I am often asked what is the “ideal” leader profile?  Being a Predictive Index® Consultant we have several profiles that are most commonly viewed as the leadership profile.  However, during my career I have learned that leaders come in all shapes, sizes and varieties of profiles.

The better question is: “What makes a good leader?”

A very good friend of mine and extremely successful entrepreneur gave me great insight into this during a conversation we had over lunch.  His PI® profile is not what you would consider to be the typical effective leader.  However, he started a business in his basement, grew the organization to over 400 employees and eventually sold the company to a Fortune 500 organization.  Pretty impressive!

I bluntly asked him: “You are not the typical leader profile, yet you have been very successful.  What – in your opinion – made you a good leader?”  He paused for a moment and then replied: “I know myself.  I know my strengths.  I know my limitations.  My belief is I was successful as a leader because I always wanted to bring people into my organization that were better than me, smarter than me, that would make positive contributions – people who would compliment my strengths; people who brought strength in the areas I considered to be my limitations.  In order to develop my company, I first had to develop myself.”

“In a nut shell, you attribute your success to your own self awareness?” I asked.

“Self awareness!” he replied.

“Did this approach help you to eliminate mistakes?”  was my follow up question.

“Heck no,” he replied.  “I made a ton of mistakes, but was never afraid to admit them.  No person is perfect, as with any human comes flaws and being able to admit mistakes, look at flaws and be honest about them.”  He then added: “I just led as me with all of my warts showing!  My people knew I was real and they – in turn – could be real as well.”

My response now to what is the best leadership profile is now: “Anyone can lead, but good leaders are self aware.”

I run an annual event bringing clients who utilize the Predictive Index® called the PI® User Group.  The purpose of this event is to exchange ideas, network and experience the concepts of PI.

In our last meeting in November 2010, we did three activities that take about 15 – 20 minutes each.  The purpose is to discuss a particular topic, experience the activity and then discuss the issues that occurred during the event.  Too often we just talk about a concept – experiential activities allow you to really see and understand the concept!

This year’s experiential activities were:

1)      Zoom ®

The purpose of this activity is to highlight the importance of clear, concise and descriptive communication by having a group of pictures that must be aligned to tell a story.  However, the group is given the pictures randomly and has to describe the picture to the other group members to create the correct order of the shots without showing the photo.

This exercise clearly showed why communication issues between people exist – what one person meant, the other took the other way.  Clarity is about how the other person receives the message – a key ingredient in employee productivity.

2)      Tarp Flip

The entire group stands on a Tarp and is challenged to flip the tarp onto the other side without anyone stepping off.  The exercise shows the importance of follower ship and acceptance of a leader to emerge and lead the task.

Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow – it all depends upon the situation.  Some of the attendees “got” the exercise immediately and then became the leader of the group.  Others were willing to follow as they acknowledged others had a better plan and vision of how to execute this task.  Sometimes being a leader means you step back and let someone else take the reins.

3)      The Raging River

Our groups were challenged to build a “bridge” from the start of the river to the end of the river using squares that must be occupied by someone at all times (or the square is lost).  This exercise highlights the importance of situational awareness as a leader and each team member’s capability to hold others accountable for teamwork and communication.

Team work, team work, team work!  How often do we hear those words in organizations?  Teams can be very efficient, but they can also be very dysfunctional.  The beauty of this exercise is that it shows the struggles a team may have in a fun and positive environment.

We oftentimes talk about things in companies, but we still should remember the old adage: “Seeing is believing!”

Several years ago a CEO of an international company was very skeptical of any type of personality assessment.  He was convinced that any applicant screening test was basically just a bunch of psycho babble.

He was willing to do a strategic test of the Predictive Index® to determine if personality assessments could improve HR best practices in hiring employees and improving a new hire’s productivity and long term retention.

We decided to look at six different positions.  We developed the job profile for each position and candidates were submitted to me for the PI® evaluation.  All candidates submitted to complete the PI® assessment had the appropriate back ground and skill set desired by the organization.

Over the period of the next month, all six position were filled.  Here is where it becomes interesting.

