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.

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!

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!

The first step in effectively utilizing the Predictive Index® in hiring is to establish the “job profile” or PRO.  The job profile tells us the environments that someone will best thrive within.  Once validated, this job profile becomes the template for future hiring for that position.

However, every so often I get a contact from a business leader wanting to discuss a candidate that does not match the job profile.  The conversation goes something like this: “I know the candidate does not meet the requirements of the job profile, but the candidate is highly recommended!”  My usual response is: “When was the last time a candidate came highly un-recommended?”  Of course candidates come highly recommended for a position, as no one would recommend someone for a job as “lukewarm” recommended.

In my role, I cannot force a client company to follow the proven process, I can only make recommendations.

Several years ago, I made it a goal to track candidates that did not match the job profile, but the organization decided to hire them due to the “highly recommended” recommendation.  I studied 12 cases where an exception to this job profile rule had been made.  What was the result?

In all 12 cases the employees were eventually terminated from their organizations.  The reasons varied from lack of engagement, poor productivity or underachievement of goals.  The most interesting part of this is that the Predictive Index® successfully predicted how the person would perform.  Not being a good profile match for the position, the PI® showed how they would behave and therefore – in advance – why they would probably fail at the position.

Following the tenets of PI® will bring organizational hiring success. Making exceptions to the rule only creates more frustration in hiring with the company and the candidate.

“Highly recommended” works best when the candidate’s profile matches the profile of the position!

I recently completed a Customer-Focused Selling™ Training at one of my Michigan clients.  The organization has a large field sales force of over 50 sales people acting as a distributor of electrical parts and services.  The company had never invested in any sort of sales training during their 40 year existence.

The National Sales Manager attended the first class.  He was one of the best field sales people and due to his hard work and great sales efforts had been promoted to the national sales role.  He was eager to understand the strategic process of sales and to implement new sales and marketing training techniques to personally sell more and be a mentor in assisting his sales personnel.

When we started the second class several weeks later, the National Sales Manager asked if he could address the class.  He started with a very engaging story.

“When I first attended the Customer Focused Selling, I really didn’t think that I could learn much as I have always enjoyed sales success.  However, one of the concepts that I learned enabled me to finally get a meeting with the buyer.  I had been trying to get this meeting for over 4 years.  Using the CFS concept I learned, I not only got the meeting, got new orders, but was also invited to play golf with him.”

He continued: “Sales team, it only takes one new concept to improve sales skills and therefore your sales results!”

We all know that similarities exist in people everywhere, and I am well placed to judge that!

I had the opportunity to do a Predictive Index Management Workshop™ in Dubai recently and was reminded about that again.

It was interesting to hear the HR stories from inside the Muslim world: identical to the stories I come across daily within the US!

Promoting employees from within and the improving employee morale it can engender was a main topic for that group. They had a strong feeling that promoting employees from within is the moral thing to do. They felt that often, as people were not achieving work satisfaction in an existing job, promotion to a new challenge was the way out for many.

They also acknowledged that while promoting from within can be among hr best practices, very often it did not work for them. They recognized that sending someone into a challenge that did not suit them, could really break someone’s career…

Amazing the insights our services could bring them! PI® brought them the insight into when and who to promote from within, and when an outside hire could be a better solution!