Why do we use assessment tools?

"The bottom line is that personality matters to individuals because self-understanding allows a person to be strategic about his/her career choices and career development. Personality matters to employers because knowledge about a job applicant's personality allows them to be strategic about the hiring process."
Dr. Robert Hogan

Assessments help your organization increase productivity and maximize performance by hiring the right people, evaluating leadership potential, and developing the talents of key individuals in the specific areas that really matter for success.

Assessments help individual leaders like you understand limitations and strengths and how understanding can bring strategic awareness to your choices for action and for changing ineffective behaviors.

Assessments help leadership teams discover their collective “snapshot” of combined strengths and similarities, as well as challenges to working relationships that arise from key differences.

In our experience, well-designed coaching and training programs that include assessments for a development component yield demonstrable improvement. With the information from a validated assessment tool, coaching clients and workshop participants learn more about what to do and how to do it.

We’ve looked carefully at the wide variety of assessment tools available–and have become qualified to use many of them over the years–however, the one we turn to most frequently is the Hogan Assessment Systems’ “Leadership Forecast Series.”

Assessments and Coaching

Certain issues arise frequently as a reason leaders and organizations look to coaching. They include:

  • Micromanaging others
  • Poor interpersonal skills
  • Inability or unwillingness to develop others
  • Inability or unwillingness to collaborate effectively

If these issues sound familiar, it’s because these problems inhibit effectiveness and cause people’s career progress to stall or derail. We see them again and again. In a coaching engagement, a report increases self-awareness, illuminates choices about professional and personal development, and strengthens the ability to self-manage. When we provide accurate feedback about the behaviors to keep doing, start doing, and stop doing, individuals take the first step towards improving their effectiveness.

Can coaching help people change characteristics of their personality? Yes, and personality affects how easy or difficult it will be to change certain behaviors. It also takes quite a bit of behavioral change on your part (and focused support through coaching) to change the ways others perceive you.

Coaching combined with assessment information leads to greater understanding of your limitations and strengths and how they compare with colleagues in similar circumstances. We transform data from the assessments into reports that give a rich, thorough picture that anticipates a person’s likely “fit” with a given situation.

It gives leaders like you a strategic self-awareness unlikely to occur in any other way.

Using Hogan with Teams

The three components of the Hogan series offer the best and most useful feedback we’ve found to help teams of leaders enhance their performance at work. When coaching a team, a Hogan report shows the working relationships between all the members of the team in one snapshot across all of the measures addressed by the assessment. The team gets an easy visual reference to see where key differences and similarities exist.

Knowing these, teams like yours and team leaders like you can develop effective strategies to minimize potential conflicts and utilize strengths. Your team can see where the best possibilities exist to develop bench strength for key areas of team deliverables.

Listen to a conversation between Sharon and Diana on assessment tools and the impact of the Hogan, in "Know Thyself", episode 3 of Season 3 of our podcast series.

For more information on the Hogan system, you can access their website directly at
www.hoganassessments.com.