The Golden Rule, despite being based upon what one might assume are good intentions, is fundamentally flawed.  It assumes that what makes me happy will also make you happy.  We’ve have been taught and retaught the Golden Rule so many times that we internally justify this behavior as right – maybe even righteous.

But have you ever worked with a “difficult” customer or co-worker?  And you treated him the same way you would like to be treated and all you did was create an adversary? Do unto a different person from you as you would like to have done unto you and the reaction you get might not be what you expected despite the best of intentions.

A better solution might be The Platinum Rule - “do unto others as THEY would like to have done.” An excellent tool to train and implement The Platinum Rule in your business is DISC. While often categorized as a self-development or even hiring tool, DISC behavioral styles positively and negatively affect customer service experiences. Businesses who use them effectively gain a competitive advantage.

Briefly, the four primary behavioral style are represented by the acronym DISC: 

• “D” represents driver, direct and determined,
• “I” represents influencing, inspiring and interacting,
• “S” represents stable, steady and supportive and
• “C” represents cautious, conscientious, and careful. 

Personality traits are often linked to job performance and used in identifying candidates who are the best fit for a job.  But a recent research papers seems to have correlated specific personality traits to retirement success.

According to a paper recently published by the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center, a team of researchers found conscientiousness, one of the factors in the Big Five personality model, to be more strongly associated with both lifetime earnings and wealth conditional upon earnings than any other of the Big Five traits. Previously, the personality psychology literature has identified conscientiousness as the personality trait most influencing academic achievement, job performance, marital stability, physical health, and even longevity. Consistent with these findings, These associations between personality and retirement success remain significant even when controlling for years of education, demographics, and measures of cognitive ability. These results imply that more conscientious individuals both have greater lifetime earnings and save more of those earnings prior to retirement.

“Both consumption and wealth increase with conscientiousness but wealth increases faster, indicating that more conscientious persons save more out of retirement resources,” the authors wrote.

Some additional key findings:

• Personality traits operate through economic resources and consumption levels and impact one’s adequacy of preparation for retirement.

• Individuals with higher levels of conscientiousness are more likely to be economically prepared for retirement, because of greater earnings and high saving.

• Neuroticism negatively affects wealth among married persons, particularly females, while conscientiousness positively affects wealth among both males and females, and openness positively affects wealth among females.

• Among single persons, and in contrast to our findings among married persons and the overall sample, conscientiousness doesn’t predict economic preparation for retirement.

• Neuroticism negatively affects preparation for retirement among both single males and single females, while extroversion negatively affects preparation for retirement among single males.

So what’s one to do if conscientiousness or any one of the factors implies you are at risk for poor retirement preparedness? 

Just as with professional development, the first step in recognizing if your personality will help or hurt career success is self-awareness. Complete a Five Factor assessment like PeopleClues, Prevue, or ASSESS to get a read on your behavior.

Next, follow the advice of Michael Hurd, the director of the Rand Center for the Study of Aging at the Rand Corp:  “Although it is hard to change our personality to become more productive, we do have the capability of modifying our spending behavior to get the right match [between our saving and spending.]”

He was unanimously applauded by his boss and peers for his strong work ethic, for “rolling up his sleeves,” carrying a big load, and his remarkable quickness and smartness when it came to working with numbers.

Bob’s also is a first class schmoozer and his ability to awe people with his charisma and aforementioned mastery of numbers and charisma has worked well for him.

Up until now.

Unfortunately the luster on Bob’s brilliance is beginning to dull. His star is falling. Both the CEO and BOD are beginning to worry about Bob’s ability to keep ahead of the growth and deal with an increasing load of responsibilities. In fact, they aren’t even sure he can keep pace because he is missing important deadlines more frequently. And his charisma is becoming a bit transparent. A few people are beginning to lose confidence and getting put off by his defensiveness when questioned about his approach or details he’s missed.

Bob is not the only high-potential superstar whose glow vaporized over time. With the pace of change accelerating, the complexity of roles and jobs growing, and the pressure on resources and results increasing, the skills and abilities that allowed many workers to rise up and dazzle management in the past now are barely distinguishable from the rest of the average Joe and Sue.

