Windridge - Identify. Develop. Retain.

Assessment of Candidates Versus Assessment of Employees

 

A very important distinction I make when using behavioral assessments within companies is the difference between external candidates (those being considered for positions) versus internal personnel (those already employed).

It’s really pretty simple:

When working around hiring decisions using behavior assessment feedback, interviewing, etc., it is smart to default to a “gatekeeper” mindset. In other words, one’s objective should be to make sure the candidate is up to speed behaviorally and technically for the responsibilities and requirements of the position. If there is any reason to think that passing on a particular candidate might be a good idea, it would be wise to thoroughly evaluate pros and cons before the hire.

Which brings me to internal personnel.  

In working with those already employed within an organization via behavioral assessment feedback / coaching, the main objective switches to providing all the support and tools to help the person improve performance, communication, and leadership skills.

A good mindset to have when considering how to use assessment feedback is:

• External candidates = gatekeeper
• Internal employees = cheerleader!

 

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Six Benefits of Assessing Your Current Workforces’ Behaviors

It is easy to wonder, what benefits as an organization (or as a manager) are we going to receive from using behavioral assessments in our employee / leadership development programs?

Below are six good reasons why behavioral assessments and the insights they provide are of benefit to you and your organization.

1. Assessment feedback encourages the leader or employee to become self-managed
   When I assess individuals I always encourage them to read through their Winslow Report feedback at least three times, and then to “sit with their results” for at least a week. Many times, upon first glance, a participant will miss the patterns of their behavior or only react negatively (“This can’t be me – the assessment got it wrong!”) to their “less than they desire” trait scores.  (Interesting how they never react negatively to their “higher than expected” trait scores, those are always spot on!) During coaching sessions around assessment results, I always ask the participant to start thinking about where their traits show up and which behaviors are important to their professional success. Once identified, we can work on what action steps they want to take around any less-than-desirable trait score(s).
2. A specific and customized developmental plan can be created
   We have all attended trainings and been momentarily motivated, but most of the time when returning to the “work-a-day” world, actual results and continued follow through on behavioral change can be disappointing. By integrating assessments into your employee’s professional development plan, you will be able to review each worker's professional developmental needs. Then add the advantage of Group Profiles and you will be able see the strengths and weaknesses of the team as a whole.  This information will enable you to focus training dollars and coaching needs with laser-accurate precision.
3. Morale is raised
   When coaching, I often hear that having assessment feedback that not only points out deep strengths but also areas of concern, has allowed the participant to identify practical steps to alter any “unproductive” behavior.  Many times someone who has struggled with their behavioral blind-sightedness for years, suddenly has a “name” for a behavior they have not been able to identify.  I often hear comments such as, "That's my low Endurance again, I’m giving up too soon," or "That's my high Nurturance, always making excuses for unprofessional behavior in my people." Identifying and naming, brings hope.
4. Results are immediate
   I have found that when challenged, people are eager to prove quickly they can overcome the undesirable implications of their less than favorable scores.  Sometimes during a coaching session, when someone wonders how to implement the desired behavioral change, I will tell them to “act as if” a certain trait score was higher (or lower if necessary).  For example, if someone has a very low level of Assertiveness, resulting in a failure to voice their opinion when needed, I will tell them to "act like a 7, just for this next one hour meeting. Once the meeting is over, go back to being a 2 again." This simple technique allows people to be themselves, while providing the opportunity to experiment with a new behavior that is more productive.  It is amazing to watch the self-modification that takes place as people try the stronger (or softer) personality level.
5. Retention is impacted tremendously
   Instead of promoting people to leadership because of technical competence, or time in service, or hiring them based on subjective data, these vital management decisions will now be made with hard, objective information. Do they have the communication and self-confidence to lead; do they have enough Conscientiousness to be aware of the needs of the company (and those around them), or Trust and Nurturance to encourage those working under their leadership?
6. Performance Evaluations can take on a completely new meaning
   With assessment results in hand, a manager can discuss specific behavioral traits against performance standards instead of the hasty and generalized "meets expectations" comments that often don't mean anything. "How do you view your progress in reducing conflict in your communication with Charles?" or "Do you feel you've made headway in being more decisive?” (Due to Low Autonomy and low Self-Confidence.) Now add meaning and value to the Performance Review process. 

