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Personalities & Performance
July 28, 2008
By Margery Weinstein
One employee excels at collaborative projects that require her to consider feedback and new ideas from a wide circle of co-workers; her colleague, meanwhile, savors hours alone in his cubicle with nothing but him and the document on his computer screen. Yet another worker in the department is great at reaching out to clients and resolving conflict, but can't be relied on to contribute consistently to group projects. Sound familiar? Most workplaces are a hodgepodge of personalities. Luckily, trainers tasked with meshing these disparate people can use psychology-based personality assessments to clue them into which employees go best with which job roles, and how they all can best work together.
Refining Recruitment
For Edward Jones, personality assessment is a way to cut through the glossy surface of job interviews. A 30-minute online psychometric tool developed by Toronto-based Self Management Group, and fine-tuned to suit Edward Jones, "gives a fairly good, in-depth peek at how people would approach the role of financial advisor and the specific attributes it takes to be successful," says Dan Timm, principal, financial advisor training and development, branch administration, recruiting and hiring.
The assessment, which asks job candidates to answer multiple-choice questions about how they would approach hypothetical scenarios, is harder to trick than a recruiter. "It asks similar questions repeatedly," Timm says, "so you can't really fake your way through the system." Specifically, the tool gauges characteristics such as enterprising potential (how well applicants are able to manage themselves); achievement potential (how bottom line focused they are likely to be); and independence potential (how effectively they work on their own rather than on teams).
But as promising as psychological assessments are, be careful what you expect from them, cautions Justin Menkes, author of "Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have." "They are self-report measures, meaning they are dependent on the respondent to tell you the truth," he says.
The solution? Be leery of marketing materials that may overpromise what the assessment tool can do. You might want to take a second look, for instance, at the validity claims of the assessment's marketers—that is, how well scores on the assessment correlate to on-the-job performance. "They give these personality tests to a bunch of individuals in a company, and say, "No one is going to see the results but us, and we're just going to give you feedback to help you with your own development.' And then they collect performance ratings on those individuals, and correlate them," Menkes says. "But if you then take that same test and put it in the circumstance of somebody who's being hired or evaluated for a promotion, then the self-report no longer becomes valid because they have an incentive to lie."
Perhaps for that reason, Edward Jones takes a methodical approach to its use of psychological assessment in the hiring process. The tool has been back-tested on hiring data since 2001, piloted in 2004, and implemented in 2007. It was given to a group of employees already employed as financial advisors, and back-tested to their job performance. "The back-test data showed us it's .72 correlated to success," says Timm. "That is a pretty good correlation."
Developing Development
The next step for Edward Jones is to use psychological assessment more to aid training. The company now is developing a brief results summary that can be used to help employees with career development. "Here's how you work," Timm says this summary would tell employees, "and here are the training and coaching techniques we're going to try use to work with you in a more appropriate way."
Indeed, the company considers personality assessment a part of its long-term growth strategy. Understanding its workforce better will allow the company to better capitalize on the talent already under its roof, says Human Resources Principal Ken Dude. "We're truly a growth company," he says, "and it's organic growth. It's not through mergers and acquisitions. So our use in HR of [psychological] assessment is centered on development."
Edward Jones seeks to use a development assessment to support leadership development, essential given its ever-increasing payroll numbers. The company's approximately 11,200 financial advisors are projected to grow to 17,500 in five years. "As we grow the population, we need to grow the leadership," Dude says. "We use assessment as part of the information we use to identify and develop future leaders of the firm."
Unlike its use as a recruitment tool, the assessment used for leadership development isn't for the purpose of selecting future leaders; rather it tells managers where employees need to focus to build their strengths.
The assessment is particularly good at helping Edward Jones assess the potential of financial advisors working outside its St. Louis, MO, headquarters, in its 10,000 branch offices. The personality assessment combined with 360-degree feedback from peers within the branch gives the company an idea of who might have what it takes to assume a leadership role at headquarters. "We're able to understand their behaviors and some of their strengths, and whether those will fit into the home office environment," Dude explains.
Following the personality assessment, employees under consideration for a home office position, as well as their supervisors, are debriefed about the results by a consultant from the vendor Edward Jones purchased the development assessment from. If, for example, the results indicate the employee thrives on collaboration, he or she may do even better in the team-oriented home office since work as a financial advisor in the field is a more self-contained endeavor.
