienced no problems. “When I got to the office, they said, ‘How did you get here without someone bribing you through customs?’ It was simply coping. I had to make decisions on the fly. From that moment on, I didn’t have culture shock.

“SRI exploded the myth that international assignments are long-term holidays. They enrich a person’s life and relationships with family members if a person has the internal resources and right support for adapting,” says Kozloff. Sometimes, he notes, people are not in the right stages in their lives to relocate for extended periods. He has encountered capable individuals who are caring for elderly parents or sending children to college; the events of their current lives preclude proper adjustment and coping in a different country.

Skilled in guiding people and companies through these decisions, Kozloff credits his anthropology education, which allowed him to “help prepare people to make the shift from their normal lives into the complexity and richness of other cultures, to deal with the complexity of innumerable subtle cultural cues and startling differences to create a new, meaningful life.”

His passion and relaxed personableness have led to relationships with some of his clients, who keep in touch and even invite him to stay in their homes during his travels. “I feel privileged to get to know these people and hopefully help them,” Kozloff says. “When I leave people, I feel a note of sadness because I often think, ‘Hey, I’d like to be friends with these folks!’ ”