I’m pleased and honored to announce that Great Lakes Profiles, an authorized partner for Wiley’s PXT Select, has now added Everything DiSC®, another one of Wiley’s excellent products, to our portfolio of leading edge assessments.
Everything DiSC® is a personal development assessment that measures an individual’s tendencies and priorities. It’s designed to support one’s understanding of his or her work-related behaviors, the behaviors of others, and how to apply this knowledge in work related situations.
Currently there are 6 core assessments in the Everything DiSC® suite and a 7th, an Agile EQ tool combing DiSC with Emotional Intelligence, will be added later in the year. The measurement of a participant’s DiSC® style is the same across all profiles, but the information presented to the participant in his or her report will be specific to that application. The 6 core assessments are:
Workplace – Workplace is the most broad-based assessment and is appropriate for anyone in an organization to take regardless of title or role. People learn their DiSC styles, understand others’ styles, and learn how to work more effectively together.
Work of Leaders – Splits the work of leaders into 3 categories: Vision, Alignment, and Execution. Using the self-ratings of 18 different traits, participants are taught why some leadership behaviors come naturally to them and others require more deliberate effort.
Sales – Helps sales people or people in customer facing roles understand their sales style, how to read customers’ buying styles, and then adapt their style to meet a customer’s needs.
Management – Designed to help managers understand their management styles, learn how to read the styles of the people they manage, and adapt their styles to manage more effectively.
Productive Conflict – Designed to help people reflect on how they react in conflict situations, understand the automatic thoughts that trigger destructive conflict, and learn to reframe those thoughts to create a productive response.
363 For Leaders – Combines DiSC with a 360 assessment and includes selectable comments for the raters rather than open-ended comments. It also gives leaders a framework for understanding leadership best practices as well as providing tips and guidance for improving leadership effectiveness., etc.). Appropriate measures for sales performance may also include calls made per unit of time, customer service measures, or revenue growth. Performance in other jobs may not be as easy to measure. For example, what are the metrics for a top performing social worker? Or, how do we measure performance of a researcher in a pharmaceutical company where 20 years of research by 50 people may go into the development of a single new drug?
Often, when faced with the task of identifying performance measures in a field with soft outputs or very long-term outputs, many managers fall back on personal likes and dislikes, personality conflicts or lack of conflicts, or other measures with little relationship to their company’s goals, profitability, or long-term success.
Recognition of these challenges has resulted in attempts to make evaluation more objective. A favorite tactic in these settings is supervisory rating scales whereby supervisors rate incumbents on one or more dimensions thought critical to performance on a numerical scale that may run from three to 10 points. The outcome of such ratings may look objective as we tend to associate decimal numbers with objectivity; e.g., “She scored a 2.7 of a possible three!” Unfortunately, an analysis of range compression (where everyone scores in a one-point range of a possible three) and interrater reliability raises serious questions about the validity and utility of these procedures.
Bottom line – if the process of selecting criteria is flawed, the outcome will be equally flawed with serious consequences for both the organization and the employees affected. So, what can a manager do to avoid these pitfalls and select top performers on the basis of specific, quantifiable, measurable, and objective criteria? Fortunately, since the issues in selecting top performers for job fit assessment are essentially the same as those surrounding the entire topic of performance appraisal, current literature is rich with sources offering guidance. One resource is Douglas W. Hubbard’s book, How to Measure Anything – Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. Another source would, of course, be Great Lakes Profiles, Inc. since we’ve been helping organizations identify those critical criteria since 1991.