I just finished reading The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni. If you haven’t read any of his books, I highly recommend them. He specializes in writing leadership fables that are easy to read, relatable to any management team, and always provide a couple of valuable takeaways that are easy to implement and can stick within an organization’s culture.
I’m not going to walk through the entire book, this isn’t a book report. What did strike me as interesting, though not surprising, was that the use of profile assessments played an important role in two of the four obsessions of an extraordinary executive. These obsessions are also referred to as disciplines. They are:
- Build and Maintain a Cohesive Leadership Team
- Create Organizational Clarity
- Over-Communicate Organizational Clarity
- Reinforce Organizational Clarity Through Human Systems
- Reinforce Organizational Clarity Through Human Systems
Again, there is a lot that goes into each one of those four disciplines and I recommend reading the book to get the full breakdown of those disciplines. However, profile assessments play a big role in two of those disciplines and I want to explore that further.
Building Trust Within a Team
The first discipline is to build and maintain a cohesive leadership team. According to Lencioni, “The essence of a cohesive leadership team is trust, which is marked by an absence of politics, unnecessary anxiety, and wasted energy.” In order to accomplish this, a team must know each strengths and weaknesses, engage in constructive conflict, hold each other accountable, and commit to group decisions.
For a team to be cohesive, they first have to learn how to trust each other. One of the best ways to do this is by a process that Lencioni describes as getting naked. This obviously isn’t anything untoward, but rather is a process for a team to get to know each other in a way that few teams ever achieve.
One of the best methods for accomplishing this is utilizing profile assessments. This is a very useful tool that helps team members understand each other better. Their strengths, their weaknesses, the idiosyncrasies that make them tick. It provides insights into how a team’s strengths and weaknesses can complement each other like fitting together a puzzle to make the most efficient team. It can also lend insights on the best ways to communicate with different members of the team. It helps lay a foundation for a truly cohesive team.
Strategically Build the Right Team
The fourth discipline is to reinforce organizational clarity through human systems. I found it interesting that the use of profile assessments help bookend the four disciplines. The first step in an organization to sustain their health is ensuring there is consistency in hiring. This is something that almost every organization struggles with, and it’s even more prevalent when it comes to Inside Sales.
One of the best ways to ensure consistency in hiring is by using a Hiring Profile. This profile is based on the values of the organization, and matching candidates share those values of the company. I’ve never met a sales organization that didn’t wish they could clone their top two or three salespeople. Utilizing a hiring profile to match those top producers gives you a head start on making that a reality. This is just one step in the hiring process, but it’s a very important first step which can help a company avoid making costly hiring mistakes that set the organization back.
In addition, these profiles are a valuable tool once a person is hired as it provides a natural starting point for on-going performance management. It provides supervisors with a basis for how to communicate, direct, and serve their front-line employees. Not to mention the importance of coming back every six months to take the profile assessment again to see how a person is growing and what effect on-going coaching is having and where to continue directing efforts.
At Quality Inside Sales, we believe that profile assessments are a valuable tool that can help build trust, improve communication, foster healthy conflict, eradicate office politics, and enhance an organization’s hiring practices. Contact us today to see how we can help, and we encourage you to take our free DISC Assessment now.
