Hay Group India Blog
Talent Q’s Dimensions and Elements were developed by Roger Holdsworth, a pioneer in the field of psychometric assessments. They measure personality and ability using the latest adaptive testing technology. Talent Q assessments gather data quickly, efficiently and with minimum investment. And they report in ways which can inform a range of talent decisions: screening and selection, matching people to jobs, coaching and development, identifying high potentials, leadership development and team building.
When in-depth assessments of behavior are too difficult or costly to carry out, Talent Q provides a cost effective and reliable way to predict performance:
• In a global telecoms organization, those predicted by Dimensions to be in the top 50 per cent of performers generated 14 per cent more sales than target and 11 per cent more than lower performers.
• Pharmaceutical sales professionals predicted by Dimensions to be higher performers achieved 7 per cent higher sales against target.
A banking organization found that a lack of robust and valid screening early on in their large scale graduate recruitment process was leading to a high rate of line manager interviews and assessment centers.
They remodeled their process to include the Elements ability tests followed by Dimensions personality assessment linked to a telephone interview. As a result, line managers saw fewer but better candidates, and the organization achieved:
• a reduction in total costs from £2.9 million to £1.8 million (across 28,000 applicants)
• a significant reduction in HR and line management time required
• investment redirected to attracting the best candidates.
Find out more about how Talent Q could benefit your organization.
To try and motivate someone by saying, ‘go and read this book’, when they don’t learn that way, is going to be as frustrating for them as it is for you. Especially when you find out later that they can’t do what you expected the book to teach them. However, if you recognize that they need to watch you do something to learn how to do it, then you will organize your time differently to achieve your objectives.
As a leader in a group you need to be aware of your own style too, because it has implications for the impact you make on the team. Without acknowledging your own style you may encourage your team to focus on issues from a certain perspective and miss the opportunities that result from different approaches. A team has a collective learning style all of its own. For example, if you have a group of sales managers who all share a preference for action, they are less likely to stop and think about the underlying framework
and rationale for their actions (with a tendency for headless chicken syndrome!). As their leader, your job is to guide this group and help them to understand the strengths and potential weaknesses or blind spots associated with their learning styles.
Hay Group can help you look at your own learning style and those of your team so you’re better able to tune into the needs of others, to the aims of the group and to the optimal way of using your collective time, resources and capabilities.
The changing face of reward examines how the business drivers of reward are changing due to the impact of the global downturn and other macroeconomic trends in the global economy. The study is based on face-to-face interviews with senior HR specialists from over 230 companies in 29 countries, which collectively manage more than 4.7 million people and generate annual revenue streams of approximately US$4.5 trillion.
Across all sectors and regions, organizations are struggling to re-build profitability following the recession. With revenue growth hard to come by, they are focusing on cost containment and performance improvement as the paths to profit growth. This requires them to balance four, often conflicting, challenges: cost containment, performance improvement, talent engagement and risk management.
In particular, the tension between cost containment and talent engagement was a very strong theme to come out of the research. Organizations are very concerned about retention and motivation, particularly for top performers, high potentials and those with scarce skills. However, the option of paying more for retention or performance is often no longer available and companies are focusing more on intangible rewards (such as motivational leadership, challenging work and career development) to boost engagement.
Nothing stays the same–ever–and your current leaders won’t be around forever. So who are the people who will lead your organization in the future? Having identified them, how do you develop and retain them? Which critical activities will provide the right experience for the fastest growth and development?
Talent Q Dimensions and Elements are unique, online, work-focused psychometric assessments for assessing large talent pools.
Developed by Roger Holdsworth, a pioneer in the field, they measure personality and ability using the latest adaptive testing technology. Talent Q assessments gather data quickly, efficiently and with minimum investment. And they report in ways which can inform a range of talent decisions: screening and selection, matching people to jobs, coaching and development, identifying high potentials, leadership development and team building.
Talent Q’s Dimensions provides a cost-effective way to measure the capability of sales staff, especially when assessing large numbers in revenue-critical roles.
Selecting the best :
Two recent studies demonstrate the contribution that a carefully chosen personality test can make to the tricky business of predicting performance – especially when in-depth assessments of behavior are too difficult or costly to carry out.
Talent Q ran assessments with employees in sales roles – 60 in telecoms and 29 in a pharmaceutical company – and compared the resulting predictions with employees’ actual performance against sales targets.
The test chosen was Dimensions, an online assessment that measures the key, work-related aspects of personality covered by a range of other personality measures. Participants undertook a single assessment that explored how they approached tasks, how they managed relationships and what motivated them.
CEOs at the world’s most successful companies know that they can only safeguard their business’s competitive future if they have the right leaders to develop and implement their strategy. While CEOs know they can also hire external candidates, they also know that the track record of outside hires can be very unpredictable. CEOs and HR Directors from those organizations seen as best by their peers for managing talent, prefer to ensure they develop a good bench-strength of talent from inside their own organizations.
