The Value of Assessments

“Coaching without assessments should be considered malpractice.” – Bill Bonnstetter

I love assessments. I have always been a data kind of guy — data that can be turned into information and information that can be used to resolve problems. Objective information that comes from the source. How do you know whether you’ve improved unless you have a baseline of where you currently are? Assessments give you that baseline. Assessments provide data pertaining to a situation, organization, team, or person. It’s the objectivity that’s important. We are all biased in one way or another and, in every situation, our biases affect our decisions in how we hire, treat, coach, and generally work with others.

If you are a business owner, executive, mid-level manager, HR professional, or recruiter, then assessments are important to you, or at least they should be. Let's talk about the types of assessments I've used and ask you a few questions to see whether they might be valuable to you.

Staff Coaching Assessments – What do you use currently to develop your staff? Do you know what motivates your employees? Most managers think that the only motivation they need is to dangle the money carrot. Unfortunately, not everyone is motivated by money. Do you know how they solve problems or interact with others? Do you know how competent they are or what skills they possess?

How do you identify their soft skills? How do you know the best way to communicate with them? And if you don’t know these things, how do you know that they are best suited for the jobs that they are currently performing? If you're an executive, how do you know whether your leadership team possesses what you and your business needs?

Imagine being able to have your team take an assessment that would identify these things. Wouldn’t it make your job and their jobs easier and wouldn’t it produce a more efficient and effective team for you?

Job Benchmarking Assessments – When you hire someone, what do you look at? If you’re like many, you have a resume to look at, maybe a LinkedIn profile, and your notes from the interview or interviews. Does that give you enough information to be able to know that the candidate can do the job and will fit in with your team? The answer is no. You have some of the information, but not all of the information. You go by your gut instinct when you hire people and that's where your hiring bias comes in. They look like they have the experience. They interviewed well and they seem like they would fit in, but you really don’t know how well they will do until they are actually on the job.

Studies have shown that it costs upwards from $30,000 to hire a mid-level employee. Add to that the cost of training once they are on the job and the cost to let them go if they don’t work out.

Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you could identify another piece of the puzzle before hiring a candidate? What if you could identify what an idea candidate would look like and then measure those candidates against that benchmark? Wouldn’t that help to identify the best candidate for the position and potentially save you thousands in hiring and replacement costs?

Stress Assessments – Everyone says they’re stressed at work, it’s just part of the job. Companies waste millions of dollars each year as the result of stress-related absences. Wouldn’t you like to avoid those absences or at least mitigate them as much as possible? Do you really want to take a chance of losing some of your top talent?

What if you could make some minor modifications to specific areas within your company, organization, or group that would reduce the stress levels of your employees? You can. But first you have to find out what’s stressing them out. Wouldn’t it be good to know whether it’s job stress, organization stress, control stress, manager stress, or something else?

Sales Coaching Assessments – Have you ever seen a sales person let go because they weren’t producing? Have you ever heard someone say that the particular person was good, but they just couldn’t sell? How many times did the company or the manager try to discover in which part of the sales process this particular person was weak? Probably not too often. It’s easier to let them go and replace them. The problem with that kind of thinking is that you never get to the root cause. Finding perfect sales people is not an easy task. Developing sales people into better sales people is much easier.

What if you could identify where they were strong and where they needed help? Wouldn’t it be a good thing from a sales training aspect to have people who were really proficient in one aspect of the sales process coach those who were a bit weaker in that area? Wouldn’t it help the entire sales team and the company.

Organizational Design Assessments – Have you ever had a 360° survey done on yourself to help you identify what all those around you perceive your strengths and weaknesses are? What about an employee or customer feedback survey? Did you ever use the information to improve your managers, organization, products, or services? Have you ever surveyed using Net Promoter Score to identify which customers are likely to refer you to a friend or colleague?

Wouldn’t information about your management team be vital to ensuring that they were effective managers and coaches? Wouldn’t information about your employees be vital to retaining them? Wouldn’t product and service information be important to resolving customer issues and improving your products and services?

I love assessments. I believe in the old adage, you never know until you find out. Assessments help you find out. You can't fix something you don't measure. Assessments help you measure.

About the Author — Ron Feher is a C12 Chair in Orange County, CA where he helps business owners build great businesses for a greater purpose. Ron is a certified professional analyst with TTI Success Insights?. He utilizes their assessments to help companies hire and retain top talent and improve team effectiveness and efficiency. He also does Career Coaching as an outreach (#givingback) and is a certified consultant through Career Direct as well You can contact Ron directly at [email protected] or (949-466-0943). @RonFeher