As a result, the combination of a changing marketplace and business climate has forced more and more companies to ask, “how do we know that the employee we have in place (or about to promote or hire) is the right person?” A corollary is then “can the employee be coached or are we expecting a pig to fly?”

Bob’s situation presents the perfect scenario to discuss how an employer can know if an investment in executive coaching will show a return on investment and/or how effective it might be.

An executive coach, retained by Bob’s employer, was retained to assess and mentor him. After receiving feedback from his boss and co-workers, Bob completed a package of executive assessments. As is the case so often, many of the areas in need of improvement can be directly linked back to personality traits, behavioral style, personal values, and general mental abilities. What follows is a brief summary about how specific feedback aligned nearly perfectly with areas for improvement desired by his employer.

The assessments revealed the following:

1. Comment: “moves from crisis to crisis” and “misses important deadlines.”

Bob’s nature is to keep busy and juggle lots of projects. These are positive characteristics and often rewarded excessively by managers. Unfortunately he has a low need to complete tasks and pay attention to details. Because he is very bright (revealed when assessing general mental abilities), Bob has been able to compensate earlier in his career. But as the role of the CFO expands and the complexity of the job increases, employees like Bob eventually reach their capacity and mistakes are made including missing critical deadlines.

2. Comment: “tends to miss the forest for the trees, missing the big picture…doesn’t always drill down enough.”

Poor strategic thinking, anticipation, and seeing the big picture can also be traced back to Bob’s personality traits and values. Bob simply doesn’t ask the right questions, enough questions, and/or go deep enough with due diligence. His inquiry goes only as far as he feels he needs to and then he moves on, sometimes relying on superficial evidence or unreliable sources. Not only is probing deep enough foreign to his DNA, Bob is not highly motivated to do so. His low Conceptual value is in the 40 percentile of the population – a challenge for someone like Bob whose role requires high level analysis and the consumption of a continuous stream of information . And the even lower importance he gives to Economics raises two critical questions: (1) Can Bob be motivated to change and give more attention to resourcefulness, details, and the bottom line; and (2) Is this firm a good match and the right place for Bob’s talent?

A final factor that must be weighed in assessing Bob’s potential to improve is his low criticism tolerance and even lower self-control. In other words, Bob tends to take comments, feedback, and even questions about his work personally. His behavioral style is such that he communicates out loud. Even if unintentional he might speak with thinking and as a result appears defensive, even if it’s unintentional.

Bob is typical of many managers and senior executives in today’s workforce. Past success is no longer the best predictor of future success. Increasing complexity, ambiguity, and change requires that the skills required by nearly every worker are more advanced, even if the worker is staying in the same job. For managers and professional salespeople, the bar is raised even higher and moving up daily. Identifying and assessing core traits, values, and abilities that might interfere with one’s future success or even derail a career as early as possible is more important than ever before.

Some employers use the resume as the first test.  But resumes are often not the product of the candidate but a document created courtesy of a third party. A typo-free resume offers little reliable data regarding a candidate’s ability to add and subtract, punctuate and use proper grammar, or take messages and jot down phone numbers accurately. In fact, the resume has become so polished that it is becoming more of a personal commercial to get an interview than an accurate representation of a candidate’s ability.

Other employers might use work sample tests asking candidates to file, sort, organize, or type a document.   Work samples offer a better test for accuracy skills but they still do not predict if and how the candidate might actually apply the skill on the job. In other words, functional skill tests are reliable tests of ability, but not if the candidate will actually use it.

Like many job requirements, assessing detail orientation and accuracy requires more insight than what an employer can glean from one interview question or one pre-employment test.

What follows are a list of different types of assessments that can accurately test for different dimensions of accuracy. The right test or combination of tests will depend on what exactly an employer needs to know, the complexity of the job, and how much it wants to invest before they hire. In other words, how significant a problem will it be if the candidate is hired and he misses details, makes mistakes, and has a mindset of “close is good enough.”

