As Published in Business 2 Business, April 2002

Where Are Thou Radar O'Reilly
By Ira S. Wolfe

Corporal Radar O'Reilly from the incredibly successful television series M.A.S.H. could hear a chopper coming before anyone else. Radar also knew exactly what Col. Blake wanted even before the colonel knew himself.

Now I know what many of you thinking. Where can we find more employees like Radar?

If I wanted to be your Radar, what would I need to do? Anticipate your every next move? Would you really value me as the masterful servant or despise me for attempting to take over your life and being too submissive? Would I eventually get on your nerves answering questions before you asked?

Who are your best employees and how did they get there? Better yet, who do you consider to be a bad employee and what's to stop you from hiring him or her again?

Hiring and promotion mistakes have resulted in big-bucks boo-boos by any standard. People mis-matched to their jobs not only result in sub-par performance but leads to the churn and turn of employees, both voluntary and involuntary.

So where do executives blow it? More than any other way, by the failure to put the right people in the right jobs--and the related failure to fix people problems in time. The failure patterns of high profile CEOs was published in "Why CEOs Fail," a Fortune article published in June 21, 1999. The key issue was their inability to pick the right people to execute their strategic plan and the related failure to fix people problems in time.

Specifically, failed executives and managers are often unable to deal with a few key subordinates whose sustained poor performance deeply harms the company. What is striking is that they usually know there's a problem but they suppress it. Those around the executive or manager in charge often recognize the problem first, but since he isn't seeking information from multiple sources or really isn't listening, everyone beats around the bush or says nothing.

When "the boys" talk
The excuses and rationalizations that executives concoct make an impressive list. Consistent throughout each of the excuses is that these executives continued to use traditional methods of hiring and succession but expected new and profitable results to magically appear. We've all heard these statements:

1. "He has to succeed." The executive is a victim of "intellectual seduction," installing a subordinate so talented that the executive persuades himself failure is impossible. If the protege then fails to deliver, the executive can't come to terms with it, especially if the protege is a succession candidate.
2. "He's my guy!" The problem of blind loyalty shows up more often than you may suspect. The boss and the subordinate may have worked together a long time; in some cases their families vacationed together or they played as part of the same golf foursome. Judgment becomes blurred.
3. "I can coach him." Maybe yes, maybe no. First the protégé must be coach-able and secondly, the executive must have the skill to coach the protégé. Coaching is not the same as teaching an individual what you know but rather it's about how to do the job. Too often, the hard working, driven, pull-it-up-by-the-bootstraps executive considers coaching a brain dump of knowledge or formula training. "If you follow me, you can't fail." It isn't uncommon for a strong executive to be blind to this fatal flaw.
4. "The customers like him--I'd better keep him around." When a failing subordinate forms strong links with your customers and co-workers, the executive faces a dilemma. Poor performance hurts the company's results, but taking out the subordinate may hurt its image. Typically the executive doesn't act until the problem is acute, and by then it's sometimes too late.
5. "I've fired a lot of people lately." Turnover -voluntary or involuntary - is never good for business. But if an employee is failing, delaying action just makes the problem worse. Is there ever a good time to hand out pink slips?
6. "He's in the job, and I'll take the devil I know over the devil I don't." This either indicates apathy, complacency, or insecurity in management's ability to identify the right person. In any case tolerating poor performance is a no win situation.

For those frustrated enough with poor performance and enlightened enough to do something different, executives and managers turned to the sciences for help in identifying the right employees. The sciences then turned them to tests. Employers in search of this better way, unfortunately, misapplied psychological and clinical tests to evaluate the job-related behaviors of normal people.

Lawsuits flew and crushing financial judgments prevailed, most notably in the Saroka v. Dayton-Hudson case in which Target stores settled the case for over $2 million. The courts, despite this knee-jerk reaction by many organizations to discontinue employee testing, did not rule against the use of assessments for hiring and promotion in the workplace. It only ruled against asking questions about religious beliefs and sexual preferences and other "private" situations that were not job related. In other words, the use of employee tests was not shut down, only the use of the wrong tests.

The truth is that the U.S. Department of Labor encourages the use of assessments and tests. In its publication, "Testing and Assessment: An Employers' Guide to Good Practices" (2000), it states that "the appropriate use of professionally developed assessment tools enables organizations to make more effective, employment-related decisions than use of simple observations or random decision making."

