Finding Our Inner Strengths

BY NICOLE NELSON

As a self-professed go-getter, Brian Krusz will tell you his personality is driven to go 180-miles per hour and expand.

And until recently, the co-founder of Sgt. Clean’s Car Wash with six express exterior locations in operation throughout Northeast Ohio, generally assumed his chief mindset was rather commonplace.

“I (erroneously) thought everyone else’s mentality should be like Brian’s,” the enterprising U.S. Marine Corp veteran said, referring to himself in the third person.
Krusz’s true awakening of behavioral norms came after participating in what he dubs a palm reading offered by Culture Index. He was first administered the strategic advisory firm’s online demo in the form of a free choice assessment two years ago. From a word bank of various adjectives, Krusz was free to select as many, or as few, stimuli as he felt best described him as a person.

Upon receipt of the survey results, which measured a myriad of seven work-related traits, Krusz was a true believer that the life-changing, company-changing survey swiftly nailed both his personality and work ethic. And upon further investigation and eventual company-wide participation, the analytical trait assessment certainly made Krusz realize just how very different his personality is from that of many of his employees.

“The Culture Index better made me understand that there are people who love to do administrative tasks all day long whereas

I would be like a squirrel locked in a cage,” Krusz said. He also said that the organizational development firm’s graphic analyzation of each employee and prospect has really helped with Sgt. Clean’s hiring and retention, resulting in increases into the 80th percentile since the Culture Index method was introduced and implemented.

“First, we tackled the internal side of things: Who do we have now? Are they in the right church, in the right pew and singing from the same hymnal?” Krusz said. “And then we went external from there.”

INCREASED INTEREST

The Culture Index Test is among the more than 2,000 personality tests currently on the market to help employers such as Sgt. Clean get the right people in the right seats. From the freebie Enneagram tests that have been sweeping the internet, to DiSC profiles fetching upward of $120 per report, this niche product line has quickly grown to become a $2 billion industry.

Many of the assessments on the market have some semblances to the industry stalwart Myers-Briggs® Type Indicator. With a steady presence since the 1940s, the MBTI® continues to remain the most popular personality test in the world.

Dr. Rachel Cubas-Wilkinson, a senior consultant at The Myers-Briggs Company and an MBTI expert, claims the assessment has been eerily accurate since she first started to work one-on-one with people to help them become the best versions of themselves by simply understanding their personality type. In this approach, she has historically let each individual take the MBTI’s 93 forced-choice questions and then walks them through a debriefing of their results.

“There were always folks who were certain there was no way this assessment could peg them, and no way that this assessment could create categories of understanding that would encompass millions of people around the world,” Cubas-Wilkinson said. “And then they would end up saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, this statement is 100% me’ and they’d get it, so to speak.”

Cubas-Wilkinson said the world-renowned personality assessment is best suited to pick up after the point of hiring. It helps employers onboard personnel and helps them form new teams.

“So, you have invested in and hired this particular person. Now you need to know who they are, how to lead them and how to bring out the best in them,” Cubas-Wilkinson said. This connects them with their motivations and their passions by drawing similarities between that and the organization’s mission — the way the team might have a goal, or even the way the team needs to function. “It’s really helping people be at their best and use their strengths,” she said.

According to Cubas-Wilkinson, the MBTI tool is also a good choice for use in mergers and acquisition scenarios where team members have been shuffled and the organizational chart looks very different.

She said that while these reshuffled teams may harbor deep industry knowledge and shared history, they may have zero knowledge of each other.

“We’ll come in and people will tell us that they learned more about each other in that one day, half-day, or in a 90-minute workshop that we do virtually with them on the MBTI, than they had in months prior to that point,” she said.

Cubas-Wilkinson said the beauty of the MBTI tool is that it gives each individual tested permission to be him- or herself.

“Everybody comes out in a positive light,” Cubas-Wilkinson said. “It’s easy to have team diversity. That’s kind of a big focus. We like to say if you do have personality diversity, you’re going to have richness of perspective and thoughts.”

FIGURE OUT YOUR FOCUS

While knowing your four-letter MBTI type and that of others in your life can help you appreciate and understand differences in relationships with family, friends and business associates, some competing assessments are more narrowly focused on the workplace.

As the founder and developer of Harrison Assessments, Dr. Dan Harrison has made it his lifetime work to help organizations hire, develop, promote, engage and retain their employees. Harrison Assessments measure 175 factors in 20 minutes and the results help provide a detailed measurement of how well a person might enjoy a specific job and how likely it is they will perform well and succeed.

In order to pinpoint this job fit and the key leverage points for development, a person’s strengths and weaknesses need to be accurately identified — and not just a general impression. “The key benefit that most organizations seek is having the ability to apply analytics that are highly predictive for hiring and accurately pinpoint the key leverage areas for talent development,” said Harrison.

Data analytics enable the same assessment to be highly predictive for all aspects of the talent life cycle including hiring, onboarding, engagement, individual and team development, succession planning and leadership development.

“The key principle for understanding and developing performance is that people will usually think their strongest traits are their strengths. However, a person’s strongest trait can ultimately be their greatest weakness. An effective assessment must be able to accurately determine the difference,” said Harrison.

In a leadership role, for instance, this self-awareness is key to helping managers make adjustments that greatly improve their leadership skills.

For example, if a leader has a strong trait and tendency for being straight-forward and direct in their verbal communications, but is not balanced with diplomacy or tactfulness, they may be perceived as being overly blunt. This perception can result in disgruntled employees or worse-case scenario, employee turnover.

Conversely, if a leader has a strong trait and preference for diplomacy over directness, their communications can be perceived as fuzzy or evasive. This can result in a failure to hold others accountable, a failure to provide clarity and ultimately a loss of respect from the employees.

In leadership roles, you must always look for balance, which the Harrison method addresses with paradoxes. Each of the 12 paradoxes was designed to help individual contributors and leaders maximize their potential and avoid derailing behaviors.

“The paradox principle helps people see themselves much more clearly and can help leaders gain their greatest constructive influence on their team, by learning to turn their derailers into strengths,” said Harrison.

TIME TO DECIDE AND START THE JOURNEY

While there are fundamental differences in the myriad philosophies as well as how assessments are presented, Culture Index’s Mike DePauw, who serves as Sgt. Clean’s consultant, claims identifying worker characteristics is a sound investment.

“It starts on the front end with employees,” DePauw said. “Rather than taking their personality for what it is, we create benchmarks for each position in the company so that way we actually know in advance what an ideal candidate looks like, and how closely the candidates line up. At the end of the day, we’re finding out proactively who is going to be a round peg in a round hole versus hiring people and then going back in time to fix challenges faced along the way.”

“If an organization is trying to use human analytics to make informed decisions, they are alright in my book because they are taking the right step,” DePauw said.