Functional skill tests.  Examples of these types of assessment might include math, grammar, sorting, filing, and software tests like Microsoft Word and Excel. The skills and knowledge required to do perform these tasks are often described as hard skills. There are right and wrong answers. The candidate either has the skill or doesn’t.  If he doesn’t, these skills can often be learned. That raises a critical question: what is more important when it comes to assessing accuracy – the skill or the attitude?  That is where additional testing comes into play. 

DISC behavioral tests.  This is one of the most popular assessment tools used in the workplace. It is an excellent predictor of how an employee approaches work and people. But despite many claims to the contrary, it does not accurately predict detail orientation or accuracy. What DISC does is predicts HOW an individual approaches problems, people, pace, and procedures.

For example, many users of DISC feel that a high C individual is good with details. But this is not always true – behavioral style only predicts a penchant for details not a skill. If the high C employee can’t spell, write clearly, or do math, then no level of energy will compensate for a lack of basic knowledge. The C in DISC represents a style that is energized by following the rules.  But having the desire does not ensure skill or ability.  Without basic skills, mistakes will be made regardless of the intentions and desires.

Likewise, the D and I styles may have the ability but their behavioral preferences may hijack their results.  The high I style often focuses more on the people interaction and less on the tasks at hand.  The high D style may also be skilled but their focus on results causes them to overlook the details.

The bottom line – DISC styles may enhance one’s performance when it comes to details and accuracy but it in no way predicts the skills, ability, or knowledge required.

Personality tests.  Conscientiousness is one of the personality traits assessed using the five-factor personality model.  Research has shown that the five-factor model is a reliable predictor of innate talent, an employee’s DNA of performance. But like DISC, personality tests do not predict functional skill or knowledge.  Psychometricians and psychologists however have broken down the conscientious trait into many subscales including detail orientation, task closure, dependability, adherence to rules, and so on. Basic knowledge is still essential but five-factor personality assessments when combined with functional skill tests provide a solid one-two combo for assessing aptitude and attitude.

General mental ability tests. When tasks become more complex or when time is limited, cognitive skills begin to play a bigger role in accurate behavior. Think of cognitive skills as the highway of information processing.  When traffic is normal, all goes well. But when information is coming in faster than one’s ability to process it, two things are likely to happen: (1) work doesn’t get done fast enough or (2) mistakes are made and accidents happen as the individual “speeds” up and rushes to get things done. Even with the right skills, right behavioral style, and right personality traits, low general mental abilities might affect an employee’s ability to produce mistake-free and timely results. 

So is it possible to accurately test candidates for accuracy?  Absolutely.  The best solution is a combination of functional skill tests plus one or more assessments including DISC, personality tests, and/or general mental ability tests. The best combination will depend on the nature of the work, the company culture, and the complexity of the job.

The right hiring decision must be based on a clear picture of your company and customers and understanding how to match the various puzzle pieces. A good job fit requires a person with the traits and motivation to sell but – and this is important – there must be a clean fit with the key stages in your sales process and culture.

How do you assess an individual’s ability to fit into your company? “One-size-fits-all” personality tests have inherent limitations. The best approach includes an assessment of some if not all of these five critical components:

• core personality,
• behavioral style,
• business motivators,
• sales skills, and
• cognitive ability.

It’s then important to discuss these components in the context of your company’s unique sales process and culture. Let’s begin with discussing your sales culture in these critical areas: lead generation, product knowledge and selling cycle. Now walk through a sampling of the questions that I ask my clients before designing a testing solution or setting up interview questions for them.

Getting the lead

First, and most important, I ask clients how the salesperson is expected to acquire new business. In other words, are you hiring new salespeople to catch the overflow of new business from an already busy sales force or a successful marketing campaign? Or, are you hiring them to increase market share at the expense of the competition? Maybe it’s a combination. The “best” sales fit will depend on the situation and your expectations.

The sales rep that is successful with cold-calling and lead generation may have very different skills from the sales rep that excels and sustaining client relationships. The former views prospects as people they simply haven’t met yet and welcomes the opportunity to make a connection. The relationship builder, on the other hand, may not be comfortable talking to a continual stream of strangers.

