Why You Deserve a Customized Approach

Think back to the last time you or someone you know visited the doctor with an ache, pain or some kind of unusual symptom. What did the doctor do to determine the cause and treatment of the problem?

Just like doctors who administer several tests, make many observations and take typical vitals before determining a prognosis, we too must remember that there is not just one assessment that will work for every situation and reveal all the details you need to know. Instead, we need to be able to choose from a variety of assessments to find the best combination. Let’s face it. Not every development, selection or team-building situation is alike. You need different solutions for hiring an executive than you do a receptionist, and you need something different for leadership development than you do for sales development. Each specific situation deserves a customized approach to assessment solutions – one where you can choose which assessments to administer before determining a prognosis.

How Multiple Assessments Add to Success

While DISC is one of the most common assessments used in the workplace, it does not reveal everything you need to know about a person. In fact, DISC only measures behavior style and communication tendencies, or “how” we act in our natural and adapted environments. It doesn’t tell us “why” we act in a certain way, what skills we have, or how well we are aware of our emotions. For almost every situation in training and development, knowing more than one facet of a person will help you provide better, more effective solutions.

Knowing everything about DISC is great, but why stop there? Knowing more about yourself and those around you will even further allow you to leverage your skills and harness your challenges to increase the success you and others bring to an organization. Just imagine how much it would help to know why someone you work with makes the decisions they do or what skills they have that could help you achieve your goals.

TTI – The Assessment Company

Shouldn’t you have the ability to choose from a variety of assessment options to help achieve your specific goals? TTI strongly believes in the very foundation of assessments - empowering you to better understand, appreciate and leverage your unique strengths to succeed in life both on and off the job. [ Read More ]

How Awareness and Communication Improve Team Dynamics

In Patrick Lencioni’s best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he tells a tale of a firm’s executive team struggling with utter dysfunction. Ineffective communication, multiple egos, fear, office politics and judgmental attitudes were all contributing to the absence of dynamics and poor performance.

Does this sound familiar to you?
Have you experienced a dysfunctional team in your career?

If yes, you are not alone. Most everyone has either been a part of, observed or even faced the challenge of leading a dysfunctional team like the one Lencioni describes. In fact, he says, “Teams, because they are made up of imperfect human beings, are inherently dysfunctional.”

Lencioni’s interrelated model of team dysfunction outlines five areas that prevent success in every team:
• Absence of trust
• Fear of conflict
• Lack of commitment
• Avoidance of accountability
• Inattention to results

But don’t be discouraged. There is hope for all of us experiencing a dysfunctional team. As Lencioni states, “In fact, team building is both possible and remarkably simple. But is also painful.” TTI strongly believes in two fundamental team building basics that help teams overcome each of these dysfunctions: awareness and communication. [Read More]

How It Heightens Disengagement and Costs You Millions

Dysfunction in a team will usually result in poor performance and inadequate productivity, but the effects of team dysfunctions on the employees themselves just might be far more serious and much more costly.

When a team becomes dysfunctional you can expect disengagement to follow as individuals may lose sight of team goals, not understand their role in the team and wait for direction to make any progress. Statistics say that the average employee is disengaged two hours each day. Could dysfunctional teams be contributing to disengagement in your organization? If so, just how does it affect your bottom-line? [Read More]

“Everything, then, must be assessed in money; for this enables men always to exchange their services, and so makes society possible.”
– Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Even though Aristotle made this point over 2000 years ago, it couldn’t ring more true today. Almost everything involved in transactions today are based on a price and assessed in money.

What about Talent Management?
Beyond salary and sales, there are many important aspects of talent management that are often not tied to the bottom line. Yet, “dollarizing” the value of talent management initiatives is vital to bottom-line analysis. Whether you are placing a value or cost on your current status, or calculating the ROI of your next talent management strategy, metrics that assess the monetary value will help you see the true effect on the bottom-line.

Bottom Line Statistics
Knowing the bottom line results of talent challenges will help you implement strategies with a proven ROI that you can see on your balance sheet. Find out how much you already know by asking yourself questions like:
• What is disengagement costing the bottom line?
• What was the ROI on your last training? What can be expected of future training?
• How are your team-building initiatives impacting your bottom line?
• What was the cost of your last bad hire?
• What is your overall turnover percentage? How is it related to tenure?

