The people you surround yourself with will ultimately determine the direction of your business.
Hiring, and subsequently retaining the right employee for each role within your team has a significant impact on the productivity and profitability of your business.
If it’s done right, the team is in a strong position to achieve some impressive numbers. If done wrong, it can spell disaster for the company and the team, or at the very least, compromise and minimise the company’s true potential.
Here’s a true business scenario you may or may not relate to –
Steve, the GM of a medium sized building company, was in the process of selecting a person to fill a Project Manager position at one of his sites. He received a brilliant application from a young guy – lets call him Brad – from one of their competitors. His resume read like a dream so they hired him.
However, after a few months, the cracks started to appear in Brad’s team. He was constantly butting heads with long standing, high performing team members and as a result, team morale was at an all time low and performance on the job was suffering.
Counsellors were brought in to mediate the team and eventually Brad left for another company. A major disruption to say the least, a massive waste of resources and a loss of momentum and standing with the client.
This example is one of the many we constantly hear from business owners.
It’s a real challenge to know how to place the right people in the right roles, but it’s crucial as the people you surround yourself with really do dictate the success of your business.
How To Ensure You Make The Best Hire
Something that often gets overlooked when recruiting team members is their Personality Profile. Just because someone looks good on paper doesn’t mean they’ll be a good fit for your business.
A personality profile gives you a clear picture of not only their temperament, but also their personality strengths and weaknesses, which are critical when it comes to recruitment.
Take Brad in our above story. He was a high achieving, goal kicker for a large organisation – he’d achieved some amazing things. However, if they’d done a personality profile on him, they would have realised that his personality clashed with some of the personalities of key team members who’d been with the company a long time and were some of their best performers. They never would have hired him.
Or take for instance if you’re looking for someone to fill an accounting position, but one of their personality weaknesses is no attention to detail – they wouldn’t be a good fit for the role.
There are countless other examples we could give and I’m sure as you’re reading this, some of your own are coming to mind.
Many times, businesses will have a standard procedure to test skills of candidates, but they fail to do personality profiling, taking into account their personality type, strengths and weaknesses, which is an important factor to generate the best possible performance from your team.
How To Use Personality Profiling
There are many different personality profiling tests you can use, but the one we prefer and that’s generated significant results for our clients is the test in Florence Littaeur’s book, “Personality Plus”.
It’s a simple test that anyone can do and it will give you clear insights into the person sitting in front of you and whether they’d be a great fit in your business or not.
There are 4 different personality types Florence identifies – the Powerful Choleric, the Popular Sanguine, the Perfect Melancholy and the Peaceful Phlegmatic. Each has their own personality strengths and weaknesses.
(You can even do this test with your partner and family to give you a greater understanding of each other.)
Here’s an overview of how to apply it.
Existing Team Members
- Personality Profile your team members.
- Look at your organisational chart and determine the personality profile (PP) that would be best suited for each role. We colour code the chart (Powerful Choleric (red), the Popular Sanguine (orange), the Perfect Melancholy (blue) and the Peaceful Phlegmatic (purple).
- Then compare the PP of the person currently in the role with the PP that’s required and determine if you need to move people around into other roles that they’re better suited to based on their PP (and skills).
Recruiting New Team Members
- Personality Profile the candidates
- Determine if their PP fits the PP of the role, along with their skill set and experience.
- Also determine if it fits with the personalities of the other existing team members.
Utilising personality profiling to hire the right person for the right role that not only best fits with their skills but also their personality type, strengths and weaknesses is an important element for the success of your business. In fact, we regard it as a complete game changer. We’ve implemented it countless times into our clients businesses to great effect to increase their long term productivity and profitability.
If you’d like to talk with us how we could help you not only find the right people, but also how to keep and grow them into a high performing team in a business that everyone wants to work for, then give us a call. We’d love to speak with you today.