The DOL goes even further by encouraging the use of a variety of assessments to get the most complete picture of the individual. This practice of using a variety of tests and procedures is referred to as the "whole-person approach" to personnel assessment.

Skill and Knowledge is rarely enough
The whole person approach extends selection for whatever purpose well beyond the interview. Interviews measure "know-how" or skills. Traditional hiring practices focus the interviewer on demeanor, personal appearance, and what applicants have done, not who they actually are. Traditional methods of judging applicants on experience or how they present themselves in an interview can't accurately measure a candidate's true fit for the job. Though people are usually hired based on the basis of qualifications, most people are fired for non-performance. People rarely succeed or fail through skills or intelligence alone.

A successful selection process focuses on "will-do" or personality traits. To make a point, I've compiled a growing list of descriptors that managers and executives tell me their employees must have to be successful. Which of these adjectives are skills -- things you go to school for or take classes to learn -- and which are more naturally determined by our personality?

Skill Personality: How much do you need for the job?
Assertiveness
Persuasiveness
Self-confidence
Resourcefulness
Goal-orientation
Detail-orientation
Copes well with stress
Patience
Methodical
Analytical thinking
Problem solving
Accommodating
Agreeableness
Team player
Team leader
Empathetic
Considerate
Motivating
Honesty
Flexibility
Persistence
Enthusiasm
Drive
Tolerance
Conscientiousness
Dependability
Reliability
Humility
Consistency
Passion

The answer is most of these qualities are personality traits, not skills, that may be learned for the short term but aren't usually sustainable characteristics if the individual doesn't own them naturally. Ultimately, job performance -- good or bad -- hinges on how well the individual's personality meshes with the job.

Let's say the skilled interviewer was able to evaluate tolerance, flexibility and drive. How do you then determine during an interview how much of each is enough and when is enough too much? Tolerance is a virtue until the individual is okay when things go wrong..and wrong..and wrong again. Flexibility is desired until deadlines and rules apply. Drive and assertiveness are everything in sales until protecting an ego is more important than what's good for the organization.

Employee assessments, when accurately implemented, are quintessential tools for managing and motivating individuals. Every job has its own set of ideal characteristics. The same jobs in different companies may have their own unique characteristics. Even the same job in different divisions within an organization may have different characteristics. The jobs may require different skills but they also require different personality qualities such as those identified in the list above.

Going from Good to Great
Good performance can take place when an individual has the right skills, knowledge and experience for the job. Great performance only occurs when the key behavioral requirements of the job, and a candidate's personality attributes, are well aligned.

Coaching and motivating people are much more successful when employers treat employees as individuals. Where turnover is rampant and employee loyalty scarce, employee tests promise to help select devoted employees who won't jump ship the moment things get tough.

Employers also rely on personality testing to discover all the intangibles that don't get listed on a résumé or don't surface during an interview: whether a candidate thrives on stress and multitasking, or whether he gets energy from working alone and doing long-term research.

Many managers have one style of management, which works best with employees with similar personalities. For employees with a different type of personality, it's important for managers to modify their approach in order to get peak performance. Behavioral testing reports like Managing for Success and TotalView help executives match the right managers to the teams and for the managers to understand how to manage and motivate their employees, which creates more alignment up and down the organization.

While Myers-Briggs, DISC and other four quadrant assessments are a general personality inventory, tests like TotalView™, a five-factor personality and general abilities tests, are more directly related to matching people with careers.

Finding people who fit your organization is a complex task. It pertains to selecting those people who resonate with you on values, vision and mission, those who are competent to work in the jobs and roles you have available now (or ones you may create in the future), those who want to work within the scope of their highest potential and those who have the ability to learn quickly.

If used appropriately, personality tools can provide employers that extra bit of assurance that the individual you hire will mesh with the company culture and can handle the job.
Success or failure in a job is usually the result of personal characteristics, such as attitude, motivation, and especially, temperament. Regardless of the industry or the nature of the business, periodically it's important for CEOs and human resource professionals to stand back and determine who is winning the war for talent.

If your company isn't winning the war for talent or churning the talent you have, remember there are viable options, and surrender is not one of them.

Ira S. Wolfe is founder of Success Performance Solutions and president of Poised for the Future Company. He is the developer of CriteriOne™, an innovative approach to aligning employees, managers and salespeople to the client's strategies and culture. Ira can be reached via phone at (717)656-4632 or via e-mail at iwolfe@super-solutions.com.