Map Your Company’s Genome

What if you knew exactly what attributes were needed to have a rock-star in every position within your company?  What if you could evaluate all new hires to help select high-potential candidates and know where they need coaching to perform at their best?  What if you could determine any gaps that exist within your current staff to help them succeed and become top-performers?   What if you could map every employee’s succession and promotional path to develop top talent and increase engagement?

Does this sound too good to be true?  Well, it’s not.  I’ve lived it, as both an employee on a path and as a business owner.  We’ve discussed using The Predictive Index © (PI) as a solution for talent acquisition and talent retention in previous articles.  PI is also a great solution for talent development and talent management.

PI measures the inherent motivating needs that drive all people.  People behave in ways that meet their needs (that’s the predictive part).  When needs are met at work, performance, productivity, and engagement go up (along with ROI).

Mapping the human genome opened up the possibilities to predict potential problems and also the best treatment options for dealing with those difficulties.  Utilizing PI for maximum benefit can also help predict areas where individual employees are likely to struggle and provide guidance for how best to coach them through any probable difficulties for greatest possibility of success.

What differentiates PI is the PRO (Performance Requirement Options– or Job Assessment Tool ©).   You can administer this to an incumbent in a role and anyone who touches the position (their manager, their staff, and their peers) to determine the best-fit candidate profile for a given role.  It takes less than five minutes.  The PI software will synthesize the results and match the employee’s PI to the PRO for a particular role.

The system generates a coaching guide in accordance with the degree of match to the various factors in their PI as compared to the PRO.  Customized coaching questions are generated for managers to ask individual employees in each role to help them thrive and gauge where they might struggle.  If you design a PRO for every position within your organization, it’s like mapping your company’s genome.

Case in point:  Several years ago I worked at a company that used PI.  I had been promoted into a new role.  The attributes needed for someone to succeed in this new position required a great deal of detail-orientation towards record-keeping and it involved two new software applications that I had never used before.

Anything involving details and record-keeping is not my strong suit and doesn’t come naturally to me.  Combine this with the fact that I am not very tech-savvy and slow to warm up to new software means that this requirement could have been a problem for me.

My manager saw this on my PI and made sure I had some extra one-on-one training with a power-user of the software.  As I recall, it was two separate one-hour sessions.  As a result, I became comfortable with the software right away.  I never struggled with the record keeping required for that role and went on to become the top-performer in the department.  A little extra coaching prevented any potential impediment to my success.

If your company has a PRO in place for every position in the organization, you have a solution for hiring best-fit candidates from the outside, for identifying high-potential employees on your team, and for promoting and supporting your staff for the best chance at advancement, growth, and success.