Three of the candidates had the resume experience and a good PI® profile match to the job.

Three of the candidates had the resume experience, but not a good PI® profile match for the job.

The three new employees whose PI® profile matched the job position performed very well over the next six months!

The three employees whose PI® profile was not a good match for the job position struggled with their job and were all let go during that six month time period.

Coincidence?  Not really.  This CEO is now an ardent fan of the PI® and proved the value of this personality tool to himself.  More importantly, he improved the quality of hire, their subsequent performance and the productivity of his organization.

In the ideal world of hiring things would be simple – define the position you need to fill, create an ad to attract people who are best suited for that position, take them through the pre-employment assessment process and select the best person for the job.

But . . . that is not always the way it works!!  Certainly a clear definition of exactlly what you want from someone in a position is a good thing but sometimes, in fact many times, as the search to fill a position moves forward the parameters of exactly what is needed in an ideal candidate evolves along the way.  One of the best hiring practices I believe hiring managers can adopt and practice is to be flexible in allowing a position and the parameters needed in a candidate for that position to evolve.

I have worked on two searches recently where this was the case and as the search evolved we came closer to defining the target and the best scenario for the company as they moved forward.  Sometimes Hiring Managers get caught in defining a role based on what they think is the best fit but as they start reviewing candidates they realize that what they thought they needed is really a bit different from what they actually need.  One situation in particular identified the need for the addition of a new salesperson because they knew they were not capturing all of the business that was out there.  But as the search evolved it was realized that a salesperson is not exactly what they need right now but rather a person to handle operations side of the business so the owner could focus more of his energies on sales – his success in this area had grown the company to its fruitful position today.

Hiring assessments are an extremely useful tool as long as these tools are assessing candidates for what is really needed in a position!  Don’t be afraid to use the applicant screening process as a work in progress to ultimately help you reach the goal of getting the right person in the position the first time!

If you need assistance with clearly defining a position and partnering with a team who will help you with this throughout the personnel selection process and not settle for simply filling the position with just anyone, give the ADVISA Hiring team a call – we would love to help!
**Attend an introductory, complimentary webinar “Use of Personality Assessments in Hiring” featuring Dana Harrison, Manager of ADVISA Hiring. Register now:
9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 14th

Famous words, spoken or not, by a famous political figure, then US Senator…

The good leaders I worked with in my 25 year career were very self aware and mindfull of whether people were following or not!

You’ve likely read before that as a leader, you should not be working in your organization, but focus on your organization. And the way people perceive their work environment, how their work environment is motivating them, and how you as a leader affect their ability to perform, is one of the most critical items you as a leader of an organization can focus on. Engaged employees bring the extra energy to work that you really need to be an above average organization. And if Sales is a big part of your business, that is even more true: do some googling and you’ll find plenty of studies to support that fact!

I guess I have been lucky throughout my career. I have mostly worked for people who took pride in their ability to motivate their people. But I have also experienced the opposite: where leaders were playing a debilitating role and were really choking off the initiative and ambition of well meaning employees.

While there is little I can recommend to help the latter group, the first group would be interested in some sound feedback on their performance, from within their own organization.
And then I follow the old scientific approach: no problem can be solved unless you can measure it.

That is why I started an Employee Questionnaire to gauge Employee Satisfaction. We create one “engagement number” that allows us to compare the engagement within your organization to peer groups, and gives you a repeatable process you can use year after year to see if you are making progress.

Consider it a feedback score that will either confirm you are on track, or help you identify the need to start work on improving employee morale.

I’d love to increase my database… please contact me if you would like to know how many of your employees are actually following you!

Ahhh . . . the question of salary!  It seems that this subject is often times set aside in the hiring process until the stage of final negotiations at which point it can be too late!!

We work with many different kinds of clients and one thing that most have in common is questioning whether or not to include the salary range for a job posting.  My advice to clients in this situation is to remind them that the applicant screening process is an effort to identify those who are most qualified for a position based on the established criteria.  Is salary not an established criteria for any job?   As an employer creates the recruiting metrics for a position, salary better be on the list!

