How Your Business Can Benefit from Talent Optimization

Do you feel like your business is in a slump? There is often a lot of finger-pointing when a business is underperforming. Perhaps your operations strategy is inefficient. Maybe your sales team is lagging. Or it might even be that a fundamental lack of leadership is plaguing your organization. If your business is not moving forward at a clip, it might be time to dig a little deeper and look past the symptoms to zero in on the likely cause: the lack of employee optimization and alignment.

Think about those sluggish sales. Is your team performing at an optimum level? If not, why? Are there others that would be more suited for the sales position? Does your sales team embrace the value of your offering? Do they possess the “selling chip” required to close deals?

Let’s keep digging, because a struggling business is not just due to underperforming sales. Again, that is a symptom. How is your employee turnover? How many bad hires have you made in the last year? How productive are individuals at a molecular level, departments at a broader level, and leadership at the highest level?

If your answers to these questions are less than ideal, there is probably a common denominator among these underperformances. And it has less to do with implementation than with people. Most of your business success troubles likely land squarely on the shoulders of something called a talent gap.

What’s a Talent Gap?

Talent gap refers to?the disparity between the skills required to successfully perform a specific job and the skillset the employee you hired to do that job actually possesses. Talent gaps can exist in your most entry level intern to the highest leadership role in your business. The tougher the labor market, the more likely your business is negatively impacted by misalignment and talent gaps.

Ask yourself if any of the following sound like your current business dynamic:

• Your employees lack the behaviors or abilities to successfully perform their jobs.
• Your managers don’t seem to connect with the team and they lack critical employee development skills.
• Your departments or teams tend to be lone wolves and consistently fail to communicate.
• Your employees have no real connection with the company culture you envision.

Regardless of the way talent gaps are popping up in your business, they can each be alleviated – all or in part – by talent optimization.

Explaining Talent Optimization

Talent optimization is a strategic approach to ensure your business is leveraging the right people in the right jobs. It is hiring and retaining those employees who add value. It is knowing that your employees can work collaboratively. It is creating team alignment in achieving the goals of your business.

There are many approaches to talent optimization. At The Alternative Board (TAB) one way we help ensure talent optimization in our own businesses, as well as those of the TAB Members we work with, is through DISC and Talent Insights Assessments.

What Is DISC?

According to TTI Success Insights, a leading provider of DISC assessments, “DISC is?an assessment that measures four separate factors: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. Put simply: the DISC assessment measures how a person does what they do. The DISC profile creates a language around observable behavior, which in turn improves communication, engagement, and self-development.”

At TAB, we believe that DISC is such an important tool for talent optimization that we request every new TAB Member take a Talent Insights Assessment, which then generates a comprehensive report. Almost without exception, TAB Members find DISC extremely helpful in recognizing their own communication styles and behavioral defaults. Many often request their leadership teams take the assessment as well. We then debrief this business owner and their entire team on how to best leverage everyone’s talents and improve communication throughout the organization.

By gaining insight into employees’ behavioral tendencies, motivators and communication preferences, business owners are better able to leverage talents and mitigate challenges throughout their team. Someone who rates high in D (dominance) is probably ill-suited for a highly collaborative role. An employee who is high in C (compliance) might not be the dynamic leader you require - and the position might be better aligned with someone who is a high I (influence).

If you think that DISC might be a smart tool for talent optimization in your business, feel free to reach out. I can tell you firsthand that it is a great start.