Tag Archive: Leadership Development

  1. How Can Talent Assessments Connect People to their Passions (And Help Your Company in the Process)

    With so much technology on the market and so many exciting avenues to pursue, HR is in a position to impact the business like never before. The challenge is not, what can we do, but rather, how much can we do to drive the business forward? This will depend on alignment with business strategy and smart HR tech investments.

    Organizations are taking a new approach to measuring things like quality of hire and employee engagement. New technology makes it possible for companies to track where employees are spending time, how they’re performing job tasks, and what their potential for success is – today and in the future.

    Some of the most exciting trends in HR tech are in the vein of discovering hidden talent, connecting people with their passions, and hiring not just to fill a role, but to set someone on a trajectory for lifelong success.

    Thanks to rapid innovation in the market, we’re seeing an explosion of new releases and platforms that are helping to turn these trends into tangibles. Even assessment software, which hasn’t traditionally been the flashiest piece of technology on the market, is becoming a game-changer for HR and employees everywhere.

    Here are 3 ways talent assessments will make your initiatives – and your employees – more successful:

    Find every person’s best fit

    Often, talent assessments are used in hiring as a way to measure fit to the job or fit to the company (or both!). By assessing hard skills, soft skills, or cognitive abilities, hiring teams are armed with insight on a candidate’s potential for success.

    Recruiters and managers can also start to see how a potential hire might fit on the team, as well as skills gaps they might be able to fill by adding this candidate versus another.

    If you’re hiring for a sales position, for example, an assessment will tell you how a candidate ranks on must-have soft skills like work intensity and follow through. An assessment might also tell you how strong he or she is in sales knowledge, such as prospecting and overcoming objections.

    Ideally, the assessment would then roll up the results into one overall score, with the ability to drill down into each different skill set.

    But say a candidate isn’t a great fit for the job they applied to. In a tight talent market, employers can’t afford to throw out applications. Rather than simply tagging someone as a poor fit, new assessment software allows recruiters to match candidates to other open positions in their company.

    This way, recruiters can make use of every candidate in their applicant pool, fill more jobs, and help more people improve their livelihood. It’s a win-win all around.

    Discover pathways to future roles

    Once you’ve got the right people in the right roles, you can sit back and relax. Just kidding! As good practitioners know, hiring is just the beginning of an employee’s *hopefully long and productive* journey with your company.

    This is where the pre-hire assessment comes back into play. One assessment can help guide the next several years of an employee’s journey. That’s why many employers see it as “the data that keeps on giving” – it continues providing value long after the hiring decision has been made.

    First, assessment results can be used as onboarding guides, helping new hires get up to speed quickly based on their strengths and opportunities in the role. Then, after ramp up, assessments can help employees and their managers see what’s next.

    Say your sales hire is killing it – hitting quota every quarter and helping the entire team succeed. She’s raised her hand for a sales manager position, and looking at performance, she’s the most deserving of the promotion.

    But, leading a sales team requires a very different skill set than what’s she’s using today. Your top salesperson is about to move into untested waters, and if she fails, you could lose her for good. Using an assessment, you can see her potential for success in a management role, along with development suggestions to make the transition easier.

    Together, the salesperson, her manager, and others from L&D can identify an employee’s ideal career path and steps to get there. The assessment creates the perfect scenario where promotions are based on skills, not just performance, and every employee has the opportunity to grow.

    Illuminate hidden skills and strengths

    Similar to promotions, decisions about who is considered a ‘high potential’ are often subjective. In many cases, putting someone’s name in the hat for a hi-po program depends on how important development is to a given manager.

    In a system like this, great people get overlooked. And isn’t HR’s goal to engage and retain as many employees as possible, not just a select few?

    Assessments can improve how you select people for hi-po programs, and thanks to tailored development plans that now come with assessment results, you can drastically scale participation in hi-po programs.

    Equally important, assessments can help re-define what you mean by ‘high potential.’ Does high potential mean potential for leadership in your company? If so, what are the mission-critical skills and competencies your leadership teams have today, and what will they need in the future?

    Assessments give you instant insight into the skills and competencies that matter most in your business, ensuring that no one is overlooked. You may find more than one diamond in the rough. Perhaps a quiet contributor today becomes a pivotal future leader.

    So, rather than let an employee’s potential wither away – or worse! – lose them to a competitor, you can use assessments to discover hidden talent and tips the odds in your favor.

    START YOUR JOURNEY WITH ASSESSMENTS TODAY

  2. Do These 6 Traits Really Make Men More Promotable?

    Personality data reveals slight differences between men and women, but not enough to explain the gender gap, especially at the C-suite.

    Nearly a decade after Sheryl Sandberg’s famous TED talk on the lack of women in leadership positions, we continue to see more men than women make it to top. According to a 2018 McKinsey&Company report, only

    • 38% of managers are women
    • 29% of VPs are women
    • 22% of executives are women

    At the executive table, men still outnumber women 8:2.

