May 28, 2003
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-- Integrity and Ethics survey
-- To decide or not to decide: A growing employee concern
-- How do these values effect job-related performance
-- WOW! That's a lot of reading
-- A solution for managers who hate doing performance reviews.
-- Question of the week: Is it legal to create our own pre-hire test?
-- Missed a previous issue?
-- Rule #1 of good employee behavior - Show up for work!
-- Special Offer for The Total View readers: CriteriaOne Certification Training - June 5-6-7, 2003
-- Pocket Guides for Managers As Low as $9.95
-- What is Your Interviewing IQ

Integrity and Ethics survey
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Integrity. Honesty. Ethics. Values. Everyone says they have them but you're likely still surprised by the choices some people make.

We'd like to find out what you consider right and wrong and if others might agree. Help us find out.

Please take 5 minutes to complete our Integrity and Ethics survey. Please be honest when responding. Your responses will be 100 percent confidential and anonymous.

Results of this survey will be published in the June 11 edition of The Total View.

Complete the Integrity and Ethics Survey here.

To decide or not to decide: A growing employee concern
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Everyone knows Joe. You can sell him anything. He trusts everyone and accepts whatever is said at face value. You could sell Joe swamp land in Florida and ice in Alaska simply because Joe likes you. Joe is Mr. Gullible.

Mary on the other hand trusts no one. She rarely accepts your word without a boatload of questions. Every decision she makes requires an act of Congress. Mary suffers from "analysis paralysis".

Both Mary and Joe are everyday employees. Mary and Joe are well-educated, dependable employees who are very active in their community and church. You like both of them as people but when it comes to making decisions, they both want to make you pull your hair out.

Several years ago while working with a group of web developers, I discovered several personality patterns that explained why some individuals routinely seemed to make bad or ineffective decisions while others could never make one to save their life.

One of the best predictors of why people approach problems differently and how they might reach a decision comes from a tool called Personal Interests, Attitudes and Values_tm(PIAV). PIAV identifies why people do what they do. PIAV identifies personal motivators.

I like to describe the six value clusters of PIAV this way. We each have our own viewpoints of the world. I've worn glasses since I've been six years old. I see the world most clearly when I look through my prescription lenses. If I passed my glasses around a room and exchanged them with my colleagues, I could likely still see what was going on but the world wouldn't be so clear anymore. The same blurred world goes for others who tried to view the world through my glasses.

Each of us sees the world most clearly through two and sometimes three lenses, or values clusters. When looking through our fifith and sixth filters,we find it difficult understanding how anyone could view the world through such a cloudy lens.

One of these six value clusters is called Theoretical. Individuals whose behavior is driven by the Theoretical cluster live to learn and solve problems. The higher their "score", the more they are satisfied by reading, research, school, and training. "You are never to old to learn" and "the one thing you can never take away from someone is my education" are belief statements that likely shaped their values. It is not surprising at all to find individuals who are always going to school and who have achieved a wall full of degrees and certificates to be High Theoreticals.

Back to the web developers and Joe and Mary. The High Theoretical developers did not take much at face value. Whether they were asked to research a company or a new programming language, they always returned with information supported with facts. While searching the web, they didn't stop at the first reference they found but delved deeper and deeper, layer by layer until they were satisfied the information was factual. The supported the information with documentation and even a bibliography. (The quality and speed by which they acquired the information varied according to their general abilities but that goes beyond the scope of this column.)

The Low Theoreticals on the other hand also came back with information. They just lost motivation after they found what they wanted. They searched, they found, and then they were done. Research for the sake of research was not their strong suit. That didn't mean their information was not valid or even better than the High Theoreticals. But their conclusions were based on the source, not necessarily fact.

For example, the Low Theoreticals might have visited the Microsoft site, found what they wanted, downloaded the information, and presented their findings as fact. The High Theoreticals didn't stop there. They searched through other sites as well because just because Microsoft said it doesn't mean it was good enough for them.

This leads to a second cluster called Utilitarian. High Utilitarians see the world through a lens that asks, "is this worth my money, time, effort, and resources?" High Utilitarian/High Theoretical are very practical people. They don't go to school just to earn a degree. Their real motivation is to earn more money and apply what they learned.

In the case of the web developers, the High Utilitarian/High Theoreticals researched up to a point and then began to evaluate the value of their time. The Low Utilitarian/High Theoreticals (Mary) often lost sight of their purpose and became absorbed in their pursuit of the truth, rather than finding a solution to the problem. It didn't matter how much time they took, having the information was much more important than meeting any deadline. Think government researcher or career student (Attention Parents: Beware of the High Theoretical/Low Utilitarian child!) and Low Utilitarian/High Theoretical comes to mind.

Of course, we also have the Low Theoretical/Low Utilitarians (Joe). They are not motivated by the research nor learning and don't necessarily see any value in spending the time to do it either. They will make decisions based on trust and hearsay from other people.

To receive a complimentary Personal Interests, Attitudes and Values report, click here and request a FREE code for PIAV in the comments box.

How do these values effect job-related performance
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If you don't necessarily like surfing the net or going to the library to collect information for a presentation but information gathering is important, find a High Theoretical to do the job for you. They are like a fish in water when it comes to finding the truth, solving a problem, investigating a mystery. Send a Low Theoretical out and he too will come back with information. Just don't be too hard on him when you ask for the documentation and you hear these words: "If so-and-so wrote it, it must be true."

If time is an issue and you delegate the research to the High Theoretical/Low Utilitarian, don't be surprised to get a theses returned - a few days late. When you ask them how much the solution was going to cost or how they proposed you pay for the solution, they probably "didn't figure that part out yet."