In a study on over three million employees, Gallup found that over 70% of Americans who go to work are not engaged. [Read More]

Controlling Turnover and Addressing Disengagement with a Complete System

Turnover alone may be costing you millions, but what about the employees you still have? Is their disengagement costing you even more?

Fortunately, turnover and disengagement stem from job fit, and you can reduce costs associated with both by using a complete hiring system. With a process that looks at hiring from the very beginning to the very end, you can consider the job, the talent, professional development and performance management. However, with reduced budgets and overwhelming responses to job ads, many companies are finding themselves skipping a system all together. Unfortunately, a move like that doesn’t come without a hefty cost, as doing nothing to ensure job fit will cost you more than implementing a complete hiring system to start controlling turnover and disengagement costs now.

With a solution for future turnover and disengagement costs, let’s turn our focus to the disengaged employees on your payroll now. Can you determine the underlying issue? It may be decreased morale, lack of direction, little job satisfaction or no motivation. Whatever the case, you need to start by using the same complete system. [Read More]

Today, companies with hiring challenges are not alone. Just recently, over 150 businesses showed up at a job fair sponsored by Jobing.com, a major job board agency. Over 14,000 people attended, but not a single hire was made that day.

As companies world-wide are in a crunch to hire for key positions, job seekers continue to flood the talent pool. This creates a challenge for screening and selection because non-qualified applicants are pouring in, and the typical process in place just can’t keep up, resulting in a delayed hiring process.

Most companies have a screening process for selection, but does it include a true analysis of talent? Beyond experience and education, a truly effective screening and selection process will look at innate traits we all possess, like behaviors, motivators and personal skills. Without this essential component, you could be wasting time, energy and resources sifting through applications, comparing unimportant employment details and making tough talent decisions with little support. [ Read More ]

To meet today’s challenges, companies world-wide are searching for ways to do more with less. While many strategies offer streamlined processes and ways to add value, the biggest opportunities to meet this challenge lie within the talent themselves and are critical to future success:

* Finding the right talent

* Retaining your top performers

* Ensuring your best employees have the opportunity to thrive

Managing talent can be tough, but it doesn’t have to be. The key is to understand the current needs of the organization and what each unique individual brings to the job to help you make tough talent decisions.

While education, experience and intelligence are important, you simply cannot uncover the true picture of human talent without a total person analysis that includes an assessment of behaviors, values and personal skills. Together, these areas present a more in-depth approach to truly understanding an individual’s unique characteristics and how they apply to performance on the job.Total Person Analysis Image

In particular, a behavioral assessment will reveal HOW a people behave through their natural style in dealing with four different areas: problems, people, pace and procedure. With a better understanding and appreciation for people with different behavioral styles, communication can be enhanced, conflict can be reduced and a better job fit can be made. With an assessment of motivators, you can reveal WHY people act, or what drives a person to take action. [ Read More ]

In today’s economy, every business executive, owner, CEO and president should be asking themselves one important question: “Do I have the talent to take this business to the next level?”

If the answer is no, you probably want to begin looking, but if the answer is yes, then employee retention should be at the top of your list. With employee retention statistics that prove your best employees may be sitting on your payroll while patiently waiting for the “right” job, you need to be sure that you are managing employee retention with specific individuals in mind and long-term goals in place.

Employees Are Not All Alike
A good manager knows the strengths and weaknesses of their employees, but do they know what motivates them? In employee retention studies, TTI has found that money is NOT the reason most employees leave a job, which seems contrary to popular belief. In our latest study of over 19,000 job seekers, only 19% said money was the reason they were looking for a new job. Instead, more popular reasons included stress, mismanagement, lack of room for advancement and lack of employee development. [ Read More ]

Start With an Evaluation—End with Results

Succession planning is more important in today’s corporate world than ever before, as mentoring is an excellent way to keep the promising leaders of tomorrow from jumping ship for another opportunity. However, many companies understand the need and value of a formal mentoring program but don’t have the tools to make a true investment in the development of an individual.

TTI’s assessment solutions allow you utilize both psychometric testing and 360 feedback testing to develop a more specific approach to succession planning with leadership development . By combining TTI’s research based Leadership Development Program with the compatible Leadership Development 360 Survey, you have the tools to make the development process effective, precise and measurable. [ Read More ]