Leadership Assessments: New Practices

Scientific and predictive validity seem to be the mantra for organizations today as they look at building rigor and objectivity in their hiring process. Instead of merely hiring the ‘right person for the right job’, organizations have become more appreciative of charting out a career graph for new hire hires even as they are being considered for the job.

We appreciate the importance of choosing candidates who possess the capacity and orientation to take on strong leadership roles tomorrow. Investing to select future leaders at the level of hiring itself presents multiple benefits to the organization concerned.

1. The decision of hiring individuals is based on well-researched assessment tools, which show a strong correlation between scores on the assessment and performance in leadership roles. Hence, the organization is trusted to make a sound hiring decision.

2. The assessment can throw up some very insightful data with respect to the candidate’s strengths and opportunities keeping in mind a specific role. By providing a career graph to the individual along with a development plan at the time of joining, the organization provides confidence to the candidate that the right efforts are being invested in making him or her successful.

3. Many times hiring technically sound individuals may prove costly at a later stage when the individual is being considered for promotion. Because candidates have been accepted purely on the basis of their technical or behavioral skills, they may not necessarily make the best people managers. Assessing candidates on their leadership capacities helps organizations in planning ahead of time.

CASE IN POINT

Our client, part of the USD 3 billion Indian conglomerate, is engaged in sales and servicing of luxury cars through state-of-the-art showrooms in Southern India. It is one of the world's leading premium brands and is amongst the most admired car brands across the world.

To achieve its vision to acquire and maintain global leadership position in the automobile space, the Company recognized the significance of having the right leaders spearheading the business. Through ongoing and structured deliberations with the Capability Building and Senior Leadership Team, and in partnership with InspireOne, the company came up with a rigorous Leadership Assessment exercise for the hiring of college graduates.

The hires were selected to go through an internally-led Leadership Acceleration Program (LAP) which focused on a fast-track job rotation program of 9-12 months. By the end of the program, these newly hired recruits were designated leadership positions with teams reporting into them. 

Hiring Process:

The Company’s selection panel visited tier 1 and tier 2 Indian business schools for a pre-placement interview. All students who choose to go through the selection procedure went through 5 stages and candidates were filtered as they moved through stages:

Analytical Test: This was a short paper and pen test, which contained 10 questions on Logical Reasoning. A time-bound test, approximately 1 minute was designated to solve each question. All students who cleared this test were moved to the next level.

Group Discussion: A case study of the companywas provided to a group of 6-7 candidates. The candidates were judged on how they were able to take decisions as the CEO of the organization around various situational challenges that cropped up in year 2006.

Personal Application: Candidates were asked to fill a personal application form which provided an insight into their personality. The questions pertained to the personal experiences that the candidate may have gone through. 

Personal Interview: The selection panel conducted a one-on-one interview with the candidate for roughly 20-30 minutes. The candidate was primarily judged on the 4 E's i.e. positive Energy, ability to Enthuse, Edge, Execution power and passion.

Evaluation of Leadership Capacity: This was the last and most critical filter to determine selection of a candidate. In line with the vision to select future leaders, the company partnered with InspireOne. The objective of this online questionnaire was to identify the natural leadership orientations, leadership styles and career anchors of the candidate. Based on the outcome of the questionnaire, the selection panel took a decision of 'hire' or 'no hire'.

Customization:

Keeping in mind the values and ethos that the organization aimed to promote as part of its culture, the team came up with following 13 behavioral requirements for a candidate to be selected.

1. Self motivation

2. Execution orientation

3. Analytical

4. Ability to work under pressure

5. Goal orientation

6. Passion to serve

7. Nurture Talent

8. Creativity

9. Accountability & Ownership

10. Collaboration

11. Decisiveness

12. Passionate

13. Seeks Quality

To meet the requirements of the organization, we mapped the leadership orientations to each behavioral requirement. A measurement scale was designed in order to evaluate the candidate on the 13 parameters. Each parameter could gain a maximum of 5 points for a candidate. Hence, a candidate could score a maximum of 65 on the overall scale. Defined by the purpose of the exercise and the background of the candidates, the range defined for hire was approximately 15 - 25.

In addition to the measurement outcomes, we analyzed the report and provided a brief summary for each candidate based on his or her strengths and areas of development. The scoring and analysis was conducted keeping in mind the specific role that the candidate was being considered for.

Assessing success:

Using the aforementioned assessment process, the organization has hired 56% of the candidates from the total applied. In order to assess the success the organization may be recommended to use the following measures:

Performance appraisal data at the end of the Leadership Acceleration Program is an effective way to determine accuracy of the results from the assessment exercise. 100% candidates must successfully complete the Leadership Acceleration Program and are deemed ready to take on leadership responsibilities.

