Assessments
In today's competitive business environment, your employees represent one of your organization’s most valuable assets. Which means your company's productivity-and ultimately, its profitability-depend on making sure every person in your organization is working up to his or her full potential.
Performance management begins with the end in mind - a company's operating objectives, developed by the CEO (or business owner) and his/her senior management team. The next challenge is ensuring that individual employee behavior and actions will turn activities into results. The final challenge then becomes sharing the goals and plans in a relevant and actionable way with all the employees – the people who actually will do the work.
Despite its critical role in growing an organization effectively, performance management in many companies consists primarily of annual appraisals. These once-a-year reviews provide a reflective snapshot of how an employee has performed over the previous year as well as suggestions for what they need to achieve in the next year. This strategy is like planning where you are headed by studying what you see in the rear view mirror.
With effective performance management in place, individual goal achievement feeds organizational momentum. Without it, employees and management face off in the unenviable job of explaining how and why each of them ended up where they did, neither of them in the place they intended.
Assessments are successfully utilized to better predict how a person will perform. We can learn how a person behaves in the work setting and how they might “adapt” when they play a different role. This can be invaluable in the hiring arena in which most people are on their “best” behavior. An assessment can give us some insight into how a person is likely to communicate, how they might prefer to work and how they might work with others on a team. Assessments can also help us develop as leaders. An assessment can tell us what type of leadership style they may prefer and what leadership styles they need to develop.
Behavior Styles-DISC
The DISC Styles self-assessment has been crafted specifically to assist organizations in understanding how behaviors impact the success of their employees—and how it all links to the bottom line. DISC is based on theories originally developed by Dr. William Marston in the late 1920’s, and adapted for professional development and training including sales, leadership, team building and customer service.
An indisputable fact is that people prefer to interact with people they like. The ability to create rapport with people is a fundamental skill in sales, management, personal relationships, and everyday life. The goal of using the DISC assessment is to create personal chemistry and productive relationships. You do not have to change your personality. You simply have to understand what drives people and recognize your options for effectively dealing with them. DISC teaches you powerful life-skills that will serve you well in all your relationships: business, social and family.
Leadership Advantage-Development Program
The Leadership Advantage is an intensive executive assessment and development program. It measures a top executive’s leadership effectiveness at their current stage of business growth, and perhaps more importantly, prepares them for the next. The program is also designed to support an executive through the behavior changes they often have to make to grow the business to the next level.
The Leadership Advantage program employs the Emotional Intelligence framework to determine whether an executive has the appropriate leadership styles and competencies to take the business forward. In doing so, the program draws on the extensive research into entrepreneurial leadership in small and medium sized companies and the top executive leadership competencies required in larger, multi national enterprises.
Outcomes
The Leadership Advantage Program uncovers critical areas of leadership focus for a top executive and their executive team. The value in understanding which leadership styles and competencies are most valuable and how to develop them will assure the company’s success as it moves from one stage of growth to another. Outcomes include the ability to:
- Understand what issues their current leadership styles and competencies may be unconsciously causing
- Identify which leadership competencies and styles they will need for the next stage of growth
- Understand how their leadership effectiveness is perceived by fellow team members and colleagues
- Confirm where the team is as capable as they expected to be, identify gaps where they aren’t as effective as desired
- Creates a leadership development climate in which the executive team provides constructive feedback and mutual support to each other
- When used in conjunction with the Stages of Growth X-ray, provides leaders with the ability to align their leadership competencies with business issues and challenges.
Leaders, who now understand how to adapt their leadership styles and competencies to their next stage of growth, will be better prepared to address all the organizational growth challenges their company will face as they move forward.
sample report
Hiring Practices
Prevue Assessment System (formerly TotalView)
Prevue Assessment is a proven selection assessment for hiring, promoting, coaching and team building supported by a simple automated system for creating and managing job specific benchmarks.
The Prevue Assessment identifies key traits where a job candidate may not align with the job-then provides behavioral interviewing questions to probe deeper into the candidates experience-to determine job fit suitability.
Prevue provides an objective comparison of the candidate with a psychometrically sound standard of high performance.
Managers can see, graphically, how 20 traits correlate with high performance in a specific job in your organization.
Prevue Assessment System is fully web enabled and available on software.
Prevue Assessment System includes five reports for one fee. Prevue fits the Whole Person Approach criteria for employee assessment, recommended by the U.S. Department of Labor.
sample report
Team Assessments
Not only can we provide individual assessments, we can look at the behaviors of the entire team. This is important if you’re looking to spot certain trends, lack of productivity, inability to move rapidly toward a goal, inability to initiate adequate activity. A quick look at the styles that comprise the team can help a leader understand the why’s of how a team operates. The information is invaluable to increasing productivity in a group of individuals. This is also useful in diagnosing issues for instance with a board of directors.
360 Multi-Rater Feedback
By using 360 multi-rater feedback we can increase the effectiveness of the results. 360 simply means that we ask others to give us feedback on our behaviors, styles, and competencies. This way as we establish a development program for leaders we are getting a more accurate view of how others see us and whether or not we’re effective. Self assessments are problematic because often we see ourselves differently than how others see us. Sometimes we are glowing in how we see ourselves and our effectiveness and sometimes we underestimate how our style and competencies impact others. The most reliable way to find out how we’re doing as leaders is to ask others to anonymously rate us.
sample report
Values & Motivation
While behavior style assessments answer the question of how we work. The Values assessment evaluates why we do what we do. The nuances of motivation are connected to our personal interests, values and attitudes. Learning how someone works along with learning why they do what they do can provide information so that as employers we can put people in jobs they interested in, motivated to achieve and love coming to work each day. Adding this assessment to the behavior assessments can give us a better overall picture of a person.
Sample Values & Attitudes Report
- DISC
- Leadership Competency
- Leadership Style
- Personality Assessment
- Hiring Assessment
- Job Fit Assessment
- Values & Motivation
- Team Assessments
- 360 Feedback Assessment
The accuracy of the information in these reports causes one to wonder…how can it be that just answering 24 questions can yield so much valuable information?
Paula Martin
Mesa County Schools
