It’s the end of February and that can only mean one thing: the start of the NFL off season. For many football fans, the off season presents a welcomed break from the sport. For others, the off season is an eight-month opportunity to salivate over the prospects of what the next year could hold. Each year around this time, the NFL holds their Scouting Combine where college players display their skills in front of coaches, general managers, and team scouts in hopes that a team will draft them.

Now comes the point in this post where I should probably disclose that I am not a fan of using sports analogies in the business world (see what I did there?). Sports analogies have become a tiring cliché and they all too often over simplify a complex situation. Having cleared the air, I will now contradict myself and state that the business world has something to gain by paying attention to the NFL Combine. At the Combine, athletes are subject to a series of tests and evaluations designed to assess their skills and abilities. In part, the Combine helps teams to decide which players have the potential to thrive at the next level. Not surprisingly, teams that draft better are more likely to have success on the field. In the business world, organizations are notoriously bad at identifying potential for next-level leadership. Rather than concentrating on skills, abilities, and other personal characteristics (the measureable qualities that are the focus of the Combine), businesses tend to rely on other factors (similarity, attractiveness, and who can play politics) to populate the leadership pipeline. Could you imagine what would happen if NFL teams stopped relying on objective data points to help make decisions, and instead started drafting players based on the cars they drive, how interesting their post-game interviews were, and how they dressed when they arrive at the locker room?

Information is paramount to any decision-making process. Without relevant information, any decision is likely to net a 50/50 outcome at best, with only half of the decisions being correct. If organizations are comfortable getting it right only half of the time, then there really is no reason to change the prevailing modus operandi for identifying emerging talent. If, however, organizations want to improve their decision-making abilities, they will need information. The only way to get relevant information on a pool of candidates is through some form of validated test, evaluation, simulation, or assessment designed to detect key attributes that influence job performance (the lack of relationship with performance has caused some to scrutinize the use of cognitive assessment at the Combine). Perhaps what we need is a Business Leadership Combine to help solve our current leadership crisis.

I was browsing the internet one night a few weeks ago, and I came across a story that caught my attention. The story is one of a Los Angeles County traffic cop that, through 20 years on the job and 25,000 traffic stops, has never received a single complaint. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. This is an amazing statistic, especially when you consider that most interactions with traffic police will leave you with a citation and a bad mood. However, this officer has a flawless record and it is all due to one factor – personality. Instead of chastising and embarrassing commuters for speeding, failure to wear a safety belt, and the like, he puts his interpersonal skills to good use and leaves commuters with a ticket and a smile. It’s the perfect combination of charm without being too charming, being personable without being walked-on.

Organizations and individuals looking to hire or promote the right person for a job need to consider factors like an individual’s personality or values. In fact, these factors are the difference between having a good set of employees and a great set of employees. Someone can have all the intelligence, experience, and educational degrees needed to do the job, but if they don’t have the right blend of personality and values needed for the job or the organization, they will likely end up underperforming and may even leave or be fired. What I would rather have is someone with the right personality and values at day one, because skills are trainable and experience will come with time. Personality on the other hand is difficult to train.

You may be saying to yourself right now, “None of this is news to me. That’s exactly why I rely on interviews when hiring people.” Interviews are great for several reasons. They allow you the opportunity to ask follow-up questions and to dig further into interesting items on a résumé. However, there are several drawbacks associated with interviews. First, asking follow-up questions reduces the structure of an interview, which is a bad thing. Second, people are able to fake during interviews, making it difficult to know what the person will look like 6 months on the job. Third, interviews are expensive. Interviewers need to be trained on the concepts they are assessing, as well as how to rate the interviewee on those concepts. Then, there are the costs associated with paying someone to conduct the interview. Not to mention, the costs associated with bringing a candidate in to interview (Sure, there are ways of conducting virtual interviews, but if successful, most are followed up with in-person meetings).

Interviews are an inevitable and expensive part of the hiring process, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do things beforehand to make interviews more cost effective and efficient. This is where personality assessment comes in. First, personality assessments provide a standard set of items that each candidate responds to, therefore adding structure to the hiring process. Second, well-constructed personality assessments cannot be faked. Third, personality assessments are a cost effective way of gathering standardized information on a batch of candidates to trim down the amount of interviews.

To find the right employee to fit your organization (like the zero-complaint traffic cop), assess your candidates then interview. You'll have success every time.