Engagement surveys conducted within respective teams after 6 months of taking on leadership role should produce sufficient data.

Minimal attrition rate from amongst the candidates hired through the new assessment exercise to be documented on yearly basis.

The Seven Deadly Pitfalls in Designing Sales Training Programs | InspireOne

Different organizations have different focus, mindset, set-up & budgets for sales training depending upon various factors like their industry, turnover, business strategy, outlook/philosophy of senior management, etc. They may or may not have a dedicated training & development department to identify sales training needs & conduct sales training accordingly. Irrespective of this fact, there are certain pitfalls that organizations need to be aware of & avoid, while designing sales training programs. This is very imperative to ensure effectiveness of the training programs & to get the maximum bang for each penny spent on them.

Here are the top seven pitfalls that we feel are critical to watch out for & avoid, while designing sales training.

Pitfall 1: Not having a clear and easily definable application or relevance to the training

Many organizations fall into the trap of looking to conduct sales training based on the current fad in the industry led by some newfound simulation, game, sales process, model or formula. This propensity reflects a herd mentality rather than a training program based on a real business need aimed at achieving a real business & learning objective. Sure, new developments in sales training might be useful, but organizations should judiciously evaluate if they are really relevant for their business & industry and then go for them. After all, the concepts & skills from the training must find application in your business & give your sales people some real firepower to make better deals.

Pitfall 2: Only the frontline sales team needs training

Many organizations are of the belief that the frontline sales teams, who go out into the market & personally interact with prospects/clients, should be the recipient of most and in some cases, all the sales training. Sure, the frontline sales team needs to have a very high degree of selling skills as they personally are in contact with the market and would have a very high level of positive and /or negative impact on the business. Having said that, the importance of continually training the immediate supervisors of the frontline teams and others in sales leadership role cannot be overlooked. As they are ultimately responsible for the performance of the frontline teams, the skills needed for motivating, coaching, leading & driving productivity through teams need to be regularly honed. Also, the people in managerial roles play a big role in ensuring the application of training by the frontline team on day to day basis.

Pitfall 3: Our sales team is already trained & evolved and therefore doesn’t need a structured training program anymore.

True, your sales teams might have highly experienced sales people, might have undergone sales training in the past, come from reputed institutes and performed satisfactorily so far. All this, unfortunately, cannot guarantee success in the future as well. With the changing dynamics of the business, the fluctuating economic scenarios & ever increasing competition, all the sales people need continual “up-gradation” of knowledge & skills. Also it is often seen that many sales people have very sound technical expertise but lack the selling skills to make the sale. Lastly, research on effective sales people has shown that the performance of a sales person is also due to several external factors which are either unknown to the sales person, or worse, rejected by him or her as not important. Either ways, this spells trouble if undetected as the sales person in question takes undue credit while not letting his or her weakness come to the forefront to get developed.

Pitfall 4: That’s how we did it till now

Many organizations are comfortable following the historical practices for conducting sales training programs like following the same set of training calendar programs year on year, following the same training methodologies, etc. With changing times & business complexity, they need to be flexible & change with time to do what is required currently to best equip their sales teams.

Pitfall 5: Concluding once the workshop is over

Many organizations do not have a clear plan and/or commitment to ensure the sales team is applying the learning post a well-structured workshop. The real business impact from a sales training comes from its application more than the workshop itself.

Pitfall 6: Only thing that matters is how the trainer is delivering during the workshop.

No doubt about the importance of the quality of the trainer & his or her way of facilitating a workshop. But it is also very critical to ensure that a thorough pre-workshop diagnostics & customization is done by the trainer to understand the ultimate business objective to be achieved from the training, the dynamics of the company & the sales team, etc to ensure effective delivery of the workshop.

Pitfall 7: Cramming too many modules or topics to be addressed in a single workshop

Organizations should resist the temptation of cramming too many topics to be covered in a workshop as it can have serious implications on the quality of learning by the sales person. “Lets add Negotiations Skills as well” can be extremely detrimental and counterproductive if the two day program’s key objective is to develop better listening and probing skills among sales people. A good way to ensure this pitfall is avoided is to look at your sales process and identify all the challenges across the sales process, which occur to make a successful sale. Thereafter, prioritize them in terms of the following categories to conclude on what can wait or be deferred for later development:

Applicability – the number of sales people with this challenge

Degree of Acceptance – how many people believe in the criticality of the challenge?

Business impact – What happens if this challenge is not overcome?

Ripple Effect – How early in the sales process does this challenge occur and does it impact give rise to any other challenge

Developing your sales force on a regular basis can have a substantial positive impact on company performance provided it is properly designed and the above pitfalls are avoided.