Here’s how it plays out. The cold caller thrills to the chase but may lose interest after he gets the sale. Relationship builders take the nurturing, and more time consuming, approach to gaining new business. It’s not that one style more effective. They both can be as long it meshes with your client’s buying style. Remember the puzzle? An ill-fitting piece simply won’t work.

Here’s another question. Do you expect sales staff to network? Not everyone is comfortable networking, nor are all sales reps skillful with this particular art.

People connect with other people differently. Just watch people walk into the room. Outgoing and assertive personalities make entrances, engaging everyone within earshot, almost announcing their arrival. Their collective mission is to meet as many people as possible. Contrast that behavior with reserved, introverted people. They scan the room looking for familiar faces and are relieved when someone makes eye contact.

Personality plays a huge role in determining when people will network and the degree of their success. If your business culture assumes salespeople will attend large events and expos to generate leads, hire people who are outgoing and group-oriented. They love that stuff. Hire a more reserved individual and you may be disappointed by that person’s performance in the large group settings but thrilled with how they make everyone comfortable in small groups and one-on-one presentations.

Questions you might ask before determining who will meet your expectations the best are:

• Does your company provide sales leads or are sales reps responsible for prospecting?
• How competitive is your market? Will this salesperson be building new relationships or attempting to grab market share from your competitors?
• Does your sales process require face-to-face meetings? Can your product or service be sold by phone or electronically through email or a website? (Extroverts prefer direct personal contact, introverts prefer voice mail and email.)

Is knowing what you don’t know important?

Let me start this section by way of example. Several years ago a high tech company retained my services to build its sales force. Previously, the company hired several “super-stars” from a company subsidiary that sold business phone systems, which we called “boxes.” The super-stars had a new assignment to sell consulting and networking services.

They failed miserably. Why? Because the sales culture shifted from a linear, boiler-plate system to one that was knowledge-based and subjective. When selling boxes, the make-or-break sales skills came down to persuasiveness and negotiation. The new assignment required bone deep product knowledge, listening skills, analytical ability, and keen ability to learn and think on the fly. These former super-stars didn’t have the key competencies to make the cross-over from product sales to solution selling.

Here are a few pre-hiring questions to determine how important product knowledge is for your sales staff:

• How complex is your product? Is previous experience and education necessary or can new hires be trained? Can the “right” personality succeed with proper coaching?
• How sophisticated and knowledgeable are your customers? (Knowledgeable customers respond best to sales staff with high cognitive ability.)
• Is the salesperson expected to keep up with competitive market forces and trends? Will you provide these market updates or is the salesperson expected to create his own information streams? Business values and motivators come into play at this juncture. Sales staff motivated by the conceptual value thrives on learning and problem solving while others, less motivated by this value, may prefer to be told only what they need to know.

The tortoise and the hare

Consider the length and complexity of your selling cycle. Sales for big-ticket capital items often take a year or more to close. Industries such as health care and government may have longer sales cycles.

Salespeople skilled with transactional sales and shorter sales cycles – the rabbits – become impatient when results are not immediate. On the other hand, relationship builders and consultative sales reps, the tortoises, become frustrated with what they perceive as the micromanagement of monthly sales quotas.

The sales cycle, compensation and benefit package, and personality affect a sales person’s chances of success. There are sales people with high tolerance for the swings between relative poverty and big payouts while others need economic stability, a regular paycheck with occasional incentives.

Remember, the sales person who ascends gloriously in one environment can fall precipitously in another. So, it pays for you, the employer, to match the personality with your culture, clients, and incentive package.

The following questions focus on a candidate’s persistence, patience, persuasion skills, motivation and cognitive ability.

• Are your sales transactional or consultative?
• Are you a low-cost or premium value provider?
• After what period of time would you expect a new hire to be making his or her numbers?

The final round

Yes, you too can have a championship sales force. But, it takes some up-front work from you to hire winners. A good boxer is much more than the most muscular, aggressive person with a will to win. Promoters know better than anyone that the right match for a contender is more than luck of the draw. The same is true for sales. Define your hiring process based on the need for lead generation, product knowledge, sales cycle and compensation specific to the job. Then, ring the bell and let the bout begin.