I would encourage you to consider the ways that behavioral assessment feedback might be of help to you as you lead and develop those within your organization. It is never too early, or too late, to implement a behavioral development program and positively shift the behaviors of those you support and lead.

*** For help assessing your current workforce or screening candidates you are considering, contact Lindsay at 206.533.9700 / [email protected]

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Besides Hiring Decisions - Other Ways to Use Assessment Feedback

Many times clients ask, besides our hiring decisions, how else and where else we can use assessment feedback?

First and foremost remember:

1. Assessments = Information
2. Information = Knowledge
3. Knowledge = Smarter Hiring and Employee Development Decisions

Here are a few ideas:

• Hiring and Onboarding – Review assessment feedback and use the information to dig deeper during the interview process.
• Tie the behavioral feedback you are receiving in the assessment to real-world work experiences you know this candidate will be facing in this position. Pay attention to their responses.
• Provide the Participant’s Report to your new hire – Once you have decided you are going to move forward with someone, provide their Participant’s Report so that from the start you can discuss performance expectations, areas of strength and areas you would like to see developed. 
• Help your new hire (or current employee) develop an action plan around needed/desired behaviors.
• Group Profiles – These Profiles are great for comparing candidates (side by side) when making hiring decisions. What can you live with and what can you live without (behaviorally)?
• Create Group Profiles for your current workforce - who will fit and work well (or complement) whom?

• When assessing current teams, divisions, departments, you can see the group as a whole: strengths, weakness, where conflict might arise and why.
  (Think about how those who are “8’s and 9’s” in Order (physical order of a person’s environment) might become frustrated when working with someone who is a lot more “sloppy” with a “1” in Order.)

• Behavioral Assessment creates a solid foundation for coaching, personal, and professional development.

 

• Behavioral Assessment identifies your current strong players for benchmarking.

• Behavioral Assessment identifies your struggling performers and looks for areas of commonality, which then helps pinpoint where training or development is necessary.

These are all examples of how my clients use the information they have at their fingertips when using Winslow Assessments. If you are using a different assessment, speak to your consultant/vendor to learn what features are available and discover ways to make use of these valuable tools.

Questions? Please do not hesitate to ask!

 

Related Posts:
Behavior Assessments: Hiring and So Much More 
Joining Forces to Identify and Develop the Best

5 Tips to Help You Use Hiring Assessments 

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How to Use Assessment Feedback Past the Hiring Decision

360 Surveys – The Importance of Understanding What and Why

I read this a few days ago in response to an inquiry about 360 surveys and best uses. Wendell Williams' Ph.D.response is so right on, I decided to share it here. 360 surveys can be helpful tools if used correctly... they can have little to no effect, or be damaging to the person or the culture of a company if used incorrectly.

“Please do not take 360 lightly. There are some real pitfalls, that if not addressed in the outset, WILL rise up to bite you later and you will find yourself scrambling to preserve your credibility.

They include:

1. Keep it job related and job specific...although managers will ask for it, avoid the "nice to know" or "big brother" questions.
2. Let each participant pick what he / she wants feedback on. One-size questionnaires fit no one (this is a very important step).
3. Keep it behavioral...valuate what people can see or hear...not what the rater "thinks." If it cannot be seen or heard, it will be subjective and error-prone. Do not buy into the nonsense that people will ignore what they cannot accurately rate.
4. Keep it relevant to the specific audience. For example, don't ask peers if Billy-Bob provides clear directions to subs, they could care less and probably have no idea. Ask subordinates.  
5. Separate these audiences: Top management expectations, subordinate feedback, customer feedback, team member feedback, and so forth.
6. Don't survey the universe...focus on a few critical areas...people can only work on one developmental area at a time. Too many questions creates a fog of confusion.
7. Examine each question carefully. If you do not know beforehand what you will do with bad answers, don't use it. Bad answers frustrate and confuse people.
8. Don't tie results to any kind of ratings, promotions, pay decisions, or other reward / punishment systems. Your system will quickly self-destruct.

