Determine which people will thrive in specific roles. It's transitioned from an art to a science.

PEOPLE MAPPING

Have you ever hired a smart person with a strong resume and plenty of experience, expecting a certain level of performance, but ending up with something completely different? Are there characteristics of key members of your leadership team that are holding them back from achieving their full potential?

For most CEOs, the answer is a resounding Yes to both questions.

This is natural, as humans are imperfect creatures driven by emotion, beliefs, quirks, and irrationalities. The good news is that over the last 20 years scientific research has begun to unlock many of the complexities of human nature.

Today, CEOs have access to scientifically proven and effective employee assessment tools that enable them to sharpen management skills, strengthen team performance, identify hidden skills in employees, and take the guesswork out of hiring. These assessments are backed by decades of scientific research and have the capacity to:

Identify and describe the facets of an employee’s personality
Identify leadership qualities and leadership style
Determine an individual’s natural reaction mode to environmental stimuli – their personal behavioral style
Measure emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient

Once thought of as “soft” skills, these abilities are becoming more quantifiable in many professions—especially in leadership roles—and they play a greater role in overall job success.

Which executive would you rather have leading your department?
A. A person with 20 years of experience, a high IQ, and strong industry knowledge, possessing a combative, negative personality and an unwillingness to compromise
B. A person with 10 years of experience, an average IQ, and limited industry knowledge, with the capacity and willingness to learn and a strong ability to synthesize information, accept criticism, delegate responsibility, motivate people, and build strong teams

Mapping your people gives you a powerful understanding of who should be doing what within your company, along with the knowledge of what motives them, where their strengths lie, and how they are likely to react to change and stimuli.

The applications of mapping your leadership team are immense:

Reduce turnover
Improve productivity
Retain higher performers
Improve the performance of existing teams
Assimilate employees into new roles faster
Get people in their highest performing roles
Communicate with maximum efficiency
Improve job-person fit
Increase employee satisfaction
Identify strengths to build on and challenges to overcome
Use training dollars effectively
Create better leaders

People Mapping Concepts & Steps

Gaining a scientific understanding of your key people is one of the first steps to building a great company culture. Once you have this information, you’ll be able to understand who should be doing what within your organization, enabling you to strengthen your foundation, your marketing, and your operations.

Map the leadership styles and leadership qualities of your key executive team

Assess your key people’s leadership styles. Leadership styles aren’t teachable; they’re hard-wired. They’re important because a good executive team should have each of the nine leadership styles represented. If you discover that some of the important styles are missing from your team, you’ll have a clear understanding of how it can be improved.
Assess your key people’s leadership qualities. These can be taught, and they can enable key executives to identify what areas will yield the greatest improvements to their own leadership skills.

Map your key people’s natural reaction mode or behavioral style in different situations

Assess your key people’s behavioral style. This enables people to better understand their own and others’ behavior. Over time, they’ll be able to adjust their behavior to better suit business situations, so they can avoid communication challenges and reduce stress. Better yet, you’ll gain an understanding of how your key team members will react to situations BEFORE they arise.

Map your key employees’ emotional skills

Research has shown that emotional quotient, or EQ, has become a far greater predictor of workplace success than IQ. While IQ is still important, by measuring EQ, you’ll gain a clear understanding of which people should be interfacing with your market and leading your team, and which people should stay behind the scenes in R&D and technical types of activities. Assess your people’s emotional intelligence to understand their social and emotional strengths and weaknesses.

Map the five factors of your key employees’ personalities

Asses the personalities of your key people to allow them to compare and contrast their personality style to the profiles of strong leaders. This allows you to understand which executives’ personality styles are the best fit for your industry, your company, or your department, and it enables you to create strategies to develop key areas that will make your team stronger leaders.