Southwest Airlines didn’t just decide one day to change the way passengers fly. At the heart of Southwest’s success is its business model and culture. “What a stupid idea” is what I’m sure executives at now defunct airlines TWA, Pan Am, and a slew of others thought when they first heard about Southwest Airlines. Look who’s laughing now!

Imagine yourself being the executive selected to tell your board of directors for the first time the plan to force passengers to become their own travel agent. “That will never work” must have been going through the board room at American, Delta, Northwest, US Airways and the like after they heard about it. But Southwest embraced the concept and decided to have passengers make reservations online and entice them with Internet only fares.

You then explain to the directors that first come, first serve for a ticket doesn’t reserve a seat. “We’re going to make them go back to our website 24 hours before departure time to retrieve their boarding pass,” you tell the directors. Finally you remind them that the boarding pass still doesn’t reserve the best seat. Initially Southwest  required passengers to get to the airport early to stand in front of their respective A, B, or C “cattle line.” A few years later, they required customers to check in exactly 24 hours before take-off. But passengers still don’t get to reserve a seat…just a place in line to select a seat after they board. Crazy idea when you think about it, isn’t it?

But who could have imagined that forcing people to be their own travel agent and board plane in cattle lines would not only be accepted but change the way people traveled. Southwest Airlines not only altered how people flew but has been the only profitable airline for over twenty-five years.

Another name synonymous with innovation has to be Apple, Inc., the company formerly known as Apple Computer. The name change represents who Apple really is: a culture of continuous innovation. Starting with the Mac, then the iPOD, and now the much iPAD and iPhone, Apple is always seeking the next new thing. Apple’s business is not products, it is innovation.

Dell, on the other hand, changed the way people bought and ordered computers and led the industry for years. But over time, all innovation gets commoditized. Dell stopped innovation – or at least it stopped innovating fast enough to stay ahead of the competition. Competitors copied the Dell model and Dell lost its edge. It failed to reinvent the exceptional customer experience it created.

Like Dell, core businesses are being disrupted by globalization, technology shifts, and new competitors. Business model innovation is essential to retaining a competitive position but that is simpler said than done. The scope of changing business models is larger and execution more complex.

Business model innovation is a perpetual quest for renewal. Complacency is a business killer. Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter in his book, A Sense of Urgency, why urgency is the antithesis of complacency. Urgency is becoming an organization’s most important asset. 

Kotter describes urgency as the combination of thoughts, feelings (gut level determination) and actual behavior (hyper-alertness to what’s going on). Urgent people come to work each and every day with a commitment to make something important happen. They emote a sense to other people that you’ve got to get going.

Absolutely essential for innovation are leaders who have both an innovative mind-set and sense of urgency. We’re finding a lot of leaders don’t have it. When they do, many of their managers don’t. The implications are enormous.

How does your management team stack up? Do your managers have what it takes to innovate and keep pace?

Just a few weeks ago, I emptied my garage and office of over a dozen CPUs, printers, monitors. The cargo area, back seat, passenger seat, floors of my SUV were filled with equipment and components. During the short drive to the local computer recycling center, I was struck by a strange thought: the similarity between these still working working-but-outdated computer hardware and many employees in jobs whose best days have passed.

The simple truth is these functional, reliable and hard-working computers were no longer able to keep up with the tasks I needed them to do – and when they did, it took too long. Booting up took 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes longer. The operating systems – you know the Windows “stuff” like Windows 98, Vista, and even XP – kept crashing. The CPUs took too long to process information. They couldn’t handle new software upgrades. The hard drives were full and the boards couldn’t support new ones. The modems needed to be replaced because good, consistent high-speed connections required new versions. And let’s not forgot the 15 inch b/w monitors. Need I go on?

That same resourceful philosophy for many of us, my friends, doesn’t stop with computers. Many workforces today are filled with loyal, dependable, hard working employees whose skills don’t match the needs of the organization anymore. It’s been reported that the skills for over 60% of all jobs are held by less than 20% of the population. In 1950, 60% of jobs required unskilled labor. Today, less then 15% of these jobs are unskilled and the number is falling fast.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not promoting a wholesale liquidation of employees. In fact, I’d suggest that many of these employees are working harder than ever and even improving their skills through training. The problem is that in today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing, no-room-for-waste environment, many of these same employees are just not keeping up with the increasing demands of the job. Why?