There are four other value clusters (Aesthetic, Social, Individualistic and Traditional) too but those we will leave for another day.

Understanding values is important is designing training and development programs, managerial and leadership programs and selecting the best people for a job.

Analytical thinking and decision-making ability are two of the most essential competencies required in business today. Understanding how your employees will collect, assess, and analyze information and then make choices is critical to the success of every organization. The correct mix of assessments makes the task of selecting and training the right employees reliable and predictable.

Finding and retaining employees who share values with others in their organization is top of mind for many executive management teams. PIAV is just one solution they found to help build teams, minimize and resolve conflict, promote self-improvement and plan career paths.

To learn more about PIAV and other Values Assessments, type "Contact me about Values" in the comment box.

WOW! That's a lot of reading
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The great library of Alexandria, in Egypt, that was burned by Julius Caesar's forces in 47 B.C. is said to have contained sin hundred thousand papyrus scrolls - virtually all the recorded information in the world.

Fifteen hundred years later, the entire library collection at Queen's College, Cambridge, amounted to 199 volumes.

Thomas Jefferson's collection of six thousand books, one of the great personal libraries of his age, became the basis for the Library of Congress. Today the Library of Congress contains 113 million items and 20,000 more arrive every day.

Fifty thousand books are published annually in the United States and something like four hundred thousand journals are in publication globally.

By the start of the second decade of this century, the information available to the average individual at any given point in time will be a hundred thousand times what it is today.

Source: The Visionary's Handbook

To learn more about train-the-trainer for building an objective employee performance evaluation system, click here.

A solution for managers who hate doing performance reviews.
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It's time to take a serious look at Janus Performance Management System. With Janus it's easy to identify the competencies that should be evaluated, set up evaluation forms (online or paper), and assess from 1 to 1000s of employees in minutes.

Each employee and manager then receives a report identifying skill gaps, providing recommendations for improvement and guiding employees through an individual development plan. Reports are available in self, 180 and 360 versions.

The Online Janus System makes it easy to identify from 3 to 10 core competencies per position, build competency-based job descriptions, develop job- specific interview questions and adminster performance evaluations - a seamless, continuous, cost-effective solution to selecting and managing top performers.

Contact us about scheduling a free tour of Janus. Please type "call me about Janus" in the comment box.

Question of the week: Is it legal to create our own pre-hire test?
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One manager writes: For several months, I have been reviewing different pre-hire assessments to use in our organization. During this week's managers meeting, one of the managers announced he was creating his own test and the rest of management bought into the idea. His arguments were convincing. First he outlined how it would save money if they didn't have to purchase a system. Second he felt that he and the other managers knew what it took for an individual to succeed in their organization.

Is is safe for us to use a manager's do-it-yourself test?

Answer: The Internet is now clogged with dozens of inexpensive, easy to administer, quick to score personality tests. So it seems logical that you too can create your own assessments. But how do you know which tests have the proven validity to protect you against EEOC law suits and which ones should be restricted to validate your weekly horoscope?

Creating your own test to save money is like buying vitamins instead of buying health insurance because you are young. As long as you don't get in trouble, you save money. Get challenged by a disgruntled employee even one time and what you saved by doing it yourself is a drop in the bucket to the cost of defending it in court.

The U.S. Department of Labor (Call us about a FREE copy of Testing and Assessments) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission clearly states that any assessment used for selecting employees must meet the guidelines. Developing your own list of questions or creating a test, especially for non-technical skills or soft skills, may seem like a good idea until someone challenges you on the grounds of the test or interview.

What is important for any manager responsible for selecting employees is not to let ego get in the way. It's amazing how many times a manager rejects a proven test because he or she didn't score as well as they thought they might or they didn't like what it said about them even if everyone else agreed it was accurate. The same goes for interview questions - they reject questions they find difficult to answer or deem as silly despite the fact that they are proven successful in predicting performance. For a test to meet defensible psychometric guidelines, a test must be valid (accurate) and reliable (predictable). To be valid a test must be proven to test what is says it is testing. Its accuracy is dependent on the type of questions or choices, the type of response items (true/false, Likert scales), the number of questions as well as the number of response items, and well, much more technical detail than most of our readers really care to know. Suffice it to say that constructing an employment test that can be proven valid and reliable and legally defensible should be left up to the professionals.

As I learned over twenty-five years ago on my anesthesia rotation during my residency, it is easy for anyone to put another person to sleep. The real skill of an anesthiologist is being able to wake up the patient when it counts. When it comes to creating test, it is easy to come up with a list of questions to ask on a test or during an interview. The real skill is identifying which questions can actually predict job performance and asking them in a way that is legal and defensible.

To learn more about building a valid, reliable and legally defensible selection and promotion process, Learn more about CriteriaOneŽ: The Whole Person Approach on June 5-6-7, 2003.

CriteriaOneŽ is based on the criterion validity, a blueprint for selecting, promoting and retaining employees based on job-related competencies, behaviors and attitudes.

Click here to receive a free copy of "Testing and Assesment: An Employer's Guide to Good Practices". Type Testing and Assessment in the comment box.

Missed a previous issue?
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Just visit our online library at www.super-solutions.com to view all the past issues of The Total View, Labor Storm Alert along with dozens of articles.

Click here to read previous newsletter and articles.

Rule #1 of good employee behavior - Show up for work!
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You offer the job and he accepts. But he doesn't show up or shows up late. A few days later you suspect he is stealing or allowing his friends to lift a few of your items that he thinks you'll never miss.

Or maybe he does show up on time but loses his cool with a customer and makes a few sexual innuendos to your female workers. "If only I had known before I hired him", you mutter.

CBI is your answer. For as little as $12 you can now pre-screen for: