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. That’s why TTI strives to become the assessment company with seven different assessments to choose from. In particular, the assessment most applicable to all types of situations is one that measures values and motivators. When used with DISC, this assessment helps us understand “why” an individual expresses a certain behavioral style and what motivates them to succeed.

Each type of assessment provides a unique way of understanding what makes each person different. Together, a specific combination of assessments will give you the information you need to implement successful talent management, selection, development and teamwork initiatives.

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?

Disengagement is not a small concern.  Take, for example, a company with 100 employees who work full time at an average wage of $25 per hour.  What is disengagement costing them?  The productivity they could be losing due to disengagement is worth an estimated $1,200,000.

Determining the cost of disengagement within your organization is an important step in tackling this talent management burden.  Then, consider implementing organizational and team multi-rater surveys that give everyone in the organization the opportunity to speak up and help you determine the real root of disengagement.  Perhaps it is dysfunction in a team, job misfit, mismanagement, lack of motivation or other personnel-related issues.  No matter what the cause, identifying it, addressing it and implementing a solution will make a dramatic difference on your bottom-line.

As a loyal subscriber of People Energizing People, you are invited you to take part in TTI’s research on the DISC style of President Obama based on your perception of his public image. The quick, 10-minute assessment will give you the opportunity to choose adjectives that you feel describe Obama the most and those that you feel describe Obama the least.

Participate in the Study Today!

Then, stay tuned for the research results to be released next month after TTI collects and analyzes the data to determine both the natural and adapted behavioral style of the President based on perceived public image. The outcome will be truly interesting! This research study will reveal how diverse or consistent our perceptions are and how well the public identifies observable behavior. It will also identify the public’s consensus of Barak Obama’s perceived behavioral style, a piece of the puzzle that makes us all unique.

Like President Obama, most of us have various roles in our lives in which we do have a public image. At the current moment, you may be in any combination of roles, such as a spouse, parent, executive, volunteer, student or mentor. In each role your adaptive behavioral style will likely change to fit the situation and its demands. Still, you will consistently maintain the same natural behavioral style, or the real you.

Adapting to Survive or Succeed?

While your natural behavioral style is your true identity, it is not always the behavior we create for others to see. In fact, our adaptive behavior is more observable because we will often make changes to either survive or succeed. Whether the change is dramatic or slight, knowing why the change is occurring is important. Most often, those changing to survive will tend to follow rules and regulations. On the other hand, those changing to succeed will tend to adapt to the behaviors called for by the environment.

Your Public Image at Work

Think of situations where you have to be more conscious of adapting your behavioral style on the job. Maybe it is when you speak publically, are faced with quick decisions or have to comply with strict rules. Do you feel stressed, exhausted and uncomfortable?

It is important to understand how your natural and adaptive behavioral styles are affecting your work. A simple assessment and review of your personal results is a great step toward harnessing your natural behavioral styles for improved communication, productivity, teamwork and overall enjoyment on the job. Then, you can uncover even more about your personal strengths by assessing personal motivators, skills and emotional intelligence.

“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. This means businesses may be operating at significantly less than full capacity, a loss that could cost millions a year.

• What is employee disengagement costing your company? Several thousands, millions, more?
• How can you calculate this cost?
• How does it compare to the investment of a proactive approach to increasing engagement?

With tightening budgets and a focus on cost-saving strategies, businesses worldwide are making drastic labor cuts. But is that always the right move? A recent study analyzed the savings resulting from changes in general and administrative functions and found that 75% of the savings came from strategies focused on restructuring and redesigning, while only 25% was from reducing.

• Would you, too, save three times as much on your bottom line by investing in your people and processes?
• Is the slash and burn approach actually costing you more?
• What would the ROI be if you restructured and redesigned your workforce?

As business associates who want to make a difference in the bottom line, we might find advice in Aristotle’s quote by remembering to assess, in money, the value of talent management initiatives so we know its true worth. How else can we place fair value on the investment in people? After all, they are a company’s biggest asset.

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. Assess job fit by comparing the job and talent, ensure that each person is on a professional development plan, and then manage their performance with specific motivation, communication and responsibilities that fit their unique personal style and skills.

A dip in the economy shouldn’t mean you loose track of the very asset that will turn your company around. Remember, now is the time to invest in your people.

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. Rather, an effective candidate selection process will reduce turnover, shorten the decision-making time frame and eliminate unnecessary time spent on screening.

One client, for example, just recently posted a job ad for a sales position. Within one week, they had over 3,000 resumes. In the end, only 1% of the applicants were actually qualified for the position. Now, they have screening tools and consulting in place to save time and money, make a hire quickly and efficiently, and ensure they hire the right person for the job. Without an effective selection system, cost of turnover, wasted time and lack of moving forward with the position is negatively impacting the bottom line. Contact TTI’s expert associates today and move beyond the typical selection process into one that provides a total person analysis.

• 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.

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. People can be managed more effectively in an environment where their motivators are naturally satisfied. Finally, an assessment of an individual’s personal skills will allow you to determine WHAT specific talents your employee will naturally excel in and can ensure you are leveraging the skills they bring to the table. Different than hard skills, such as engineering techniques or medical procedures, personal skills are more intangible, such as teamwork, personal accountability and self management.

Together, this total person analysis will give you a more complete picture of personal talent so you can make tough decisions with support, rather than relying on education, experience and intelligence alone. How would a total person analysis benefit your talent management initiatives in hiring, leadership development, succession planning or team building? Contact the experts in solutions-based assessment solutions today to discover how you can implement this proven method to benefit you bottom line.

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