To function successfully in any given role, individuals need capability. Capability can be described as the ability of someone to handle particular levels of complexity and ambiguity. Predictors of employee capability can be narrowed down to four key indicators, represented by the acronym P-I-C-K.

P stands for Performance (or Pace)

To compete in today’s fast-paced, competitive markets, employees need to produce more in less time with less waste. Referring back to my computer analogy, employees who run on a 386, 486 or Pentium processor can still get the work done; it just takes them longer. If time isn’t a factor, then working faster is a non-issue. But few businesses can afford to ignore drags on productivity. When working harder than necessary to get less than optimal output, these employees, like older computers, throw off a lot of heat, too – aka “waste energy.” While the older processors were next-generation at one time, today they are relics, unable to keep up with higher expectations and more demands.

How many employees do you have that are still working with yesterday’s processors when their responsibilities require speeds only available with 3 GHz or more, possibly duo- or quad-core speed for more effective multi-tasking? (For you non-techies, that’s the equivalent of walking fast vs. driving a NASCAR!)

I stands for Innovation

Innovation fosters growth. Innovative people do more than just throw out new ideas, the proverbial crap against the wall, and hope something sticks. Innovators identify critical constraints and find solutions to relieve bottlenecks. They see the opportunity in the “white space,” where others just see what lives in the here-and-now.

High-performing innovators are also capable of grasping how multiple outcomes might interact with each other. Innovation requires employees, primarily managers, to thrive in a constantly changing and ambiguous world. That in turn requires employees who take risks but continually exercise good judgment.

How effective are your managers at encouraging and stimulating innovation? How innovative are your employees? Do they have the ability to get beyond obstacles and grow your business?

C stands for Complexity

History may have a habit of repeating itself but life sure seems to get more complicated every day. Analytical and complex-problem-solving skills are critical competencies in today’s ambiguous, paradoxical and confusing business environment. These skills are defined by cognitive capacity. Cognitive capacity is a measure of mental horsepower, the ability to unravel complex situations, extrapolate consequences, and apply the information in making effective and timely decisions.

Unfortunately, just like yesterday’s computer being incredibly inefficient at running a complex spreadsheet or watching a DVD, many employees aren’t equipped with the capacity to perform simultaneous complex tasks efficiently or effectively. The ability to multi-task and work quickly are also hard-wired, intrinsic skills. Like your old computers, sometimes upgrading is just too expensive. After all is said and done, what you have is an old machine working harder and faster but still putting out mediocre performance.

Do your employees have the horsepower and capacity to decipher and unravel your business’s toughest problems at a pace equal or faster than the competition?

K stands for Knowledge

The days of graduation signaling the end of learning are long gone. Lifelong continuous learning is more than just a buzz-phrase. It’s the catalyst for innovation and competitive advantage. Knowledge is more than information. It’s more than academic degrees, technical certifications, and years of experience. Knowledge is taking what you’ve learned and experienced and applying it in ways you never thought imaginable.

How effective is your culture at attracting and supporting employees passionate about continuous learning? How well do your best and brightest apply the knowledge in effective and productive ways?

Following the 4 Indicator PICK sets a strong foundation for evaluating the preparedness of your workforce, your leadership and production bench-strength, and leadership growth potential.

How prepared is your business to attract and retain employees who are the best PICK? What tools and assessment methods are you using to evaluate which employees will be able to perform and innovate, deal with complexity, and keep up with the necessary knowledge?

The first step in effective staffing depends upon identifying the proper fit.  Traditionally most hiring systems and processes focus on job fit – the match between a person’s abilities and the demands of the jobs.  Job descriptions, classified ads, and interview questions target functional/technical skills, education requirements, and past experience.  That worked well for decades.  Once hired, an employee stayed with a single employee– often doing the same job day to day for decades.  Employers valued employees and treated them like family. Employees were rewarded with a paycheck and tenure in exchange for a hard day’s work. Things like team fit, culture fit, and vocation fit were secondary.

