We collaborate with clients to help with hiring and development decisions for executives, sales reps, professionals and other key employees. Our emphasis is on matching the strengths of an individual to the specific needs of the role, the team, and the business in order to improve the effectiveness of the position. We focus on the psychological, strategic, and other behavioral science knowledge towards these ends.
Rather than using a “one right-way” success profile, we customize the selection criteria to address the current situations and dedicated directions at each level. We have found that coupling our experience with an emphasis on executive candor, self-responsibility, and collaboration is key to developing useful profiles. Often the process of collaborating on a profile can facilitate development of the relationship between consultant and executive–especially for new clients–improving the effectiveness of the project.
Our assessment reports can also provides information useful for work group adjustment and developmental planning for the organization, group, and candidate. We believe that agreed upon follow-through goals and plans substantially improves the success rate for new hires, as well as developmental candidates.
Our first step is to assess the needs of our client’s specific business strategies, job and interpersonal work group demands, and strategic direction. For example, organizations differ on their needed emphasis on different specific leadership practice and strengths to achieve it’s strategic goals, such as, to create a vision, develop the group, implement the vision, and achieve results. Different times and situations demand different types of leadership. We explore the details of what our clients have determined to be their priorities among these goals along with the practices that would work best in their situation.
We gather this strategic information in a variety of practical ways, including assessment tools, structured interviews of key executives and feedback sessions to get all on board. Each assessment is collaborative and organized to best to gain insight into the situation at hand: both current practices and needed practices to meet the organization’s strategic goals. One key output is a template of the personal characteristics being sought.
For the individual candidate we select a complement of tests best able determine immediate fit and potential for development to meet the predetermined institutional needs. Our assessment approach for both potential hires and develop candidates is almost always multidimensional. Accordingly, we can include various tests for leadership or problem-solving styles, personality, interpersonal needs, and intelligence. We are hesitant to rely on single dimension tests, as it the repetitive themes brought together to
Choosing the wrong person for a job or executive development is, of course, costly and frustrating. Most executives know the experience of bringing in a person who had significant success doing a similar job at another company, “great interviews” and all involved are excited by the hire. Then surprise: the short-term or intermediate performance is disappointing or disastrous. That is what a mismatch looks and feels like.