Psychological assessment can give you insights into the types of job roles employees will excel at, but it isn't nearly the whole story, says Stuart Crandell, vice president of global assessment solutions for human resources firm Personnel Decisions International. "I think one of the mistakes is overinterpreting the personality assessment, and assuming that what you see is your destiny," he says. "There are things people learn to do to compensate for what they know are maybe not their natural preferences."
Relationship Retooler
Once you've recruited your workforce, and determined what roles fit which workers, your next question is how to help employees work together efficiently. Teambuilding is another task psychological assessment can support. For SeaChange International, a streaming video company, personality assessment strengthened understanding of peers and customers. By learning about their own personality, and those of other people, employees in SeaChange's call center are better able to handle challenging customers, and interact more smoothly with co-workers, says Judy Gustafason, SeaChange's director of HR.
The assessment and accompanying curriculum developed by training and consulting firm Loyalty Factor, LLC, informs workers of their own tendencies while educating them about other personality types, and how best to interact with them. Delivered in half-day sessions over a few weeks, the course design enabled employees to immediately apply what they learned. "You first have to understand your own style," says Gustafason. "What are your personality characteristics that are demonstrated by the way you learn, listen, think, and work? If you understand your own style, and can apply those assessment techniques to the caller, then you can understand how they prefer to learn, hear, or work, and you get a better opportunity to try to match."
If you decide on a categorical tool, meaning an assessment such as the one SeaChange uses, that organizes employees into personality categories based on preferences, two to think about are the DiSC and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment. DiSC is the four-quadrant behavioral model in which assessments classify four aspects of behavior by testing a person's preferences in word associations. DiSC is an acronym for:
Dominance: relating to control, power, and assertiveness
Influence: relating to social situations and communication
Steadiness: relating to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness
Conscientiousness: relating to structure and organization
A DiSC assessment can help people better understand their tendencies, needs, preferred environment, and strategies for effectiveness, plus how they interact with people in the other dimensions.
MBTI (which is published by CPP, Inc.) likewise can be used to enhance interpersonal relations, says Michael Anderson, Ph.D., a CPP research scientist. A group of employees a supervisor believes could be working better together could take the assessment, with a CPP consultant delivering accompanying customized training to boost teambuilding.
One of the preferences the assessment determines is whether the employee is an introvert or extrovert, and what that means to his or her work style. Before going through the MBTI program, in which the differences in work styles between extroverts and introverts is explained, an extrovert might assume his or her introverted co-worker is just being unfriendly and difficult. But once you understand that person just needs time to reflect on the project, Anderson points out, you can use the knowledge to work more effectively with him or her.
SeaChange's psychological assessment classifies personalities into four major types: Thinker, Intuitor, Sensor, and Feeler. "Thinkers," for instance, are analytical, deliberative, and detail-oriented. Their biggest fear, says Gustafason, is being proven wrong, so if call center employees identify their customer as a "thinker" by the words he or she uses, they know to show they respect the caller's expertise before doing anything else. Just as understanding the personalities of others helps employees interact better with customers, so, too, does it enable them to better empathize with co-workers. "It helps them manage their relationship with peers and," Gustafason says, "it helps their management team better manage them."
Editor's Note: For an article on skills assessment, go to www.trainingmag.com/assess.
Sidebar: Personality Assessment Primer
Evaluating the personality or psychological tendencies of employees takes some planning and effort. Here are some tips to get you started:
• Personality assessment can cut through the artificial gloss of job interviews, if you do it right. To make it harder for job candidates to trick the test, use an assessment that asks similar questions a few different ways.
• Beware of marketing materials that overpromise what the assessment tool can do. Take a second look, for instance, at the validity claims of the assessment's marketers—that is, how well scores on the assessment correlate to on-the-job performance.
• Back-test the assessment to job performance of those who already have taken it to measure how accurate a predictor it is of on-the-job success.
• Keep in mind the results of personality assessment aren't conclusive. Don't write off the leadership potential of an employee who doesn't rate high in certain psychological tendencies. When motivated, people find ways to compensate for weaknesses.
• You can use assessment for more than recruitment and measuring leadership potential. It also can be used to teach employees about their own personality, and those of their peers, thereby boosting teambuilding.
• Weave the personality assessment into a teambuilding program to most improve your workforce's ability to effectively collaborate.
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