Tag Archive for: Behavioral Assessment

Paradox Theory and Team Dynamics

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paradox theory and team management

In today’s specialized work environment, talent is not enough. Talented people must effectively work together in order for the organization to succeed. HR budgets are tight and finding the right combination of talented people who can work together day in and day out to achieve positive results is difficult. As any good sports team knows, getting the right talent on the team in the right positions working together is imperative.

Harrison Assessments Paradox Theory reveals team dynamics in a way that has never before been possible, enabling individual team members to easily identify how their own behaviors contribute or obstruct the team objectives.

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The Verbal Caustic

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verbal caustic

The Verbal Caustic- another Toxic Employee

Almost every organization has experienced some form or another of a Toxic Employee; someone who, whether consciously or subconsciously, disrupts or hinders the advancement of productivity in the workplace.

Also known as “walking liabilities”, they say things and they do things that make them a huge liability. Just because you haven’t been sued for it doesn’t mean they aren’t walking around creating liability for you.

One of those types is the VERBAL CAUSTIC.

Characteristics: Steps on others without even realizing it; blunt and caustic; laser-tongued. Thinks he/she is just being honest, does not know when he/she hurts others’ feelings or doesn’t sufficiently consider others needs while pushing for his/her own (this is certainly not always the case and is less likely).

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Mini Napoleon

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Napoleon Cartoon

Do you have a Mini Napoleon employee in your midst?

Almost every organization has experienced some form or another of a Toxic Employee; someone who, whether consciously or subconsciously, disrupts or hinders the advancement of productivity in the workplace.

Also known as “walking liabilities”, they say things and they do things that make them a huge liability. Just because you haven’t been sued for it doesn’t mean they aren’t walking around creating liability for you. One type of toxic employee is the “Mini Napoleon”.

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Suitability and Eligibility- The Win Win Candidate

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Winning CandidateSuitability AND Eligibility.. The winning combination in HR that can help you find the win/win candidate.

Choosing the best candidate to recruit and hire is not an easy task. However, hiring right the first time can save you a lot of time and your company a lot of money. Today forward thinking companies are using HSM’s and new tools to choose the best candidates. A successful HR manager will use tools that focus on both “suitability AND eligibility” to attract and retain good candidates.

Some recruiters make the mistake of hiring people only for their qualifications, resulting in bad hires related to behavioral weaknesses.

Other recruiters make the mistake of over-emphasizing behavioral factors by eliminating people only on the basis of their behavioral assessments. Sometimes they even unfairly eliminate candidates based on a single behavioral factor. Behavioral assessments should be part of the overall assessment that includes qualifications such as experience, education, and skills. That’s why the Harrison system provides a unique eligibility assessment that complements the suitability assessment, providing an overall score for better hiring and succession planning.

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Emotional Moody

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emotional moody

Do you have an “Emotionally Moody” type person working for you?

Almost every organization today has experienced a “Bad Apple” employee; someone who, whether consciously or subconsciously, disrupts or hinders the advancement of productivity in the workplace. One type of bad apple is the “Emotionally Moody”.

Characteristics: Temperamental and goes through mood swings; difficult to predict the best time to communicate with such employees. Appears distant and can be rather cold towards others; unable to control emotions and finds it diffcult to maintain self-composure.

Traits to look out for: Introverted, low self-esteem, easily tensed and poor stress management techniques, intolerant to bluntness, pessimistic, weak in interpersonal skills and display low comfort with conflict.

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Psychological Traits of a Good White Collar Worker

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psychological traits of a good white collar worker

Psychological Traits of a Good White Collar Worker

Baby Boomers remember the old days that had set working hours. You went to work and then around five p.m., you packed up your stuff and went home. If there were an emergency you might stay until five-thirty.

Those days are gone! White-collar work, sometimes called Knowledge Work, is never done. Your immediate To Do list might have twenty items on it, but right behind the immediate To Do list is a supplemental To Do list with another forty action items on it and after that list is done, there’s a third one waiting.

Most white collar workers today need to be able to work autonomously (that big college word for trusted to work on your own and get it done without supervision). And yet, they also need to be able to work cohesively as part of a team when the need arises.

But not all white collar jobs are created equal.
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A Good Weapon to Use in the War for Talent

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War for Talent

A Good Weapon to Use in the War for Talent

Companies today are constantly in a war for talent. Identifying the right targets and having the ability to capture them is essential to winning. We are looking for the innovative leaders of tomorrow and the competition is stiff.

