PXT Helps Financial Firm Match Bankers to Job

Companies suffering from low worker productivity need to investigate how well their employees match their job duties. One financial services organization in the Southeast, facing a productivity problem, conducted a study to examine the relationship between employee performance and job match to the ProfileXT^®. What they learned has armed them to better select productive employees.

Participants
The company used 36 mortgage bankers to help examine the problem of low productivity on the job. Leaders evaluated each banker's performance, using a sales goal ratio and a supervisor’s performance rating. Supervisors gave top performers a 1, average performers a 2 and marginal performers a 3. Of the 36, the company rated 11 as top performers. The average top performer met 97.2 percent of his/her sales goal.

Nine bankers ranked in the 2, or average, position, and 16 ranked as marginal. The average marginal performer met 32.7 percent of his/her goal.
 
Job Match
With the help of ProfileXT, the company developed a job match pattern for the position of mortgage banker that described the attributes of top performers. ProfileXT scores of the top performing employees helped create the pattern. Next, leaders matched all 36 bankers to this pattern. After reviewing employee ProfileXT; job match percentages, they selected of 87 percent as the benchmark to best identify top performing employees.

Results
Seven of the 11 mortgage bankers that the company ranked in the top performer category were correctly identified as such by the pattern. Only four of the 16 marginal performers were incorrectly identified as top performers by the pattern.

That means that of the 11 ranking as top performers, seven met or exceeded the 87 percent benchmark. Of the remaining 25 average and marginal performers, only five met or exceeded the 87 percent benchmark. Thus, the ProfileXT efficiently helped identify top performers.  

Furthermore:

• The average sales goal ratio for those who met or exceeded the job match percentage benchmark was 76.1 percent.
• The average sales goal ratio for those who did not meet or exceed the job match percentage benchmark was 48.9 percent.

Summary
Although this organization’s top performers made up less than one third of the total sample of mortgage bankers, more top performers (seven) who were matched were able to meet or exceed the job match percentage benchmark than both the average marginal performers combined (five).

By selecting candidates based on the overall match of the ProfileXT, organizations such as this one are better able to increase productivity by identifying those likely to succeed. The company now uses 87 percent as the benchmark to predict performance in the mortgage banker position.
 

 Putting the Puzzle Pieces Where They Fit

If your workforce resembles that of most organizations, many different kinds of people are toiling under one roof. In one area, you have a person striving for better pay and benefits working next to someone for whom the pay is secondary to the job duties. Nearby, an employee struggles to balance work and home life. And yet another worker on the same team is looking for a new position because he thrives on change and is seeing the same old tasks every day.

Unless you know your workers' differences, the music they make together may sound more like a cacophony than a symphony.

Profiles Performance Indicator™ (PPI) to the rescue. This key assessment measures the behavior of individuals and the impact of their actions on your organization's success. The PPI helps you understand each person's attributes, which allows you to motivate and manage more efficiently. Furthermore, it can help you reduce conflicts in personality and style that get in the way of problem solving.

PPI tells you:

• Whether the employee is self-motivated or requires external cues
• How he or she is likely to perform in job-related competencies
• How he/she responds to job stress, frustration and conflict

Two reports come with PPI – one for the manager and one for the employee. The manager's report contains essential information about productivity, quality of work, initiative, teamwork, problem solving, adapting to change, response to stress and conflict, work motivation and motivational energy. It offers the manager a way to coach and motivate better, and provides specific, individualized suggestions for working more productively with each person. 

The employee report provides feedback – information about performance and ideas for professional growth. It helps the worker understand his on-the-job attitudes and behaviors. The report also offers a guide to better communication and cooperation with coworkers.

Leading the organizations of today and tomorrow requires knowledge that yesterday's leaders did not need. Think of managing today as trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with millions of tiny pieces. You cannot force the pieces together; you must examine each one to see where each fits in the picture. Your goal is not to finish the puzzle, because it is ever-changing; your goal is to keep putting the pieces where they fit.

What Goes Around *

See Your Managers' Strengths from Every Angle

A senior manager announces his decision to move to a competitor and the senior management team convenes a crisis-management meeting to figure how the organization will survive. Meanwhile, for the rest of the team, it's party time! The champagne is flowing; everyone's wearing funny hats, blowing noisemakers, and toasting their good fortune. The topic du jour is "With that clown gone, maybe now we can get on with business."

What happened? How can someone so valued by senior management work so badly with the troops on the ground? The reality is most senior managers have no awareness of how they or their fellow managers perceive them throughout their organizations – even at a time when so much is spoken about achievement of corporate goals through team-based efforts. No wonder that more than 30 percent of all people changing jobs are doing so to get away from their bosses. They're not leaving their jobs – they're leaving their managers! This sort of disaster can happen only in an environment where the performance of management is appraised using traditional boss-down appraisals, with performance of managers assessed only by their direct bosses. This traditional approach means that the views of those who most directly experience the effectiveness (or otherwise) of a manager's performance – peers and direct reports – are never tapped. If your success depends to any extent upon your team, that's just not acceptable any more.

