PEOPLE

Have you ever said to yourself, If I could just get my people aligned to my strategy, then everything would fall into place?

This is a common challenge for small to mid-market CEOs. People can be a company’s greatest asset or its greatest liability. If you don’t have the right people guiding your foundation and your market penetration strategy, you’ll struggle to fulfill your company purpose.

Why? Humans are emotional beings, imperfect and often irrational. When you hire someone, you might expect a particular result, but the outcome often misses the mark completely.

The good news is that, thanks to exhaustive studies in the field of business psychology, managing people has evolved from an art to a science.

The Science of People Development

Developing and managing people isn’t difficult; we just need to understand how to make the right decisions about people, and we need to identify the right tools to determine who should be doing what.

Most of us are familiar with the DISC and Myers-Briggs personality tests that became popular in the 1990s. In recent years psychologists have made astonishing breakthroughs in how to measure the way people are wired.

Today we can gauge:

• A person’s strongest and weakest skills
• How they manage their emotions
• Their worldview, or their cognitive orientation in business and society
• What motivates them
• How they interact with others
• Their emotional quotient—the single most important factor for workplace success

Few CEOs can properly develop their people without using highly predictive scientific tools. Scientific assessments validate your key people and give you the power to ensure that your company will achieve the public agenda you outlined in your Foundation. At the simplest level, mapping people enables you to quickly determine who should be handling the most important functions within your company.

Once you have validated your people, you have mastered three of the four most important areas of business. The final step is to refine your operational decision-making process so you’re able to make better day-to-day operational decisions and understand how those decisions will impact your overall company value.