Gone are the days of high unemployment and applicants banging down your door just to get an application. Job boards and matching sites are furiously searching for qualified candidates to post their resumes. Companies are competing against each other to find and attract good candidates.

It is imperative for hiring managers and recruiters to fully understand what truly appeals to the candidates in order to attract and retain the best people.
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The Best Kept Secret in Talent Management!

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bestKeptSecret

Harrison Assessments

Is improving engagement and retention a top priority in your organization? An analytics system that facilitates better hiring and promotion decisions at every level and enables leaders to more effectively onboard, coach and mentor their employees can dramatically impact your results. At the same time, preparing your talent to advance requires effective behavioral assessment. The best kept secret in talent management is that now one system can meet each of these crucial needs!
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Harrison’s Job Success Formula- JSF

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Harrison Assessments Job Success Formula

Harrison’s Job Success Formula- JSF
Personality tests are increasingly popular due to the importance of understanding how an employee or job candidate will behave. Since poor performance usually relates to behavioral issues, measuring job behavior is essential.

However, personality tests are very general, usually measuring only 4-30 personality factors which are used for every job. In contrast, Harrison Assessments’ award winning suitability assessment is designed to measure engagement, motivation, interpersonal skills and retention factors related to specific jobs.

Ever wonder how Dan Harrison and the Harrison Assessments formulate the success factors for a specific job?

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Blind Optimist

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blind optimist

Blind Optimist

Do you have a Blind Optimist at work? The kind of person who sees good in everything, no matter what the situation? That ever so cheery person who never seems to be living in reality? A little ray of sunshine in the workplace is good right? The sprinkler alarms could be raining water down on desks and they would smile and say… “at least the plants are getting watered”. Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration but you get the point.

Having optimism is good, but it is also possible to have too much optimism to the point that it is “blinding”. An optimistic attitude is good, especially if you are in a position that requires a little extra positive energy, such as sales or customer service, however if the optimism gets in the way of making accurate strategy analysis or executing or performing a tasks with attention to the possible fail factors the increased level of optimism could become a hindrance to success.

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Walkway Strollers (or Web Browsers)

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Prairie Dogging

Walkway Strollers (or Web Browsers)

Do you have a Walkway/Web Stroller at your office? You may recognize the type:

Characteristics: Highly mobile around the office complex and loves peeping into others’ cubicle (workstation) finding out how others are managing their work and life.

This behavior may manifest itself virtually. The walkway stroller may not cruise the actual hallways, they may cruise the web instead. They may take it upon themselves to police the social media sites, peeping into the personal posts of their co-workers.

This person typically thinks s/he is practicing management by walkabout except that s/he forgets to manage his or her own work, deliverables and KPIs first.

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Suitability and Hiring Selection Success

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suitability and hiring selection success

Suitability and Hiring Selection Success

For most jobs, suitability/behavioral factors are about 50% of the reason people succeed or fail at a job. Therefore, effectively measuring suitability should be an essential part of any job fit or hiring assessment. The importance of assessing behavior during recruitment is evidenced by the fact that most organizations hire people for their eligibility and then try to develop their suitability. And in many cases, they fire them for their lack of suitability. Since behavior is fundamentally more difficult to change than eligibility, it is better to hire people who already have the right suitability for the job.

Suitability/behavioral factors are more difficult to assess because, unlike eligibility factors, there is no objective and verifiable information that is readily available. In addition, suitability factors are much more interrelated, and subtle balances between factors have significant implications for behavior. To make it even more challenging, applicants have a significant incentive to withhold or distort information that might hinder their job opportunity. This is highlighted by a recent study that determined that 80% of resumes contained lies.

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Always Right

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Dwight always right

Always Right

Do you have that “always right” never in doubt employee in your organization?

We’ve all seen them, some of us have worked with them and most of us can certainly identify a few of them. Those personality types that muck up the atmosphere at work and typically put a wrench in productivity because of their dominance. The very strong type personality that sometimes gets categorized as a bully because of their strong convictions. This person’s wealth of “certainty” may not have a positive effect on your company.

The Harrison Assessment can help you identify and positively develop these personality types.

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Amazing Job Race

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Amazing Race

Amazing Job Race

Too bad you don’t have sixteen weeks of challenges, obstacle courses and road blocks to find the winning Amazing Job Team!

I will admit it. My guilty pleasure is watching “The Amazing Race.” It’s a long running TV show that starts typically with 12 two-person teams and follows them as they race around the world, trying to be the first to complete a set of challenges and get to the finish line winning 1 million dollars.

