Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
Nearly two years ago we began development of an exciting new way to evaluate Executive Management Teams. We brainstormed, conducted surveys, performed research and identified 16 qualities that CEO's wanted their Executive Managers to possess, along with 9 Styles crucial to a Management Team's ability to grow their companies. These Qualities and Styles are not presented in any other assessments on the market today.
Over a period of 18 months, a team of PHD's whose primary expertise is in testing, worked with us to map the formulas, measures, and research of a very well researched personality instrument (the basis for many well known personality tests) to our new Management Assessment. When we were ready to have a small test group take the assessment, the results of round one were not impressive. The scores were very inconsistent with the findings we wanted to present. I was extremely disappointed with our progress.
The project was escalated up to two PHD's with even more expertise. After 6 more months of understanding the findings we wanted to provide and the formulas they had in their "vault", the second round of testing yielded results that were no closer than in the first round. We were failing to get accurate results, running out of patience and running out of time.
I have had many occasions to speak and write about how personality tests, behavioral styles tests and psychometric tests, which are all very similar, differ from Objective Management Group's Sales Force Evaluations and Assessments. As a matter of fact, you can read four such articles right here:
I have always said that personality tests, although they contain several elements that are important for sales, weren't built to predict sales success and, even when modified, can't go wide enough or deep enough to predict likely challenges or diagnose why salespeople get the results they get. As a result, they cannot be used as development tools and they are very risky and inconsistent as hiring tools.
So how did we come to go down this path where we were going to use a personality assessment as the instrument behind our new Management Assessment? After all, weren't we being hypocritical?
We were convinced by a PHD/testing expert that the research existed to map to our findings.
Well the research does exist - except - their findings aren't the same as what we want to provide. As with a sales assessment, they're identifying findings that they can measure - like emotional steadiness - and saying they can provide a score for that. Well they can - except, like nearly all of the findings from personality tests, the findings are out of context. The questions have nothing to do with selling or managing and someone who might control their emotions quite well socially, might not be equally effective in a sales or business setting. This example holds true over nearly every one of their findings and the questions they target to drive those findings. So the findings that show up in most personality assessments are not necessarily what you need to know, they are simply what these assessments are capable of measuring!
So back to the story.
We realized that we got away from one of our core competencies - our ability to identify the right questions to uncover the data to provide accurate, predictive, job specific findings. So we wrote the questions, resumed the beta and went about the engineering required to complete the development of this very powerful, very different assessment. As I reviewed the descriptors - the specific traits we would "measure" to reveal our findings - I realized that over the last several months, the PHD's at the personality testing company had gradually and subtly modified the descriptors enough so that we too would report what they were capable of measuring, rather than what we wanted to measure.
Believe it or not, our in-house team was able to accomplish in about one week of intensive work, what the team of PHD's couldn't complete in the last year and a half! Test answers in our third round appear to be coming in exactly where they should be and all of our questions are accurately driving the desired findings. Exciting stuff!
So now, when I explain why a personality assessment that wasn't built for sales, isn't predictive or sales specific enough, even when modified for sales, we have an 18 month research project that details, demonstrates, and proves, once and for all, that a personality assessment doesn't measure much more than the various dimensions of personality, and doesn't predict much more than some basic human behaviors. They just don't measure the concrete, job specific skills, competencies, capabilities and behaviors that we really need to understand about a salesperson's, sales manager's or Executive Manager's abilities.
Final Word - stay tuned for the March launch of what will be the most useful assessment to date for your Executive Management Team. I think you'll love it as much as I do.
(c) Copyright 2009 Dave Kurlan