Culture, Style, and Fit: Why Teams Need a Leadership Personality Test

Gallup has reported that only one-fifth of U.S. employees feel engaged at work, and that engaged employees have 42% lower stress than actively disengaged employees. Team leaders need to possess the skills to help build a thriving workplace culture that ensures their team feels directly supported.

Having a leadership gap like this can cost you both money and morale, and if your hiring funnel still uses gut instinct, you may be liable to fall foul of this danger too, so what’s the way around it?

Below, we discuss how a leadership personality test can:

• Discover red flags early
• Reduce decision time by weeks
• Cut replacement costs
• Offer a summary of a person’s capabilities

Discover how to track and analyze elements such as cultural fit and leadership style with data that you can share with others, and ensure that you get the best people for the job on board.

The existence of a single bad leader in your business can trigger significant costs in terms of:

• Exits and rehiring
• Lost productivity
• Skill retraining
• Client churn
• Anxiety and trust issues

Contact center company ICMI recently revealed that as many as 82% of workers actively seek new employment due to toxic leadership, and that each poor leader can cost a company up to $126,000 per year. As such, you need a way to quickly analyze anyone who might want to join your team, and this is where personality tests come in.

Such a test can provide valuable insights into a person’s integrity long before you extend an offer letter. You can then quantify every element of a potential hire, including areas of improvement, such as:

• Key strengths
• Stress triggers
• Areas for improvement
• Reaction to challenges

Using an online dashboard, such as the one offered by the Elite-level package from Success Performance Solutions, you can obtain a manager-fit score in minutes rather than days, enabling HR to move much faster without guesswork.

The testing doesn’t have to be a one-and-done thing either. You could even use it as an ongoing testing method to determine whether managers should receive new training. Alternatively, reward those who display key management styles that you wish to emulate by linking these assessments to payroll, ensuring they receive the rewards they need to prevent them from moving to other locations.

The culture within your office is an ongoing and always-shifting concept. It requires more than just posters to improve, something that many companies do not understand. Understanding that your leadership exemplifies the culture you want is a crucial part of that.

Working with Success Performance Solutions, you can rank potential candidates based on where they align with your business’s core principles, including in areas such as:

• Safety-consciousness
• Customer obsession
• Business-positive mindset
• Sales-oriented thinking

These objective culture-fit scores can help you avoid the creep of bias when someone measures “fit” informally and starts to impart their own views on the process. You can also ensure that your expectations related to culture are communicated before someone even joins your business by informing them of what you expect in a manager during the hiring process.

Tracking this process can help you achieve a faster onboarding effort, as those joining the company are more invested in its success. Additionally, it can ensure that they remain for a longer period, as they feel a sense of belonging.

Many testing systems utilize the acronym DISC to help leaders understand the behaviors they should prioritize. While not all tests utilize these data points, they help provide insights to you and your team, communicating areas where individuals need to adjust their management style.

The elements of DISC are:

Understanding a potential new leader’s team leadership styles can give you insights into how they will:

• Conduct meetings
• Offer feedback
• Make decisions
• Encourage productivity
• Manage risks

Each of these elements is a core aspect of your efforts to resolve complex tasks. The leader you choose needs to be able to execute the goals of your business smoothly and react to existing processes, whether successes or bottlenecks, in a way that ensures you can maintain high quality and productivity.

Among groups of leaders, such as a senior leadership team, it can even be advantageous to share DISC information. Offering one another DISC maps can help you all anticipate each other’s likely reactions to any given situation, thereby avoiding conflict. Doing this can be especially useful when opposite styles (such as Dominance vs Steadiness) interact, encouraging people to find a third party if necessary.

Using SPS Elite pre-employment test packages, you can blend many different tests into a single session. Doing so avoids the potential issues that arise from candidate fatigue while providing you with as much data as possible.

These structured assessments give you a plethora of data with which you can start to analyze the qualities of any applicant and get scores related to their capabilities within minutes of them completing each step. You can even set up automated systems to automatically send polite exit emails to people who fail to pass a step due to not meeting your requirements.

When you have all the data from the test, you can then create a model defining exactly what criteria you have for applicants. You can weigh these models against specific criteria, or even between hard and soft skills, to ensure you focus on the right areas that befit your attitudes and values.

Success Performance Solutions’ dashboard can then visualize all this data in a straightforward style to help you see at a glance which candidates match your criteria before passing the data on to a hiring panel along with the applicant’s combined scores.

Academy to Innovate HR recently discussed the fact that the average company in the United States spends around $4k and 24 working days to hire a single new employee. You don’t have the time or money to waste, and so many of the key steps you need to take with leaders are to:

• Retain them
• Train them to succeed
• Discover which supervisors have potential
• Ensure they remain active and engaged

Regular reassessments, using all the data you have collected, can help you track the success of efforts to coach new leaders and monitor the closure of their skill gaps. Linking this testing trend data to your business KPIs can show you how your efforts directly impact your team’s output and success.

Even if not all the leaders you review are ones you hire, having key data such as this available means that the effort is not wasted with each hiring cycle. Instead of discarding the learning you have done, you can keep the data on file for each of these applicants. Then, if another opportunity arises, you can review what you already know about them and reach out.

In these cases, you can even investigate to see if people have up-skilled in the time between applications. As you do not need to check old data, you can reduce the cost of external searches by only looking for the areas in which people have improved. You can then get people onboarded faster and avoid lengthy downtime.

Bad leadership drains your company’s profits. However, knowing that you have the data to back up a well-chosen leadership team means that you can instead have the assurance that you are moving in the right direction. Use a leadership personality test to align managers with your company culture, knowing that you can rely on them to drive growth.

Success Performance Solutions has 30 years of experience in helping companies identify and recruit leaders. We commit ourselves to each task, and our 90% retention rate speaks for itself. So, get in touch to learn more about what we can do for you.