Often times Hiring Managers think that by posting the salary range candidates are always going to ask for the top end of the range (and in some cases they just might do that!) but part of the assessment and screening process is to ask candidates for their salary history.  In so doing it allows a Hiring Manager to match the salary history with the identifed salary range for a position.  Salary should not be a situation where you want to get the “best deal” but rather one that you want to make sure is fair.

From a candidate’s perspective, they are often times uneasy about sharing their salary history with a company too early in the process.  This may be due to fear that their salary history is too high for the position so they will not be considered at all or fear that if they reveal this information too early they will not get the best deal!

Hiring managers and candidates need to keep in mind that in order to create the most positive working relationship between employer and employee it is important to be honest and this needs to start during the personnel selection phase.  All of the pre-employment assessments and candidate screenings in the world are not going to make a difference if the expectation in terms of salary is not a fit!

At Advisa Hiring our goal is to help find the best match for our clients and for candidates.  By using our proven RPO system in your next hire we can help walk you through the pitfalls like salary that come up along the way!

What is a pre-employment assessment and is it necessary?  Having been in the business of hiring now for more than 15 years, about half as a Hiring Manager and the other half in the more consultative capacity I hold now, I am amazed at how often Hiring Managers think that getting the right person “on the bus” for a particular position is as easy as posting an ad and then choosing the one candidate who fits your target the best.  The tricky part often comes into play not in finding the right candidate but accurately identifying the target and realizing that the chance of finding someone who fits in the center of the target is difficult – hence the reason that area is so small!!

This is where pre-employment assessments come into play.   These are not only tools that help to match a candidate to a position.  They also help Hiring Managers to better understand what it is they really want in someone for a position and where they can compromise in order to still get the desired outcome.   At ADVISA Hiring, we use the Predictive Index® as our primary assessment and selection tool in hiring for our clients (and for our own company!).   This tool does not give us an “exact picture” of what the ideal candidate looks like but rather it provides us with a guideline in helping to compare candidates to the target.  This type of candidate screening is an invaluable one for Hiring Managers during the hiring process and for managers after the process to ensure that employees are best suited to do a particular job.  No one wants to work in a job that does not meet their needs and a manager does not want to manage someone who is not well-suited for a particular position.  Too many times candidates who did not go through a pre-employment assessment process or who did but weren’t even close to the target end up at best as underproductive employees and at worst end up leaving the company for another opportunity.

Using the Predictive Index in your hiring will put you in a much better position to have engaged employees and much more opportunity for you as a manager to focus on the true business at hand.

If you do one thing this year to improve the hiring outcomes in your business, think about adding an effective hiring assessment tool.  I believe you will be glad you did.

So…the economy is looking up and you’re finally hiring ONE key person. You need a salesperson…or you need a manager or maybe you even need a new division president and it has to be the absolute perfect person because you’re dipping your toes in slowly to the hiring pool and it has to be the best hire ever. So where do you start to make sure that the assessment and selection process goes perfectly? Because there is very little margin for error…

You start by running an on-line ad – great place to start you think! But then…the resumes start pouring in. And they keep pouring in, day after day and there’s so many of them! And you’re thinking…I’m a manager and I have so many other things to handle besides sitting here looking through hundreds of applicants’ resumes. And you start to panic and think…help! I’m drowning!

There is ALWAYS a better use of your internal resources and that’s where we come in. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a new buzzword but it’s very relevant in today’s economy for businesses who no longer have in-house hiring capacity. You need help by outsourcing this vital responsibility but you need to find somebody who truly understands you, your company and, more importantly, your hiring needs while still allowing you to keep ownership of the hiring process. You need us!

We take the time to understand what you are about and what you need. We allow you drive the process – we function as your partners. Our job is to bring candidates to YOUR table that meet the criteria you’ve identified as crucial. We place the ad…we read the resumes…we contact the candidates…we obtain the personality assessment surveys…we did a little deeper to see if the candidates are a good match…we conduct the initial phone screen interviews – we make sure hr best practices are followed.

In other words, we can function as your life preserver and we can not only keep you afloat but we can help you reach land safely!