But the definition of work has changed. Job requirements have changed as well, transitioning from a world when brawn and physical skills were as much as an asset as were brains and knowledge.  Lifelong “permanent” jobs have all but disappeared. Careers are in a state of constant flux. Job requirements are more complex and the skills and abilities required to do them change regularly. Past experience isn’t as effective a predictor of future success as it once was.  And employees with the right skills are demanding more than just a paycheck. 

Employers who limit employee screening and selection to the person-job fit dimension exclusively inevitably experience high rates of employee dissatisfaction, low employee engagement, and higher rates of turnover and termination. Consequently, three other dimensions of employee fit must be considered before hiring a job candidate and promoting an employee.

The person-team fit (or group fit) between the employee and his co-workers and supervisor has grown in importance over the past decade. In many organizations the fit between an employee and his co-workers and clients is even more critical than between the person and the work. “Hire attitude, train skills” is an increasingly popular hiring mantra.

Good person-team fit means that an individual fits and appreciates the different interpersonal styles, goals, and skills of team members. Because teamwork, interpersonal communication and collaboration can be as critical these days as functional skills, many organizations now place a high value during the screening and selection process on identifying job candidates who will fit on the team as well as do the job.

Many employers are also placing a growing importance on person-organization fit, particularly those organizations with strong missions and commitments to a purpose.  Person-organization fit is the fit between an individual’s values, beliefs, and personality and the values, competencies, and culture of the organization.  Examples of organizational values and competencies include integrity, work ethic, competitiveness, and citizenship.   This is a challenging factor for many employers to implement.  Finding an ample supply of skilled workers is difficult enough these days.  Turning down a highly skilled candidate with a good person-job fit because he or she doesn’t share the same values and beliefs of the organization requires a lot of guts and commitment. But ignoring the organization fit of employees often results in poor performance and turnover.

A fourth and final dimension of fit is person-vocation fit – a fit between an individual’s interests, abilities, values, and personality and the occupation itself.  While most employees have chosen an occupation long before they are hired, a growing and critical opportunity exists for organizations committed to effective staffing.  Companies that want to develop their own leaders or build a talent pipeline using the current workforce may be able to use an employee’s vocational interests to determine good fit.  Retaining skilled and valued employees would be easier if employees matched the competencies, goals, and interests of workers with the rewards and requirements of the occupation.

Possible Assessments to Measure Dimensions of Fit

Person-job fit

                Cognitive skill tests

                Technical, functional, and office skill tests

                Job knowledge

                Previous experience

                Personality related to performing job tasks

Person-group fit

                Team work skill test

                Personality related to team work, collaboration, communication

                Behavioral style and values assessment to evaluate compatibility and/or sources of conflict

Person-organization fit

Values assessment to evaluate alignment between personal motivators and the organization’s purpose, goals, and values.

Person-vocation fit

                Aptitude tests

                Interest tests

                Values assessment

                Abilities test

                Personality related to demands of jobs within an occupation

The definition of work and consequently, the definition of a job is changing. The evolution from agrarian and industrial age jobs to service and knowledge work is nearly complete, thanks to the help of the latest recession. The ability to use your “head” as well as your hands, not one or the other, is a requirement today. And yet, we have graduation rates hovering around 70 percent for many high schools and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S.T.E.M.) scores falling well behind dozens of nations. Today knowledge is power and too many workers simply don’t have the mojo.

Employees in new jobs don’t “go to work” … and if they do, they don’t work in permanent full-time positions. They work in part-time jobs, often working for several employers at the same time. But unlike the past when working part-time was a stepping stone to full-time employment or a means to propping up personal finances, part-time work in the future will be by design. Skilled workers will work remotely, simultaneously interacting with different teams in different places and even collaborating on different projects. People with the right skill sets can do that. The contingent worker, or “just-in-time” worker, will become the norm, especially in lower skill jobs. The less versatile the employee, the more expendable he or she becomes.