Have you come across any other pitfall that has limited the success of a sales training initiative? We would love to hear your perspectives and how you overcame those pitfalls.

Integrating Technology with Assessments | InspireOne

Numbers are honest. Sometimes, brutally so. Anything that can be measured is mapped to a number. Right from the number of man hours needed to bring a software project to completion to the number of productive hours spent by a unit of the organization. However, there is one thing that numbers can’t do by themselves – make decisions. That job, thankfully, still rests with people. Imagine a world where the right people are armed with the right numbers. Imagine a world where the honesty of numbers meets the intuition of man. Imagine a world where you have all the information you need to quantify things like employee productivity. Our assessment tools bring this world as close to reality as is possible in this day and age.

One thing all managers, recruiters and executives complain about is the fact that their decisions are made based on very abstract and often intangible and unquantifiable attributes. The gap between feeling and fact, intuition and reality is what our assessment tools seek to fill. Let us look at recruitment, for example. It is pretty obvious that the quality of your organization would be a direct function of the quality of recruits. Recruiters often face one glaring problem – how do we make sure that he/she is the right person for the job, which is a big deal, given that that’s what their job is – to find the right people. The first step towards understanding whether an individual fits the requirement is toassess the individual.

Humans assess and size each other up very quickly. We’ve developed immense stereotypes about each other that have grown over thousands of years. However, human assessment based on human perception can be extremely dangerous due to the perception being impacted by elements such as bias. Given the way things are at this point of time and given the fact that we’re unlikely to nominate a machine as CEO/president in the near future, it would be safe to assume that we can’t change ‘who’ makes those assessments. What we can change, is ‘how’. Assessment tools drive out human perception and bias and replace it with a set of objective indicators. You could assess whether or not a candidate is fit for a job by looking at his EQ or personality tests. You still get to make the decision. But you now have the ability to make an informed and objective decision.

You could argue that standardized as well as customized tests have been around since the beginning of time. You could also argue that we have always used some objective measures to arrive at decisions. So what’s different about assessment tools these days? There’s a huge list, actually. But let us start out with a couple of benefits you stand to gain out of these tools. To start with, you could actually conduct these tests online. Great, but that only makes it easier for collection of data. It isn’t building any intelligence into our systems, you may ask. The answer to that is simple, really. It isn’t just collection of information that’s easy, but also storage and retrieval. Online tests enable you to create huge repositories of data – which you could use for modelling something, or even use as a baseline for a different entity.

The biggest benefit of collecting such information or running such tests online is the fact that these tests can then be analyzed via a variety of techniques, which can again be customized. You can slice and dice across data, look for outliers, look at measures of central tendency and what not! This information can lend several perspectives and would form an immense repository that would hold you in good stead later. What’s more, given the fact that we’re moving into a cloud based environment, all this information is stored on the cloud, making it accessible to any place with an internet connection! Have multiple branches that span across continents? No problem, as long as you have an ISP who is willing to give you an IP address that you can use to get on to the internet. If you can read this blog, you can access your data. As simple as that.

Most organizations are reluctant to move from traditional assessment methodologies onto more tool and automation based methodologies. This is mostly because  there’s a huge paradigm shift in the manner in which this information is collected and analyzed. One thing that most organizations fail to realize is the power of sample spaces. With online assessments, you can increase your sample space massively, especially in a cloud-based environment. A greater sample space would mean that you have more data to work with and this brings down the probability of surprises (read shocks) that would arise as a consequence of your decisions.

To sum all of it up, it does appear that the future of decision making lies via assessment tools. They act as great enablers and ensure that your decisions are tied to something tangible, something quantifiable and something measurable. Imagine a cricket match where the teams don’t really know what their scores are. They’re just playing along with some vague idea of what they need to do in order to seal victory. Contrast this with the bare minimum information that you would need in order to succeed – runs, wickets and balls. Information is truly paramount. It manifests itself as data that can be mined to create new information. This new information can be fed back into systems and results can be observed. These results go back into the system again as further information. Once you set the information cycle in place, you can rest assured that you will be making decisions based on observable, well defined parameters. Information systems have revolutionized the way we view data and make decisions. The world is headed towards a second IT revolution. The world is moving to a space where data can be accessed anytime, anywhere and from any device. The world is moving towards the cloud. You should too.