These are key elements...avoid anyone or any system that either does not address or minimizes the importance of each of these issues. Good luck!”

Well said Wendell – very helpful information for those considering, or currently using, 360 degree surveys.

 

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Managing Managers

How to Use Assessment Feedback Past the Hiring Decision

How to Use Assessment Feedback Past the Hiring Decision

My hope for this post is that you will begin to think about assessment use past the initial hiring decision, realizing there is a world of helpful information to be gained by using assessments throughout the life cycle of your workforce.

Here are a couple of things I love about the Winslow Assessment:

• The Winslow Assessment is a great tool for measuring “behavioral” habits and influences of the people you are bringing into your organization (hiring). Behaviors change with life and circumstances. The importance of identifying what is going on “now” with an individual is critical for onboarding and performance success. When stress, disappointments (personal or professional), dysfunctional management, and / or life circumstances become a downward spiral, you will not get the same performance as when life is humming along.
• The ability to candidly discuss with the candidate any area(s) of “concern” before the hire. This helps you notice their attitude toward development, their ability to be objective, and their pro-active approach to areas that challenge them. You can then identify if you want to move forward with the candidate, or not.
  This objective overview also alleviates “this person walks on water” syndrome that can come back to bite you about three to four months after the hire when annoying behaviors surface that you never expected.
• The ability to set performance expectations with a realistic “behavioral” blueprint for areas of strength and / or areas for development. This is an asset not only for the hiring company, but also for the individual. Time, coaching, and money are not spent on areas that are already working.
• The added benefit of being able to use the assessment on your current workforce is to help you identify “behavioral fit,” who will work well with whom, who might over power or frustrate another, etc. I have clients who simply assess their workforce every two years (life happens after all), provide their behavioral feedback to them, and then coach them accordingly.

Assessments in general help conversations quickly flow into “what is most important for us to be talking about right now” without the need to spend a lot of time probing for where strengths and / or concerns might be.

Here are a few ways to incorporate assessment results into your organization:

• Applicant Screening - Eliminate unqualified applicants early in the process
• Personnel Selection - Select the best available applicant for the position
• Personnel Placement - Place new employees in the most suitable position and environment
• Needs Analysis - Objectively determine the specific training and development needs of  individual employees
• Succession Planning - Identify the most suitable individual(s) to be coached and mentored to replace those who will be promoted, transferred, retired, or terminated
• Reorganization Decisions - Determine which employees will function most successfully in the  reorganized unit
• Termination / Outplacement - Explore the possibility of changing duties, positions, managers,  departments, etc., instead of termination
• Organizational Development - Identify the development needs of the organization
  (For example, if you see low Trust scores across the board – plan to address this dysfunction via training or coaching.)
• Performance Appraisals - Determine if employees are performing to potential
• Career Pathing - Advance individuals into the most suitable positions or coach them so they can develop the behaviors necessary to succeed in their career

Are you are currently using assessments for hiring? Where are some of the other areas you have found their feedback helpful?

If you are not currently using assessments and would like help exploring areas where behavioral feedback would be an asset in candidate selection and/or the professional development of your current workforce, contact Lindsay at [email protected] – 425-697-2700.

 

Managing Managers

Management, especially front-line management, can affect turnover more than any other system. If your organization suffers from high turnover, then the first place to look is at your front-line management.