Multi-Rater Feedback
Modern business has rendered the traditional boss-down appraisal extinct, and a more appropriate approach to assessing management competencies and performance has emerged. That new approach is Multi-Rater Feedback, and Profiles Checkpoint is an excellent example of this new model.

Every year, more than 250,000 managers worldwide use the Profiles Checkpoint Multi-Rater Feedback System – a system that provides managers and leaders with an opportunity to receive an evaluation of their job performance from the people around them – their boss, their peers (fellow managers), and their direct reports (the people whose work they supervise). From this feedback, managers can compare the opinions of others with their own perceptions, positively identify their strengths, and pinpoint the areas of their job performance that need improvement.

The Profiles Checkpoint process is concerned with a manager's job performance in eight universal leadership and management competencies, and 18 skill sets:
 

How Does it Work?
Each participant completes an evaluation – a process that takes about 15 minutes. Participants are guaranteed anonymity (except for the boss) and urged to be honest and objective in their responses. Participants complete their feedback via the Internet, or on paper if desired, and results from all participants are compiled in a report that is returned to the manager.

Checkpoint reports have colorful graphs and useful charts, as well as narrative descriptions of the results, to help the manager to read, understand and effectively use the data for self-development. The report has a special personal-growth section that coaches the manager and helps improve performance in development areas.

The Checkpoint report also encourages managers to link directly into an online system called Checkpoint SkillBuilder, which takes them through the step-by-step process of developing a comprehensive and personalized development plan. Read more about the Checkpoint Skillbuilder system.

Round and Round…
The upshot is a more detailed and objective assessment of a manager's strengths, and of any areas where additional development might be required. This assessment then forms the basis of a development plan between managers and their bosses – whereas the managers are fully aware of the dynamics of their relationships with the people around them, they are also effectively locked into the organization by the commitment of the organization to their ongoing skill development.

After a period of six or 12 months, the process is run again; the effectiveness of the development plan is assessed; and new development goals are set for the following period.

Multi-Rater Feedback vs. Boss-Down Appraisals
There are several reasons managers at all levels are eagerly embracing this approach to performance appraisal.

Equitable
For the manager being appraised, Multi-Rater appraisals differ from boss-down appraisals in the same way that judge and jury courts differ from "hanging-judge" courts. Managers benefit from a wide variety of feedback upon their actual job performance, and, to be deemed top-performing managers, are no longer solely dependent upon the extent to which they have developed a good rapport with their direct boss.

Proven Effectiveness
For the appraising boss, a positive change is more likely when an appraisal draws upon multiple sources trusted by the manager. Multi-Rater appraisals have been shown to be more effective than boss-down appraisals in driving a manager to make necessary behavioral changes or to improve management skills. If your boss says you need some improvement in some particular area, you may think, "What would she know?" or explain it away as a personality thing. If, however, 11 different people of your choosing – people with whom you work closely and whose views you trust and value – send you the same message, you really have to listen.

Team Motivation
Multi-Rater Feedback systems also have a positive team-building effect. Research has proven the motivating value of the exercise for those involved as reviewers. Your people are sent a clear message that their opinions are valued, and they can help effect positive change in the management where required. Traditional reviews have given way to this much more effective tool for management development, as Fortune 500 organizations are mandating their use.

Used regularly as an integral part of a strategic development plan, 360-degree appraisals can lead to more consistent management development, better alignment of corporate goals with personal-development objectives, more open communication, and better team balance.  

*From the book 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved. Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint permission. 

PXT Spotlights Team Leaders at JPS Health Network EDITOR’S NOTE: Judith B. Redd, a 19-year employee with JPS Health Network, is executive director of JPS Institute for Learning in Fort Worth. The Institute is using the ProfileXT® to measure leadership bench strength and to help identify people who can lead organization-wide teams.  Q. What does the JPS Institute for Learning do? A. JPS Institute for Learning is the strategic foundation for building a learning organizational culture at JPS.  We provide continuing education and learning for 4,000 plus employees, physicians, students, contractors and volunteers in the JPS workforce.  We also develop and implement organizational development initiatives and manage career development programs. Q. Why did the JPS Institute for Learning begin using Profiles assessments? A. We wanted an assessment to identify our current leadership bench strength and to help improve our hiring decisions for new leaders. We chose the ProfileXT. Q. Why did you choose Profiles International for your assessments? A.  We liked the idea of the national database of existing patterns for leadership jobs and the ability to customize patterns to meet our job-specific criteria.  We also liked the fact that the database includes jobs in healthcare and other industries. Q. How do you see organizations emphasizing work teams? A. Organizations are looking at teams as a way of moving forward on mission-critical initiatives and operational goals. The basic concept is that teams bring out the best ideas available and help to keep everyone marching in the same direction on major initiatives. Q. How is JPS Health Network using team information? A. Profiles has built a team pattern for us that provides us with a benchmark. We can see what we look like today and what we will look like as jobs change. Also, as we look at current staff, we are seeking ways to identify leaders with certain strengths to lead organization-wide initiatives and project teams. Q. In what other ways does the ProfileXT help you? A. It is helping us with individual self-development by emphasizing to our leaders that leadership development is a partnership.  Neither the organization nor the leader is solely accountable for leadership career development.