When thinking about personality, one thing that we know is there is no such thing as a good or bad personality. It really depends on the job and situation. This is a point that we regularly emphasize to individuals and organizations. Along these same lines, we know that high scores on personality assessments do not inherently mean good things, and low scores do not always mean bad things – there are positives and negatives to both ends of the continuum. Having stated that, our scores do represent our reputations. Over the course of time people come to expect certain behaviors from us based on our past performances.

One of the main goals of personality assessment is to provide individuals with strategic self-awareness. Through feedback, we can help the individual understand his or her tendencies and reputation in the work environment. As such, we can help the low Prudence individual understand that others view him or her as being impulsive and lacking attention to detail, or aid the high Prudence individual with recognizing that he or she may be somewhat inflexible and resistant to change. Having stated that, we are not out to change personality, rather we are looking to make people more aware of their tendencies so they can change their behavior moving forward.

Nevertheless, change is a difficult and ongoing process. To illustrate this point, take a minute to write a few sentences using your opposite hand (i.e., your right hand if you are left-handed and vice-versa). At first, it’s a challenging and awkward thing to do. However, with practice this behavior will become easier to execute. This analogy represents what we are trying to accomplish with feedback and coaching. We should not be trying to convert lefties to righties, and the same is true with personality. We are not trying to convert the low Prudence to high Prudence (or vice-versa), rather we are aiming to help individuals understand their strengths and shortcomings of what their scores represent, and provide developmental tips to leverage these strengths and mitigate these shortcomings.

So, the next time you are confronted with a challenging situation, don’t throw up a white flag and hide behind your personality scores. If you’re low Prudence and the project requires attention to detail, or are high Prudence and the project demands flexibility and openness to change, don’t allow your personality to be a barrier to your success. Instead, take some time to reflect on your natural response tendencies and decide if this is the most advantageous response option given the situation, or if a different course of action would be more beneficial. Through persistence and ongoing coaching, we can learn to overcome the dark side of our personality and let the bright side shine.

Over the past several years, Hogan has held an annual Game Day as a way to bring everyone together and have a little fun on a Friday afternoon. Hogan Game Day involves teams competing in a series of Minute to Win It-style challenges where individuals earn points for their teams based on successful completion of the game. Not only does the winning team get a swanky trophy and bragging rights for the year, they also get to make a donation to the charity of their choice.

Given our ambitious and driven nature, things can get a little competitive. Your teammates are cheering you on, while the competition will do whatever it takes to rattle your concentration and get in your head, which can make stacking chocolate Ding Dongs on your forehead pretty challenging.

Beyond the fun of taking a Friday afternoon off to compete in silly games with your coworkers, Game Day serves another important function – it helps get people engaged. Hogan recently published a whitepaper on the importance of engagement in the workplace. One of the key points from this paper was that engagement has an impact on a company’s bottom-line. When employees are disengaged, productivity suffers.

So, how do we get (and keep) employees engaged? Research shows that it starts with senior management. When bosses treat their employees with concern and respect, workers tend to feel valued and will go above expectations.

There are many techniques bosses have at their disposal to help increase employee engagement. Although extravagant corporate outings like whitewater rafting excursions tout their ability to help build and engage teams through improved communication skills and enhanced trust among team members, these excursions are not only costly but incredibly time consuming. Luckily, there are much simpler ways for managers to get their employees engaged.

The first step for organizations to increase engagement is to hire employees that are more likely to be engaged. An obvious first step would be to hire people that possess the relevant knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to perform the job. However, there is more to engagement than simply being able to perform the job. It’s important that people also like their job. As such, understanding organizational and cultural fit is imperative to having engaged employees. If people do not find congruence between their values and the values of the company, we are more likely to see dissatisfied and disengaged workers.

Once the right people are in the position, it is important to keep people engaged. A few ways to keep people engaged include increased communications between boss and employee, providing opportunities for stretch assignments, and hosting events that display appreciation for the employees. When managers have regular communications with their employees, they have an opportunity to reinforce how the employee’s work has contributed to achieving the mission of the organization, which should help provide a sense of meaning for their job. Providing stretch opportunities allows managers to challenge their workers and allow them a chance to grow their skill sets and responsibilities. Lastly, having appreciation events such as game days and other outside the office gatherings can allow workers to have fun and bond with one another. Probably the most important thing to consider with any engagement activity is to be genuine. If the initiative seems forced, chances are the employees will see right through it and the activity may backfire.