Key Management Skills

Front-line management jobs come in all shapes and sizes. On one hand, there are people with a management title, but their job involves "doing," not coaching. Their title could be a reward for good performance, an ego boost, or strategic positioning. This kind of manager does not manage. He or she is an individual contributor and should be evaluated for contributor skills, not management skills.

True front-line managers are usually coaches. That is, they are responsible for…

• Managing
• Developing
• Correcting

…the activities of the people they supervise.

Front-line managers get things done through people, not by doing the job themselves. Too many manager interactions with intelligent human beings are caustic.
Their behavior drives turnover.

Front-line managers do not have to be an expert in the jobs they supervise. They just have to know it well enough to give direction and guidance. This is not an easy skill to acquire; while some argue it can be learned, few people have the skills to coach effectively. In practice, they tend to dance around the issue or make veiled threats. None of which helps their direct reports get better.

Manager / Coach

When evaluating managers make sure they can intelligently question, discover problems, make appropriate suggestions, and get subordinate commitment. Most flounder in the coaching arena. To select or promote better managers evaluate your candidate’s abilities to do the following:

• Plan and organize complex activity.
• Coach and develop others.
• Be able to think analytically and see both the forest and the trees.
• Be able to perform the job, but not necessarily be an expert.
• Have the behaviors, interests, and motivations of a manager

Always remember that first-line managers are cited as an employee’s greatest source of stress. And stress can be a significant reason for turnover. Incoming and first-line management promotion decisions are the easiest to tackle. Forget about "promotions as a reward" and focus on "promotions based on job skills." Evaluate prospective front-line manager job skills by interviewing about past behaviors, administering tests and exercises, and watching the person perform in coaching simulations.

The bottom line: If you want to start reducing turnover, then make sure every incoming executive and manager has the right skills and behaviors for the job.

*** Adapted from a post by my colleague - Dr. Wendell Williams

Assessments - Who Can You Trust?

Because of some great questions on a recent post I did on assessments, and because a logical response would take a lot of space, I decided to simply write another post.

The question that popped out at me was an excellent one about “trust” - “What criteria do I use to decide who to trust?” when choosing an assessment tool.

Trust can be challenging when looking for any solution and with assessments, all of them can look or sound so good, how do you wade through and find the best assessment tool for the job that you need done?

My response: Do your due diligence.

• Know what you want or need the assessment to do (performance, employee development, interview and candidate selection, personal development).
• Ask for validation information on the assessment you are considering, and make sure it is up to date (validated every three to five years).
• Ask how long the consultant has been working with the assessment.
• Ask where the assessment consultant does most of their work – personal coaching, candidate selection and interview, employee development. Many people are “licensed” in various assessments but have done little actual work using the assessment.

Dependent on what you want to use an assessment for, here are some other things to consider:

• Make sure the person serving you (coach or consultant) is not only originally trained and licensed, but that they are continually using the assessment and they are fluid in understanding their assessment tool’s strengths and / or limitations.
• Make sure that the assessment is the right tool for what you want to do. For example, styles type assessments are not good for hiring decisions because this type of assessment tool is too general (broad) in its groupings.
• For hiring decisions (to be legally defensible) assessments should be performance based and show job‐relatedness with results appropriate for the position and the employer’s purpose.
• Make sure that the assessment is up to date in its validation – which is typically done every three to five years. Plus, you may even want to research and understand the basis of the assessment – what was it created to measure: behavior, performance, or general personality preferences?

Finding an assessment and / or an assessment provider that fits your needs can be a bit intimidating, and people’s feelings run deep on what assessment is “the best.” My opinion, the best will vary depending on your needs, so do your due diligence.

Personally I’ve taken the Winslow, MBTI, DISC, a cool little tool called 5 Dynamics, an assessment by Future-Step (Korn Ferry), Emergenetics Selection Profile, plus numerous magazine assessments. Some of these are strictly coaching tools and some are hiring and / or development tools; they all were interesting.