I happily watch the trials and tribulations of the teams as they jump through hoops, complete challenging projects under pressure and compete with each other to win position. I get an inside seat to the behaviors of people under stress attempting to complete tasks. It is interesting to me to watch how well someone completes a task that they enjoy doing… (the surfer lady who excels on all the water, heights and physical challenges…etc)

The Amazing Race is termed a “reality show.” The show is filled with leadership, teamwork, culture and communication lessons. As I watch and learn I wish that businesses in “reality” could put their possible team candidates through a race like this to figure out which candidates are the best.

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Bad Egg or Humpty Dumpty

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Humpty Dumpty

Bad Egg or Humpty Dumpty

You have that employee that doesn’t quite fit or is not quite up to performance standards. Some refer to them as “toxic” or “pains.” In previous blogs we have referred to them by different stereotypes…. Mini Napoleon, Crowd Pleaser, Emotional Moody, Ego Almighty, Verbal Caustic…. Etc. These employees are disrupters in the work place often hindering productivity and considered to be liabilities.

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Don’t throw the Baby out with the Bathwater

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Don’t throw the Baby out with the Bathwater

Baby in Bathwater

Sam works in Accounting. He has pretty good business sense and is very good with numbers. However, every place that Sam goes to work, within two years he gets pushed out. Now Sam is working for you. Unfortunately, nowhere during his reviews from his past employers or during his interview was it mentioned that Sam had any problem. And now he is yours.

He’s a talker. Some would even call him a Walkway Stroller or a Crowd Pleaser. He likes social interaction so much that if he doesn’t get it, he will find a way to get it. This usually ends up with him not completing some of his assigned tasks.

Harrison Assessments guesses that in this case, although Sam’s skill level for the job may be proficient, his suitability may not. If you have a Sam, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. What if there is another job within your organization in which Sam can do better and prosper?

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“What do you like to do?”

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Office Space Consultants

“What do you like to do?”

Wouldn’t that be a great question for the job applicant to hear from an interviewer? It would signal to the job seeker that the organization, the one they are considering working at for eight hours a day, 40-50 weeks a year, actually cares about them.

It would signal that they understand that if you enjoy doing the majority of tasks the job requires, you would most likely be successful at those tasks. When you take on a new position, your past experiences become interwoven with your new duties.

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Who are your HIPOs?

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Hippo Businessman

Who are your HIPO’s?

No, this is not a typo. I am not talking about those big somewhat loveable yet dangerous animals that frequent the waters… the hippos.

HIPO’s… High Potential Candidates. Those job applicants or current employees in your midst that are the potential proactive earners, the successes, the gems.

You can’t tell if someone is a HIPO just by looking at them. They are not wearing a big gold star on their lapel that signifies, “I am your best employee pick.’’

An effective tool to use in identifying employee potential is a comprehensive behavioral assessment that is specifically designed for job fit analysis, such as Harrison Assessments.

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Keep Your “Keepers” with Behavioral Assessment

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Team - 22219117_mIs your Board and executive team developing human capital strategies to gain competitive advantage and accelerate their business goals? Is your organization seeking new ways to positively impact engagement and retention? If so, they are not alone! Deloitte Consulting and Bersin identifies three primary areas of strategic focus in their Global Human Capital Trends report: Lead & Develop, Attract and Engage, and Transform and Reinvent. Among these strategic trends, leadership, retention and engagement, talent acquisition and reskilling HR were the top urgent needs to support business priorities and goals. Additional research by Aberdeen Group of Best-in-Class organizations demonstrates that top performing organizations, successfully utilize behavioral assessment as an enabler in each of the strategic talent needs.

Is improving engagement and retention a top priority in your organization? An assessment system that facilitates better hiring and promotion decisions at every level and enables leaders to more effectively onboard, coach and mentor their employees can dramatically impact your results. At the same time, preparing your talent to advance requires effective behavioral assessment. Now one system can meet each of these crucial needs.
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Dr. Dan Harrison, International Leader in Behavioral Assessment: Achieving Career Success by Knowing Yourself

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What makes some people prefer working in teams and some prefer independent project work? Why do some people thrive as engineers, while others are born to be writers? It is fascinating to think about the underlying preferences and behavioral traits that determine what careers best suit each of us. International leader in behavioral assessments, Dr. Dan Harrison (www.harrisonassessments.com), shares his unique assessment instrument and how our behavioral preferences impact our career choices and performance success.
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