For many years CEOs at the world’s most successful companies – such as GE, P&G, BP – have seen the importance of securing their long term competitive future by investing large amounts of money and time in identifying future leaders. Using a whole battery of assessment techniques and processes they have attempted to recruit the best graduates and to see, early in their careers, which managers had the long term potential to make it to the top: what the British army has called: ‘finding the General’s batten in the knapsack of the new recruits.’
But in recent years CEOs have become more concerned about their more immediate competitive future: do we have the talent and capability to develop and implement the strategies that will enable success in today’s highly competitive and changing business world? Today the pressures for change are greater than ever – from globalization, competition, technology, break through business models – which means that the shelf life of both strategies and leaders can be much shorter.
And here is the CEOs real concern: the ability of leaders to implement one type of strategy may not be the type needed to implement another: the skill sets may be different, the behaviors may be different, the experiences needed may be different. For example those needed to lead a nationally based, fully functional company, operating in a stable competitive and technological environment, will be very different from those needed for a leader in a highly matrixed global organization facing rapid competitive and technological change. But this is the transition many businesses are going through.
Some major companies have responded by throwing out or downgrading their programs for building long term bench- strength because they have lost their confidence in their ability to predict the type of talent needed. But our research shows that it is the companies that can resist this response and combine a focus on both the long term and the short term which have enduring success.
Future winners are investing in the right leaders today. As in past recessions margins are being cut, costs pushed down, currencies are shifting – and future winning organisations are starting to reposition themselves. These winners invariably see the writing on the wall first, take advantage of market movements and realign their resources to where they can make most money. This is the message from our annual Best Companies for Leaders research which shows that these winners are already thinking about, and investing heavily in, the future leaders they need to identify and grow.
The big difference this time round is that they want to know the odds: to place bets on the right employees to invest in and to do so at significantly reduced cost. To put it simply, once they have worked out how to re-organize and operate differently, they are investing heavily in redefining what that looks like for the people agenda, particularly their leadership competency frameworks. They see this as the first step in re-aiming their talent management processes on their new success criteria. They also make sure they keep their next-generation leaders engaged and energized despite the difficult market conditions. That way, when the economy swings back, they will be ready for repositioning growth and stealing a march on the competition.
This article offers our best thinking on the most cost effective way to identify future leaders – those who should get the cream of your development budget.
Generational transitions are landmark events in a family-owned business’ (FOB’s) lifecycle. It nearly always takes an epic infusion of time, discussion, and emotion to find a point of intersection between the soaring visions of the founding first generation and an achievable reality for the following generation. In my experience, these factors interplay to often create disruptive tensions that drive actions.
As part of an organizational restructuring engagement with a mid-size manufacturing organization (which is part of a larger, diversified conglomerate), we found ourselves involved in a long debate on the top-level governance structure. (Mostly because it involved deliberating the role of the entrepreneur and the first-level of professional management).
Towards the latter part of our discussion, the firm’s chairman invited his son to join in. The son had been part of the conglomerate for three years and was primarily responsible for incubating and running businesses in the services space. Now the son was clear that he did not want to get involved in the day-to-day running of the businesses he was responsible for. His role, he said, was to build the business and the team, and provide oversight where required. Good teams, he added, should run day-today operations.
To make sure this happened, he had painstakingly ensured there was a proverbial “Chinese Wall” between the business he managed and the one under his father’s direct management control. To a large extent, this insulated employees of both the existing manufacturing company and the new services company from changes in management style. Employees of the newly-formed services company were able to create their own roadmap—with practices and values more aligned to the nature of the business and the targeted talent pool.
Contrast this to another Indian entrepreneur we’ve worked with, head of large manufacturing firm. He has always struggled with his management style. His personal preference was to get involved in the business only when there is growth opportunity; rather than take day-to-day administrative and management decisions. While his father was respected for his deep operational knowledge of the business, the son wanted to play the role of the classic investor-promoter and not the hands-on, chieftain role that his father had played. However, because he and his father had worked together closely for over nine years during his initiation into the business, he tried to inculcate his father’s style. This struggle between his natural preference and his father’s management style found him oscillating between two very different styles of management. As a result, his team received confusing, often conflicting, signals on what was expected. The cascading impact was so severe on the teams that the son managed that in a few years, his firm went through instability, lack of cohesiveness, and ineffective decision-making.
When two generations overlap for an extended period—like in this case—the inability to break away from tradition to create or to lend legitimacy to a unique management footprint is common.
Clearly, the first generation plays a crucial role in determining how the second generation and the employees experience the generational transition. Their messages and actions set the stage for the change. Their willingness (or lack of it) creates space for the next generation – a thought to ponder upon by captains of Indian FOBs.
Emotional Intelligence helps you measure and develop high performance behaviors.
Hay Group’s research, in partnership with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, continues to demonstrate that emotional and social intelligence differentiates outstanding performers from average employees.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) helps you measure and develop these star qualities in your employees. It uses the Goleman and Boyatzis Emotional and Social Intelligence Competency Inventory (ESCI) – the most validated measure of EI behaviors on the market.