Obviously I settled on becoming trained and licensed in the Winslow Assessment as I respected the performance base of the assessment, the continuing training required and I’m a believer that behaviors make or break a person’s personal or professional success. Don’t get me wrong, as you can see by the amount of assessments I’ve taken, deciding on “which one” was not easy and in the beginning I felt much like the commenter on my post – Who should I trust?

I also brought on the Emergenetics Selection Profile as it’s a neat tool for identifying those with the skills of attention to detail and multi-tasking ability. And no, “attention to detail” is not my strong point!

Bottom-line: Trust and verify because assessments when used correctly will open up insights into candidates, employees, or yourself that will help move everyone forward.

 

4 Possibilities of Succession Planning

Everyone seems to have their own preferred method of succession planning / succession management strategies. The most important thing to remember, no matter what "method" you use, is that succession planning is to identify who is ready now to move up in your organization, who will be ready next, and who may never be ready. How you keep track of your workforce is an important aspect of your people management skills.

First off, take look at yourself and your approach to the succession management process:

• Do you keep good records of available feedback and data?
• Are you fair and objective in your succession decisions?
• Are you providing those under your management the resources and opportunities to develop themselves so they can move forward in their career?

4 areas to identify when working up a succession plan.

1. One page - with columns; detailed simplicity is best.
2. Who is Ready Now?
   * Name
   * Current role
   * Strengths – what do they bring to the table now, skills and behaviors?
   * Weaknesses – where do you notice holes in skills and behaviors?
   * Responsibilities you know they are ready for now.
   * Areas you want them to develop as they fit into their new role; be specific.
3. Who will be Ready Next?
   * Name
   * Current role
   * Strengths – what do they bring to the table now, skills and behaviors?
   * Weaknesses – where do you notice holes in skills and behaviors?
   * Identify what specific skills and / or behaviors are necessary for them to move into “ready now.”
   * Help them obtain the training / coaching to develop themselves
4. Not Ready – these people are not ready now, next and possibly never will be.
   * Name
   * Current role
   * Strengths and weaknesses
   * Why are they not ready? Be very specific
   * Is their “not ready” related to skills or behavior?
   * Are they not ready because they need more stability right now in their work-life, instead of disrupting their known work environment? Will this change?
   * What will these individuals need to do to get themselves ready? And realize, they simply may not be able to move themselves to that place.
   * Are they failing now, and you simply cannot afford to invest any more resources into them?

I strongly recommend using behavioral assessment feedback to identify those “strength and weakness” areas of your employee’s succession plan. Combining assessment feedback along with your own observations (and others’ feedback) will provide a well-rounded overview for setting performance expectations and identifying the behavioral next steps relevant to career responsibility and development.

 

Assess - Identify - Coach

Simple steps to help you manage your currrent workforce:

1. Assess current employees.
2. Identify any gaps in behavior and performance.
3. Coach/train where needed.

Windridge Coaching is Born!

I absolutely love the work I do around hiring and placement of behaviorally fit individuals. You know, the people who come into your organization and hit the ground running with little-to-no “surprises” in their personality. And I so appreciate the hiring managers, recruiters, business owners, and executive teams I work with around hiring and the positioning of their people. They are the best!

Still, much of my work even in the “hiring assessment support” realm is actually coaching, pure and simple. I am the listening presence. I am the objective outsider, a sounding board who is an asset when making those sometimes difficult hiring decisions.

And so, because I love this listening /supportive line of work and I seem to be doing more and more coaching within organizations, my decision to create a targeted website for Windridge Coaching was born!

This site will provide access in one place to useful professional development information and also allow access to some of the wonderfully skilled associates / coaches I have in my inner circle… There may be times when I am not the coach a person needs for their situation, and the ability to refer them to the capable skills of my colleagues will be a wonderful asset.

With the addition of Windridge Coaching I’m looking forward to allowing Windridge to grow and provide a broader range of support to professionals who are in the process of moving themselves, their careers and their organizations, forward.

Website is up – content will be growing and expanding - please check out Windridge Coaching!