People also have long complained that they have been swamped by too much information. In 1917 a manager of a Connecticut manufacturing plant complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results, and money is spent.” Despite his objections, technologies like the telephone supported economies build around mass production. Today technology and globalization has created a seismic shift from quantitative change to qualitative differences. Economies, once driven by whoever owned the machinery and raw materials, is now being outflanked by the new raw material of business –data. Joe Hellerstein at the University of California at Berkeley, calls it the “industrial revolution of data.” The Economist called it the “data deluge.” Keeping up with all the new information being created is difficult enough. Analyzing it and extracting useful information is harder still. Ignoring it is economic suicide.

This revolution requires a new skill worker – one who has the ability to process large volumes of uninterrupted data and extract valuable information from it. Gordon in a recent issue of The Futurist called for a “[a] new age [that] will require the reinvention of the education-to-employment system.”

In the meantime, employers seeking qualified workers will face unprecedented challenges to recruit and retain them. And our communities will  be wrestling with the societal, personal, and economic impact of prolonged joblessness.

The reasons for this poor fit range from “not pulling his weight” or “continually creating tension with her co-workers.” But rather than single out these employees for improvement, managers want to circumvent addressing the problem head-on, hoping that a few hours of team building training will enlighten the disenchanted so they see the light and experience that “A-HA” moment. This conversations occurs so often that I can recall only one time in nearly 15 years in the business that an inquiry about team building was actually prompted when everyone was already working collaboratively and cooperatively. Every other request seems to be prompted by a conflict between one or more individuals and the manager or co-workers; and the team building event itself was a covert attempt to avoid addressing the real problem. Unfortunately masquerading conflict resolution as team building is ineffective, time-consuming, and costly.

Addressing conflict effectively started with identifying which of three potential sources of the conflict is causing the rift or disengagement: interpersonal, functional, or intrapersonal.

Interpersonal, or me-you, conflicts reprsent the stereotypical conflict – I don’t like something about you and you don’t like something about me. If the source of the conflict is just a problem in how one employee does his/her job vs. how another employee or manager expects the job to be done, these situations are often easily resolved by using the DISC assessments. One of the biggest benefits gained from DISC is that employees easily grasp the concept that each of us has a preferred way to approaching problem solving, interacting with others, pacing ourselves, and following procedures. They also learn that these preferences are not good or bad, right or wrong – they are just different and those differences create conflicts. Understanding differences in how we approach tasks and intereact with people is the best first step at minimizing and resolving conflict. I often hear after such an intervention that “I didn’t realize how I was coming across.” When one person accepts tha fact that another’s style is not an attempt to get under their skin but merely an expression of the way he communicates, many interpersonal conflicts disappear.

A second type of conflict is functional, or job related. This occurs when the way management expects the job to be done conflicts with the way an employee prefers to do it. For instance, management may expect supervisors to offer ongoing positive feedback and to engage employees by coaching and personal meetings. The introverted manager however may prefer to communicate by email or memos and doesn’t see the point in thanking employees for a job well done – “that’s what paychecks are for.” Conflicts between an individual and the expectations of the job usually result in de-motivation and burnout. Unfortunately along the way, these individuals create a lot of collateral damage. Identifying the behavioral and personality requirements of the job and matching an individual’s style and personality to the criteria minimizes the risk of functional conflicts.

The third type of conflict is intrapersonal, or me-me, results when an individual has internally conflicting behavioral styles, values and personality traits. For instance, let’s say an employee prefers to complete what he/she starts before beginning something else (the Steady behavioral style)> But he also has a short fuse and is energized by addressing problems quickly (the Direct style). Just like two people with these conflicting styles who are forced to work together, a single indiviudal can have an internal conflict. The best solution is helping the individual understand his/her own style and personality and coaching them in ways to modify their work and interpersonal style. The result when handled properly is a less stressed, more productive employee.

Resolving or preventing conflict begins with individual assessment. This immediately exposes the root cause of any internal or external tension and focuses a manager’s energy and resources into improving performance instead of dancing around the problem. In addition to different behavioral styles, personal values and motivators create conflict. Like behavioral style, values are neither good or bad, right or wrong. But different personal values (or worldviews) are a common source of workplace conflict. The good news is that understanding how DISC behavioral styles and individual values work can help individuals improve performance and job satisfaction and assist managers in building effective teams and improving productivity.

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