What Assessment Should I Use?

By Bill J. Bonnstetter

This is a legitimate question, and to answer it, we must dig deeper.  More questions may be needed to get to the root of this challenge.

How big is the challenge?  Do we have a challenge that is costing the business lots of money, time, resources, etc.?  The bigger the challenge, the more you need to collect all the possible data by assessing the people involved.  Doctors do the same thing; the bigger the health risk, the more they practice defensive medicine using diagnostic tools.

Do you want a permanent fix, or are you willing to settle for a temporary fix?

TTI’s DISC assessment is one of the best in identifying how a person wants to receive information.  Keeping this in mind, let’s look at a conflict between two co-workers.

Using DISC, we assess the two to look at their behavioral styles.  We schedule a debrief meeting, and after talking through their assessment results, the two conflicting co-workers leave the meeting feeling like they have a new understanding of each other.  Their conflict is resolved.  Not so fast, seven months later they are back to arguing and causing tension at work.

This time, we assess their values and world view, using Personal Talent Skill Index (PTSI), and discover that they really have a values conflict as one person has low internal scores. This new information, detected by using additional assessments, changes the solution to our challenge.

DISC is a great tool, but it will not uncover all of the evidence needed to solve every challenge.  When you only use DISC to solve all problems, you are overlooking much of the evidence to solve your challenge. Using multiple assessments uncovers much more additional evidence and allows you to be a better detective.

What are people bringing to the job that could be a part of the problem or a part of the solution?

TTI has developed a new wheel to assist in the understanding of the aspects people bring of themselves to the job that can be assessed or at least discussed when addressing challenges in behavioral styles, motivators, self management and dealing with others.

TTI’s Dimensions of Superior Performance™

What role does emotional intelligence have to do with the issue?

You can have a perfect job match with the right behavior and values, but the person may fail to be successful due to emotional intelligence. High D’s who cannot control their anger are good examples of emotional intelligence gone awry.

Do you have a situation where a person is expressing a lot of stress?

For example, a value mismatch would be when a person whose aesthetic score is 3 standard deviations below the mean is forced to spend 40 hours a week dealing with aesthetic issues.  This concept is easy to confirm:  after taking the values or PIAV assessment, simply identify your lowest value and think about how you would feel if you were forced to spend a lot of time dealing with tasks of this nature.

Does the person have the skills to do the job?

Do you have a person whose behavior and values match a job but still seems to have performance challenges?  Adding additional assessments to your tool kit, like the PTSI and DNA Talent, will assist you to look deeper at additional areas that will be helpful to explore.

Summary

As you can see, assigning just one assessment to a challenge is not going to give you a full scope of what you are dealing with when people are involved.  Opening your mind to really look at the challenge at hand and think about what assessments should be used to uncover the evidence is not always easy.  Many times it ends up to be less of an investment on your part to collect all the data you can at one time by using multiple assessments from the beginning of your challenge.

I hope these questions and information help you understand the need to be a good detective.  A good detective uses many tools to discover facts and evidence to solve mysteries!  Using TTI assessments gives you the ability to accurately diagnose performance issues using all of the facts and evidence the assessments help you uncover.

Our research indicates you cannot solve people problems with just one assessment.  In fact, it should be considered malpractice to solve people problems without using assessments.