Say you apply for a job. You take an assessment to see if you’re the right fit for the company and the role. After you join the company, you take another assessment to gauge your managerial skills. Later you may be part of a team-building exercise, which requires an entirely different assessment. Pretty soon, you’re feeling like this:

According to senior consultant Dr. Kevin Meyer, a lot of companies are dealing with assessment overkill.

“Over time, they’ve adopted specific assessment tools for specific needs,” he said. “In theory, it’s a good approach, but when you use different tools there’s no common framework for a company to use to understand and evaluate its employees.”

Our comprehensive approach to personality assessment provides the depth and detail companies need to hire the right people, identify and develop talented individuals, build better leaders, and improve their bottom line. And because personality is stable over time, our assessments are a useful tool throughout the employee lifecycle.

To learn more, check out this video interview, or read our new eBook, Why Personality?

He’s the passive aggressor, the one with the tight-jawed smile. Sure, he’s a great guy when he gets his way, but give him an unpleasant task and he’ll drag his feet. Need him to fill out that insurance paperwork? Yeah. He’ll get right on that.

On the climb up the corporate ladder, the line between strength and weakness isn’t always clear. Although the procrastinator is outwardly pleasant and sociable, team members may be putt off by his stubbornness.

Watch this video to see the Procrastinator at work, or visit www.howdoyouderail.com to view the entire HDS video series. Follow on Twitter @ImHiLeisurely #howdoyouderail

When it comes to understanding your employees, it boils down to three basic questions:

What do people want? What are the core motives, values, and interests that get them out of bed and into the office every morning?

How will they get what they want? What strengths and weaknesses do they display when they are at their best?

What will get in their way? What are their derailers, the characteristics that emerge during stress or pressure to erode relationships and derail their chances of success?

Armed with this powerful information, you can make better hires, identify and develop talented individuals, build better leaders, and impact your bottom line. To find out more, check out our recent eBook, Why Personality?

Assessments are powerful, business-critical tools that predict and monitor employee performance and multiple assessments are administered based on the different needs within the organization. Over the course of a typical year, some employees might be assessed and reassessed over and over again, causing frustration and assessment burnout for already busy employees. When organizations use multiple assessments that have no or limited correlation to each other, it also creates a glut of data that forms its very own black hole, sucking in all the information – full of redundancies – including the vital insights.

Since the variance between these assessment tools is often slight, organizations risk capturing virtually the same data in different systems that are further limiting because they are unable to talk to each other. Organization-wide, collected data filters into this black hole ensuring it is nearly impossible to compare results or pull broad-spectrum reports. As more assessments are ordered to suit emerging needs, employees and human resources professionals become frustrated. To avoid burnout and black hole syndrome, finding an alternative is imperative.

Research indicates that the solution may be easier than you realize: employ a comprehensive suite of assessment tools. Here’s how:

One Suite, Multiple Options Having a comprehensive suite allows the organization to assess employees once, using the same questions for everyone. With this concise data in hand, the organization can run multiple reports on everything from detecting leadership potential to recognizing levels of accident proneness.

Creating Consistency Collecting the same information about all employees provides a broad, deep understanding of the entire workforce.

Implementing Strategy This starts by identifying the organization’s needs (PDF) including the biggest pain point; once needs are determined a comprehensive assessment suite can be rolled out. We recommend holding a “conversion” training to help employees understand the new approach and its associated value for improving the HR lifecycle and employee experience.

With a comprehensive assessments suite in place, organizations will see burnout diminish while the black hole gives way to a viable bank of employee data. To find out more about using a comprehensive suite of assessments, download our latest eBook, Why Personality?

Have you ever been somewhere you felt like you just didn’t fit in?

People’s core motives, values, and interests affect every aspect of their lives, from how they behave, to the kind of atmosphere and work environment in which they feel happy and productive. When it comes to team performance, shared values can have a powerful impact:

• Coherence – Having common values assists with team bonding and makes working with colleagues easier and more enjoyable. Conflict tends to be more productive on teams with congruent values, focusing more on substantive, technical, or professional differences.
• Greater efficiency –Team members are on the same page with regard to tasks and situations, understand each other’s needs, and trust one another more than individuals in teams without shared values.
• Stability – Shared values increase individuals’ commitment to the team and its purpose, which increases team motivation and reduces turnover. Members who stay longer with a team are more likely to engage in activities and make decisions that benefit the group over selfish gains.

To find out more about team values, and how personality impacts team performance, check out our complimentary eBook, The Truth About Teams.

Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.

-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. 

Balancing psychological roles is an important step toward creating a high-performing team. It is equally important to understand team members’ derailers.

Under stress, people’s greatest strength can become their biggest weakness – the ambitious salesperson earns a reputation as a cutthroat competitor, the meticulous accountant turns to nitpicking or micromanaging. These tendencies are called derailers.

If too many members of a team share the same derailing tendencies, they can become team derailers. Team derailers fall into three categories:

• Distancing derailers help individuals manage anxiety or pressure by maintaining distance from and pushing others away.
• Agitating derailers are an offensive rather than defensive response to pressure. They help individuals manage situations by manipulating or controlling others.
• Acquiescing derailers help individuals manage their anxiety and stress by building alliances with others.

These derailers can lead to shared blind spots, amplified reactions, or competitive responses, in which team members enter a sort of arms race by responding to each others’ derailed behavior in a manner that triggers more derailed behavior. However, by recognizing their shared characteristics, teams can work to mitigate their tendencies and correct problem behaviors.

To find out more about team derailers and how personality affects team performance, check out our free eBook, The Truth About Teams.

As more organizations are forced to do more with less, speed coaching provides a fast, agile and cost-effective way to enhance the performance of key employees before they derail.

The viability of an organization depends upon the quality of its future leaders, yet limited resources often pose significant obstacles to providing them with necessary coaching and development. During her session at GSC SHRM, titled “Speed Coaching – Limited Resources but Unlimited Development,” Patricia Kellett, director of the Hogan Coaching Network, shared several strategies for using speed coaching to develop future leaders.

Trish discussed how speed coaching can be effective in changing behavior by sharing a case study of Bob, an employee who was recently promoted to supply chain manager for his company. Although Bob knows the business well and is effective at relationship building, his supervisor hears from team members that Bob’s meetings tend to go on for too long, and that he is indecisive, not open to new ideas, and gets overwhelmed by a more assertive employee.

As Bob is proficient in several key areas of his role, she explained, it would be a waste of time and resources to have him go through the typical linear development cycle. Instead, it is more effective to provide him with speed coaching in the few areas in which he needs improvement. By providing targeted speed coaching that builds on his existing strengths and develops his competency companions, or the existing skills that can be used to improve his performance in other areas, he can be a more effective leader.

To ensure an organization has a pipeline of future leaders it can count on to assume key positions, it is imperative to understand the assets and liabilities of these individuals. As each company has several team members who may not be perfect, but are still too good to lose, their supervisors need to provide targeted development that prepares them to meet future needs. Through speed coaching, they can provide their high potential employees with fast and effective development that drives their performance, but won’t drain financial resources.