Fri, 12/18/2015 - 13:44

Why do you consider your assessment and decision support system to be potentially the most powerful management tool available?    (or sometimes, it's worded, How can you say that…?)

 

If you deploy this system inside your organization, you give your organization  the capability to understand your candidates, your employees and   your teams.  The capability to understand could actually  have no impact on your organization but if you use this capability, this is incredibly powerful stuff.  It continually, every hour of each day,  impacts an organization's performance through the ongoing decisions of its managers, their actions, their effectiveness and the engagement of the employees.

 

By providing validated data on 175 traits, matching it to job-specific research and displaying it in formats to assist in predicting performance in specific jobs,  hiring, management, engagement, team building and succession planning.

 

Fri, 12/04/2015 - 11:47

The recently developed capability to accurately predict whether someone will be a high, average or low performer on specific jobs is a very powerful management tool.  Increasingly,  it is one that is increasingly impacting the performance of organizations across the globe. The foundation for this capability rests in the ability to quickly profile a person's motivations, natural tendencies, preferences and attitudes along with their  knowledge and experience requirements and then relating  these to a validated job specific performance benchmark.  

 

If you can accurately predict the performance of managers and employees in thousands of different jobs,  it makes sense that this underlying data is highly causal in its impact on performance.  Indeed, thousands of organizations, small and large,  are now using Job Success Analysis profiles to make key hiring decisions because it enables them to greatly increase their success at choosing high performers.

 

Mon, 10/19/2015 - 20:12

Many culture (or engagement) initiatives have little impact because they are focused on a one-time event or perhaps a series of  educational or awareness activities that often lack focus.   At the time, it feels like the right thing to do and of course, they typically further interpersonal understanding and internal communication,  however, things largely very soon revert back to "the way we were".  

 

Wed, 09/16/2015 - 14:57

The Harrison Assessment reveals insights on what drives behaviors and how we typically act under normal stress and under extreme stress.  It also reveals how likely we are to see certain "strong" behaviors or imbalances.  During the debrief process and even more so, in executive team building sessions using these tools, we've continually learn lessons in how to improve and sustain a high performing team.

 

Another lesson learned… Communication tendencies and what causes them are typically misunderstood which causes conflict , avoidance behaviors and an inability to work as a team.  When I discussed this individually with executives, I often get a recoiled response as if to say this is elementary, but after they think about, they realize perhaps their reaction is a bit elementary if not inaccurate. Let me illustrate what I mean through an example.

 

Fri, 08/21/2015 - 11:30

Here I will discuss, at a high level, how you understand your organization's shared values and beliefs and then use this understanding to help create a higher performing and more inspired and engaged  organization. Culture, as we see it, is the shared values and beliefs of an organization that determine much of its success.  This is, in large part true, because culture largely determines the quality and quantity of discretionary effort both by managers and by employees. Culture, however, is one of those concepts that's been pulled, twisted, flipped and turned inside out in good part because it is so important to an organizations success. Although I guess that depends on what  twisted or pulled version you are considering..  

 

A large part of culture is determined by the attitudes (a function of deeply held beliefs), motivations, natural tendencies. work and task preferences… of all the members of the organization. The rest is determined by the key leaders and the policies, rituals and behaviors that have evolved.

 

Tue, 07/28/2015 - 13:20

When you are hiring and managing millenials, what are you going to be dealing with?

Are they really different,  somewhat different-  what is the pattern of variation?    Should they be managed differently?  Do they have the same values and motivations as their bosses? .... Here are some perspectives.

 

Mon, 01/19/2015 - 19:58

An Interview with Dr. Dan Harrison on a Disruptive Technology...

Using Paradox Methodology and SmartQuestionnaire Technology to dramatically improve the Hiring / Selection processes

Thu, 05/01/2014 - 14:54

What  does people optimization entail? In some of our discussions and feedback on our website, we've received comments along the lines, "You can't optimize people..." To which our response is, REALLY!  Further, we say, if you are a manager over a group of people and you don't have a mindset where you are consciously trying get the most from or make the most of the productivity of your people, then you are probably a bad manager.  Some are hung up by making some value judgment on the "act of optimizing" but the reality is, an effective leader and an inspiring work culture both can create the conditions for optimizing your people, that is optimizing your productivity, innovativeness, teamwork, efficiency etc...

Optimizing  the performance of people in organizations involves such things as the following:

Fri, 01/11/2013 - 10:41

The Gallup organization recently did a study that concluded that disengaged (i.e. unenthusiastic, unmotivated etc..) employees cost, on average, an additional 33% of the money spent on salaries.  That is,  if you’re a small business with a $1 million dollar payroll, you are incurring a $300,000+ cost burden if you do not have highly engaged employees.

How do you get there?

First of all, you have to have an understanding of what engagement is and how you measure it? Engagement is a condition in the culture of an organization by which your employees ..

  • Derive considerable meaning from their work,
  • Take the initiative to solve problems as they develop
  • Take the initiative to continually improve
  • Have strong meaningful relationships at work. Not only do they  feel positive about their co-workers and managers but express positivity in their day to day behaviors

To achieve engagement takes four things:

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"The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated the costs to replace an employee to be approximately 1/3 their annual salary; but when you start looking at the impact of hiring the wrong employee and having to replace them, some studies say 2.5 times annual earnings, some 4 times and some even higher." AGILEdge