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Leadership Ethics – Include the Assignment to Judge Performance

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15TH, 2009

 

Ethics defined is that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.
 
Have you ever hired or promoted someone who performed well in their previous jobs and then failed miserably in the position you hired them for? 
 
This afternoon I will be presenting an Objective Management Group Sales Assessment for one of my clients. In reviewing the report I found one of the more interesting sections was the one that describes Assessment versus Observed Performance. 
 
The Overview I will present to my client asks: Why do some sales people’s assessments not correlate to their performance?
 
The answer is the sales person in question may have an easy assignment, hit their numbers but assess poorly, thus they are account managers rather than producers. In essence when we judge performance we must assess the assignment along with whether or not they hit their numbers. 
 
A sales person, employee or manager who isn’t hitting their numbers can be judged as weaker than they really are because they aren’t producing as much as someone with an easier assignment.
 
This is one aspect that I love about the Objective Management Group’s Sales Assessment; it scores sales people on three variables: difficulty of assignment, performance, and assessment results. It’s easy to see who’s performing because they have an easy assignment, who, despite a difficult assignment has the potential to perform, and of course who isn’t performing regardless of the assignment.
 
It’s difficult to judge someone you are hiring for a tactical or management position if you just compare their performance without knowing the difficulty of their assignment. OMG has developed solid tools to help in the sales process that I strongly recommend using their screen test to assess sales candidates for your business. [More on 96 % accuracy of these tests next blog]
 
The Topgrading interview we recommend to our clients demands you follow a process, CIDS [Chronological, In-Depth, Structured] with every job a candidate has had. When done correctly it provides recognition of both performance and assignment difficulty. 
 
The value of OMG screening and sales assessment tests is that it doesn’t require a 1-3 hour interview to discover this. Time is money. Make sure when you are assessing candidates that you not only quantify performance, but also job assignment difficulty to ensure you have a good idea how your candidate will perform in the environment you plan to place them in. 
 
Not only will you be doing yourself a favor by assessing candidates this way, you will also be doing your candidate a favor but not placing them in a position where they cannot succeed.

 

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