    The easy explanation is to say that women drop out of the workforce to be caretakers at home. While this may have been the case in past generations, it simply isn’t true today. The McKinsey&Company report shows that only 2% of women plan to leave to their careers to focus on family.

    Ambition isn’t the problem either, as 68% of women want to be promoted to the next level. Not only that, women negotiate for promotions just as often as men, according to McKinsey&Company.

    So, if women want to be promoted, they’re negotiating for promotions, and they’re not leaving their careers to focus on family, what’s holding us back?

    Are there differences in personality that can explain why more men are promoted to executive positions than women?

    First, let’s look at why people get promoted. Being assertive, competitive, and taking risks are often cited as factors that increase one’s chances of getting promoted. These are also behaviors that stereotypically male. On the flip side, being accommodating, reserved, and striving for perfection – behaviors that could potentially derail an opportunity for promotion – are stereotypically female.

    When we look at innate styles, do these stereotypes hold true? Are men really more likely to possess career-making personality traits?

    To understand exactly where the differences in our styles lie, we reviewed assessment data from 850,000 men and women in senior level roles across industries, focusing on 6 personality traits that strongly influence promotability:

    1. Accommodation.
    2. Assertiveness.
    3. Cautious Thinking, which can influence our willingness to take risks.
    4. Competitiveness.
    5. Detail Interest, which can influence perfectionism.
    6. Social Restraint/Reserved.

    While results do show some truth in gender stereotypes, differences on key personality traits are not significant enough to keep women from climbing the ranks.

    It’s not surprising to see that women score higher on traits that are stereotypically female, like accommodation and social restraint. It’s also not surprising to see that men score higher on traits that are stereotypically male, like assertiveness and competitiveness. On cautious thinking (a proxy for risk taking) and detail interest (a proxy for perfectionism), however, men and women score exactly the same.

    What are the implications of these trait scores? For starters, being higher on accommodation could lead women to say yes to more non-promotable tasks, such as organizing events or volunteering for internal committees. And, being lower on assertiveness could keep women from offering their ideas or asking for what they want. But, with the exception of competitiveness, these are differences of less than 10% – while the gap between men and women at the C-level is more than 5X that.

    You could say socialization is to blame. Modern culture, progressive as it may be, is still steeped in a legacy of traditionally-defined gender roles. Men are ‘allowed,’ and often encouraged, to be assertive and competitive. Meanwhile, women are expected to be moderators, peacemakers, and and put others’ needs first. Those are the messages we receive through childhood, adolescence, and into our careers.

    And yet – in spite of all this socialization – the personality differences between men and women are surprisingly small.

    To truly level the playing field, we as women can empower ourselves in areas where men have an edge. Yes, men and women are socialized differently, and, in general, we exhibit traits such as assertiveness and competitiveness differently. But that’s not to say we don’t have it in us. These are gaps we can close, and small gaps at that.

    The road to the C-suite for women (and for men!) starts with self-awareness. Then the work of developing healthy leadership habits can begin.

    The bottom line is this:

    If there’s no innate disadvantage, and we perform just as well as men once promoted, then all we have to overcome is tradition. And we’re making progress every day. So keep pushing forward!

    Olivia Salas

    Written by Olivia Salas, M.A.
    Vice President of Solution Delivery, Outmatch

  3. New Sales Managers: 3 Reasons Why They Fail

    Great salespeople don’t always make great sales managers. Research reveals why many of these promotions fail, and 3 competency gaps that stand in the way of success.

    When a new sales manager position is available, many times the promotion goes to a top-performing salesperson. But, success in a current role does not guarantee success at the next level. That’s why 40% of promotions fail, according to our partners at Pinsight.

    The risk is two-fold: Promoting the wrong person puts an ill-equipped leader in charge, and at the same time, removes a top performer from the sales team. A near coin-flip success rate isn’t good enough to gamble on. You need a way to tip the odds in your favor.

    At Outmatch, we assess over 50,000 salespeople and sales managers per year, and the assessment data reveals 3 major competency gaps between the roles. These are the areas where the biggest shifts must occur before great salespeople can become great sales managers:

    Communication style: too assertive.

    Assertiveness is a personality trait that gives salespeople their edge. It helps them prospect, pursue the right people, stay persistent, and close deals. But for sales managers, high assertiveness can be a liability. The natural tendency to dominate conversations may prevent sales managers from listening to the needs of their team.

    Temper your assertiveness: When communicating with others, new sales managers should practice active listening, ask questions before giving their opinion, and remember to confront the issue rather than the person they’re talking to.

    Strong at delivering, not driving results.