Top 3 myths of Employee Engagement | InspireOne

Doing more with less has become familiar to many of us—and our workforce is no exception. The World Bank estimates global GDP grew 2.3% in 2012, with expected continued moderate growth in 2013 (The World Bank, 2013). Much of this growth is driven by the human side of the equation. Between 2011 and 2012, 90% of countries saw an increase in productivity i.e., GDP per capita (IMF World Economic Database, 2013). Since 1993, revenue per employee has seen a 3.2% compound annual growth rate compared with little to no growth in revenue per cost of goods sold or per invested capital (CEB, 2013). These facts illustrate what most leaders know: companies (and countries) should be able to do more with the employees they have. Employee engagement is increasingly seen as a fundamental mechanism through which to attain superior organizational performance (IBM, 2013). Fundamentally, organizations can do more with more engaged employees. Presented in this report are insights into the global state of employee engagement based on one of the biggest employee research databases ever assembled. These insights help provide a roadmap for driving productivity through engagement of people. Armed with these big data, we identified three key findings that can challenge some of the commonly held beliefs concerning employee engagement and leadership:

• Neither the sky nor employee engagement is falling. Contrary to popular reports, in almost each country, our big data indicate employee engagement was up in 2012 compared to both 2010 and 2011.

• People join companies, but leave managers companies. The adage that people leave managers is not supported by big data. Although managers play an important role in supporting the engagement and retention of employees, they cannot go it alone. Their senior leaders should step up and take responsibility for delivering on what has been consistently the most important driver of employee engagement over the last five years—communicating a motivating vision of their organization’s future and inspiring confidence in their employees.

• The economic crisis should not be used a scapegoat. Compared to 2008, senior leaders’ ability to inspire confidence and motivate employees towards a shared vision was rated more positively in 2009, at the peak of economic turmoil. Ratings generally remained consistent or actually improved in 2010 and 2011. It was only in 2012, three years after the crisis, that confidence in leadership took a notable hit. Further, senior leaders were rated similarly or more positively in mature, stable and even economically challenged markets. These data suggest the economic crisis should not be used to explain poor perceptions of senior leader performance.

In addition to sharing the evidence for these myth-busting insights, this report will also give leaders valuable guidance into their role in promoting employee engagement to build organizational success.

For companies to be successful, employees must be engaged to perform, innovate and drive outcomes. This report will help organizations proactively manage employee engagement activities for future productivity by drawing attention away from what matters less—the economic climate and direct managers—and focusing on what matters more—visionary leadership.

Five ways to use Assessments more effectively

With analytics and measurements coming into the fore in HR, it’s little wonder that assessing employees has taken so much mind space of HR leaders. The benefits cannot be discarded – from hiring the right person in the right role to identifying development requirements for your high potentials. If well used, they are said to have no adverse impact and yet deliver results that predict (not foretell) your employee’s performance on the job.

So what are ways in which to make the use of assessments more effective in your organization?

Here are five for starters:

Involve the line manager. It cannot be over emphasized but assessments that are designed for business leaders would be better suited to deliver results that business leaders require. By starting with the output in mind, involve your business stakeholders to agree on a set of outcomes using which they feel comfortable to take relevant actions (for hiring and / or development) that support operational decision-making.

Don’t let go there; consult with them on the first few process steps to get them to become more comfortable with your assessment process and become your ‘Assessment Champions’. Before you know it, they’ll be speaking fluent HR!

Automate the administration process as much as possible. ‘As much as possible’ is key. Oftentimes, organizations continue to hold on to earlier process steps, such as first level interview screening, even after using Assessments predominantly to screen applicants early on in the process.  Similarly, while identifying high potentials, managers can often bypass assessment results with their developed bias. Failing to trust the validity of the assessment process is a key reason why many well-intentioned assessment initiatives fail.

When using assessments for recruitment, also look at using the data to develop the person during on boarding. According to Aberdeen Research[1], 75% of Best in Class companies use Pre-hire assessments for creating targeted development plans during post hire. That translates into a 91% retention of employees in the first year by Best in Class companies versus others.

Beyond selection, there’s prioritization as well. Oftentimes, hiring managers do not have depth in their pipeline to effectively use assessments for selection. In such practical situations, its important to still prioritize the candidate pool for interviewing. This will ensure that you capitalize on the probability of hiring a high performer and also not lose out on the possibility of selecting a trainable candidate who can over-achieve by stretching himself/herself.

Better, more informed sourcing based on assessment data. An established assessment process can work wonders to your sourcing strategy. You can generate enough data to create a detailed DNA profile of a high performer, which you can then work backwards to identify sourcing channels that provide you those characteristics in future hires as well. This feedback loop also helps recruiters to constantly calibrate their assessment process and make it relevant for the future.

These are just five approaches to effectively use assessments out of many more possible approaches. Do you have any such approaches that you recently used? Tell us how you used assessments innovatively in your organization and we’ll profile your work in our upcoming U&I quarterly newsletter.