How Predictive Index helps you optimize talent from the inside out
Every company has business goals. Most have a strategic plan in place to achieve those goals, and even a financial plan to support that strategic plan. But what’s most often missing is a people plan or strategy.
If you don’t have the right people to execute your strategy or the right leadership in place to drive the strategy, how effective will your organization be in reaching your goals?
That’s what makes optimizing talent so important.
The cost of job misalignment
A person’s behavioral drives and cognitive ability are innate. Meaning, if you hire someone based only on their resume and an interview, you’re taking a risk and missing a key element: who they are. They might not end up fitting well into your existing team. The person and the role they were hired for might not end up being the right fit.
And there are costs to misalignment. High-performing employees who take on work that their misaligned team member should be doing are more at risk for turnover. And if job misalignment trickles down to affect your customers, then customer retention is at risk.
Even when trying to address observable performance issues, companies run into challenges. A one-size-fits-all approach to feedback, training and performance improvement plans doesn’t consider a person’s unique drives that make up who they are. Their fit with their job position, their manager, their team and the company culture all play a role in their performance and morale, and even the success of their team.
But if you have the tools to assess what drives someone and what their cognitive abilities are, you can tailor your approach to fit the person and help them truly reach their goals. Can they turn things around in their current role? If not, would they be a much better fit in another role or department?
Assessment tools are also invaluable in the hiring process. You can get the right people into the right positions by knowing what drives them and understanding the behavioral requirements of the job, thereby preventing misalignment in the first place.
To demonstrate, let’s dive into the Predictive Index®, a talent optimization platform.
The Predictive Index (PI)
PI has two key assessments. The first is a behavioral assessment that gives employers the understanding they need of an employee’s drives, needs, motivations and resulting behaviors. The second is a cognitive assessment that reveals a person’s ability to learn, adapt and process complex ideas.
Both assessments provide value in the hiring and retention of talent.
With the behavioral assessment, employers gain the ability to predict the behavior that will result from an employee’s drives.
With the cognitive assessment, employers can predict if an individual would be successful in a particular role by understanding their capacity to deal with the cognitive demands of a given position.
For current employees, the results of the two assessments can identify what fits and gaps employees have if they’re looking to get promoted or move into a new position. This is especially valuable in succession planning. Companies looking at their existing bench of talent to see who could succeed key leaders can make data-drive decisions to identify those with potential.
The assessments also can help managers tailor their management style to fit each team member. Managers can use information to understand what feedback their employees want to receive, how they prefer to receive it, what leadership potential they have, where they could move in their career, etc. A tailored management style helps build a more solid relationship with each employee, deliver more effective feedback and ensure greater retention.
For new hires, the assessments match up a specific job’s requirements to a candidate and identifies their fits and gaps, as well as their predictor of on-the-job success to help you make the best hiring decision.
Working as a team
Because working as a team is so critical to success, PI’s team features also enable you to optimize talent from the inside out. You can plot individual team members onto a team workstyles graph that displays what everyone’s natural styles are when it comes to overall working style, communication, decision-making and how they take action.
Whether you are creating a new team or optimizing an already intact team, you can assess and build the team designed to accomplish their charged goals. Need a team of entrepreneurs who are comfortable breaking the status-quo? Find individuals who are naturally innovative and agile. Need a detail-oriented team to maximize efficiency and consistency? Find individuals who are naturally geared towards process and precision.
You can also get ahead of engagement issues. Maybe there’s one person on the team whose work style or personality clashes with other members and is causing that person to become dissatisfied. If you can recognize this, you can bring solutions to the table. PI makes it much easier to identify potential engagement issues or issues that haven’t yet become apparent.
The results of talent optimization
The value of an assessment-driven people strategy to optimize talent applies to any organization, in every department, at every level. And the statistics are there to show the far-reaching effects it can have on organizations. With PI, companies were able to increase their sales team’s performance by 21%, save $90 million in revenue and reduce turnover by 38%.
Want to learn more about how you can optimize your organization’s talent from the inside out? Contact us for a free demo of the Predictive Index, or learn more about this platform here:
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Author(s)
Wipfli Editorial Team