    The shift from delivering to driving results is a challenging one. Successful salespeople are used to doing things themselves, while sales managers are responsible for helping others achieve their goals. Sales managers must be able to slow down, see the bigger picture, and ensure that the entire team is on track.

    Focus less on details, and slow your work pace slightly: New managers should schedule strategic breaks to reset and remind themselves of the bigger picture. To avoid getting bogged down in details, a good question to ask is, “How is this task contributing to the overall goal?”

    Organized, but not highly strategic.

    Successful salespeople are pros at managing themselves, their tasks, and their time. But at a strategic planning level, sales managers must think realistically and carefully – two traits that probably weren’t needed earlier in their careers, and can even get in the way of strong sales performance. Once promoted, however, these traits become crucial.

    Cultivate realistic and strategic thinking: Before jumping into action, new sales managers should pause to ask questions and evaluate options. It’s also helpful to identify 2-3 great decision makers to run ideas by.

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    Knowing these competency gaps gives sales leaders the power to be proactive. You can assess these competencies to make better promotion decisions, create targeted leadership development plans, and increase your sales manager success rate. To learn more about what makes salespeople successful, check out Charm, Myths, and the Secret to Better Sales Teams:

  4. Developing the Next Generation of Leaders at HCA Healthcare

    Leadership Development in Healthcare

    Holly Bunn, Director of Leadership and Organization Development at HCA Healthcare shares her strategy for getting leaders to their highest level of potential in the fastest way possible.

    Organizations in and outside of healthcare are investing more in leadership development each year, while confidence in leadership is declining. About $13 billion is spent annually on leadership development, but only 6% of leaders say they are confident that their leadership pipeline is ‘very ready,’ and more than half report a weak succession plan, or nothing at all in place.

    This alarming breakdown between investment and return is challenging organizations to think differently about leadership development. HCA Healthcare is one of these organizations. According to Holly Bunn, Director of Leadership and Organization Development, the most effective way to empower your leaders is not with a one-size-fits-all course, but with a customizable programs that align an individual’s needs with the organization’s curriculum.

    We provide a development report to everyone early on in their career so that when they’re selecting a professional development course or mentorship program, they understand their current strengths and the areas they may want to focus on first. That way, they can reach their long-term goals, and we can see strong leadership and success in their trajectory.”

  5. Leadership Development Programs

    Strategies for Smarter Investments in Leadership Development

    U.S. companies spend nearly $14 billion annually in leadership development. However, only 6% of leaders say they’re confident that their leadership pipeline is ‘very ready.’

    Why are leadership development programs not producing well-equipped leaders? This was the topic of a recent webinar featuring Martin Lanik, author of the business bestseller, The Leader Habit, and Sarah Glass, I/O and leadership development expert. After the presentation, Martin and Sarah answered audience questions on leadership development strategies, leveraging data for leadership development, and more. Learn more with Martin Lanik and Sarah Glass’ Q&A.

     

    1. What’s your recommendation on where to target leadership development? In the high potential population, or across all leaders?

    Martin: I recommend thinking of leadership development as a funnel. First, you want to assess everybody to get a basic understanding of what you’re working with, and establish a baseline. From there, you start prioritizing. Maybe there are some business needs that are more critical than others, and based on that, you identify in which areas (and in which people) you invest the most money.

    For example, you can use a leadership assessment across your leadership population, then use a leadership simulation to on a select group, and reserve your high-touch development strategies, such as executive coaching, for those employees who are most ready to take on critical leadership positions in your organization. The diagnostic piece is really key here. Without any assessment or analytics, you’re going in blind.

    2. In leadership development programs, what data is typically shared with the organization versus the individual?

    Sarah: Most of the organizations that we work with are leaning toward transparency. The idea is to share as much data as possible with the individual so that that person has an opportunity to understand their own baseline. Data that you share can help generate self-awareness, which is such a critical factor in a person’s development journey. There has to motivation and intent behind development, and the realization that it’s going to lead to a better result. Otherwise, you’re not going to see significant change.

    This doesn’t necessarily apply to something like a bench strength analysis, or anything with data in the aggregate that you’re using to make organizational decisions, but having data that’s visible at the individual level is definitely important.

    3. How much additional data do you get from a leadership simulation?

    Martin: The benefit of doing a simulation, compared to other types of assessments, is that you see the person in action. Rather than predicting, you’re actually witnessing their behavior. This is especially important when you think about a person’s readiness to move into a next-level position. The simulation allows you to place an engineer or a sales person, for example, into a management position—in a safe environment—and see how they tackle leadership challenges. This is as close as you can get to crystal ball—seeing how successful someone can be and how ready they are.

    To learn more about leadership development programs, and your organization’s role in helping leaders form positive leadership habits, watch Martin and Sarah’s webinar on-demand: Transforming Leadership Development From a Program to a Daily Practice