Getting the Right People On the Bus: Assessment Solutions for Five Critical Business Stages
Human Capital Advisor, 2005 Issue No. 1

Businesses progress through five distinct phases driven by market forces and strategy execution: survival, maintenance, growth, best in class, and transition. Personnel issues are critical throughout the hierarchy, and it’s crucial that businesses have the right people in place to successfully navigate each phase. Assessment services can be invaluable in helping organizations to identify and develop the people who are so critical to their success.

Why Assessment?

Whether an organization is in survival mode or in transition to its next group of leaders, assessment is an invaluable tool. Psychological assessment provides tools with which to assess skills and abilities, personality, interests, and work styles to assure a good fit not only with a particular position but also within an organization’s culture. Assessment results generate information helpful in managing newly hired staff members, managers, and executives; identify potential warning signs to consider prior to making a hiring decision; identify strengths of current staff members, managers, and executives; and provide helpful suggestions to improve performance and assure that each staff member performs to the best of his or her ability.

Survival: Deciding Who To Keep

Due to a sharp shift in market forces, businesses may face challenging times requiring retrenchment, both in terms of costs and personnel. Tough economic times elicit tough decisions, and although no company wants to reduce its workforce, sometimes there’s simply no other option. So what do you do? How do you decide who to keep?

Assessment services can be helpful in identifying the key leadership abilities, work styles, and problem solving abilities needed to position companies to survive tough times. Such times may require leaders who can adapt and embrace the new business models necessary to not only endure immediate economic challenges but also help the company emerge as a healthy organization. Objective assessment tools can provide a sense of fairness and add additional data points helpful in making these difficult personnel decisions, while simultaneously identifying key strengths and offering helpful suggestions for development.

Maintenance: Avoiding Bad Hires

“Fit” becomes a critical issue in evaluating prospective new staff members. Key issues to examine are whether a candidate’s skills, personality, and work style are a good fit with an organization’s culture. For senior managers, research demonstrates that they’re most likely to fail due to poor “fit” with the company's culture and the management team that they join.

Assessment services can provide helpful information that assists in avoiding a “bad hire,” which is estimated to cost companies between 30% and 150% of an ejected person’s salary. In short, assessment services can provide warning signals to guard against bad cultural fits while simultaneously providing suggestions to position compatible candidates for success.

Growth: Hiring the Best People

The key to fueling the successful growth strategy of any organization is selecting the right people — people who are instrumental in helping an organization meet its goals. The first step in this process is creating a leadership success template that’s directly linked to the business strategy. This template identifies those key skills and leadership qualities critical for the organization to succeed.

Getting the “right people on the bus” has become a rallying cry for organizations seeking to create enduring success in a world where market forces are rapidly changing. Identifying, selecting, and developing a core group of leaders who are aligned in their efforts to assure the success of their organizations has proven the key differentiator between companies that effectively navigate changing market and economic conditions and those that don’t. Assessment information assists in identifying those people who possess the core characteristics of such a success template.

Best in Class: Developing Future Leaders

Best-in-class companies recognize that their people represent a critical competitive advantage in achieving desired organizational goals. “Growing your own leaders” has been identified as a key business imperative for best-in-class organizations, and doing so effectively requires an investment in people that becomes as important as investing in equipment or technology.

Assessment for promotion and professional development can be helpful in providing objective third-party information and accelerating the continued growth and development of future leaders. Assessment information can be especially helpful in creating professional development plans for high potential managers and newly promoted executives.

Transition: Succession Planning

As people are an organization’s number-one asset, planning for their succession is crucial. Minimally, organizations should begin succession planning for critical positions a minimum of three to five years in advance. Best-in-class organizations adopt a talent management mindset, whereby career path discussion aren’t limited to once-a-year events but are ongoing conversations linked to an organization’s long-term business strategy.

Psychological assessment information can provide data that serves as a foundation for internal discussions related to succession planning. Assessments can provide data related to readiness for promotion, identify strengths, and suggest additional training or development for future leadership development. Integrating assessment information into decision making and development planning can increase the confidence that organizations have in their final decisions and aid with the creation of a succession planning strategy that affords potential successors the abilities and skills necessary to lead the company to continued growth.

Assessment Solutions

Psychological assessment provides valuable solutions in solving key personnel challenges that emerge throughout all stages of a business. The goal is to assist organizations in capitalizing on and maximizing one of their most important competitive advantages: their people.