Lessons Learned While Frying Chicken

If you are looking for a team building workshop or keynote presentation, we have just the ticket for you! This highly interactive, entertaining, yet profoundly important session focuses the participants on understanding and celebrating their strongest personality attributes AND the need to adapt behavior as necessary to meet the requirements of work and life. Your organization will have clear and definable metrics to provide guidance and leadership to your workforce. The session is light-hearted but teaches invaluable lessons, as it celebrates the differences of all people but recognizes our responsibility to meet each other half way. Fast moving and fun, your people will love the session, and your organization will gain insight into your most valuable business asset – your people.

Contact us immediately to reserve your workshop date. We look forward to serving you!

Tags: Bob Kreisberg, candidate assessment, keynote, OPSUBOB, Opus Productivity, Opusbob, Performance, personality, presentation, Team Building

Posted in Business Leadership, Team Building, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

OPUSBOB: How’s Your Aunt Vivian?

One of the great things about what I get to do for a living is that I get to talk to people all over the world. I mean, I can be on the phone with a candidate for a client in Moscow or Singapore or Detroit or San Francisco or anywhere. And it’s great because it’s such a big, big world that we get to work in.

Something happened to me last week which really convinced me that as the saying goes, it’s a small world after all. I had a chance to do a profile of a candidate. And as part of the small talk, we talked about where the person was from and as it turns out, he’s from the same town that I’m from.

This is a little tiny town on the east end of Long Island. And when he gave me the family name it registered with me, and I said, “Not only do I know that you’re from the town that you’re from, I know what street your family is from.” He said, “How could you possibly know that?” I said, “It’s because your family was my next door neighbor.”

So I want you to think of the odds of that. Think of the odds when you’re talking to people all over the world that I could end up talking to the grandson of my next door neighbor. So when I recounted the story to my mom later in the day, she said, “Well you know that his Aunt Vivian was your babysitter when you were growing up.” And I just couldn’t believe it. Aunt Vivian was my babysitter?

Well, it really struck home with me that although the world is big, in so many ways what we do brings it all close together. Now I grew up in a family business where we sold merchandise in one small town and we really did get to know our customers. We knew what color of clothes they like, what sizes, what brands, and what they bought last year for Christmas. We knew all of that.

Well as much as the world has changed, there is still a lot to be said for understanding that you could be talking to your next door neighbor and your reputation of who you are and what you stand for still matters. It maybe a big world but you still can’t hide from your Aunt Vivian.

Thanks for your attention.

Tags: aggressiveness, behavioral traits, candidate assessment, conformity, dominance, extroversion, personality profiling, reputation, sociability

Posted in candidate assessment, Employee Morale, Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

OPUSBOB: Why Conduct Personality Profile Read Backs with Candidates and Employees?

As most of you that watch these video blogs know, OPUS Productivity is a business providing services that assist our clients in making more informed and hopefully better hiring decisions.  A big piece to that service is the personality profiling tool, and a key aspect is that we take the time to review the results with the candidate. This way they know exactly what the personality profile says.  You would be amazed at how many candidates say to us, “Gee, I’ve gone through this cycle, before but nobody has ever told me what the profile said.  This is really neat.  I’m really interested in knowing what it says.”

Well, why is it a value to everybody? And believe me, we believe it is a value to everybody.  There is definitely a value to the candidates, as they are concerned that maybe the personality profile has said something about them that in no way reflects who they really are.  By hearing the results and being able to discuss the degree of accuracy, or areas that they think it may or may not really capture their personality, the candidate has the confidence that they are being represented in a fair, honest and honorable way.  In addition, the profile review is traditionally an affirmative event.  People get to hear something positive about their behavioral style and of course, that’s a good thing.

It’s positive for the employer as well.  Any behavioral profiling tool that includes a read back session has higher coefficients of reliability.  It provides the employer with the knowledge that the individual that filled out the profile really sees themselves that way.  So the company knows they’re getting an accurate reflection of what the person is.

And lastly, it’s better for the hiring manager. The hiring manager now has somebody that’s connect to not only with them but with the candidate, and can provide them with insight and guidance, not based on a bunch of dots on a page, but based on an actual conversation.  So that’s why we take the time to talk to the candidates.

Thanks for your attention.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

OPUSBOB: Can a bad personality be fixed?

I want to talk with you today about whether or not a bad personality can be fixed. It’s an interesting concept and it’s something that we’re probably all familiar with at some level. I was in an Executive Suite for a number of years, and we had a receptionist who was a very sharp person, but also highly critical. If she liked you as a tenant, you got very good service. But if she decided, in her infinite wisdom, that you weren’t very capable in what you did, you got lousy service, and I watched this happen.

Of course I was on the side of getting very good service, so I was okay. But it clearly was not an okay situation. And really, the nature of this person was that she had a critical nature and you could say that she couldn’t help herself. Or of course she could. But it raises the point when you have someone that has a personality style that’s not fit for a particular role; can you as a leader fix that personality?

Well, to an extent you can, but you need to realize that there’s only so much elastic that you’re able to get out of somebody. So asking somebody to be so different from what their natural style is, is a very uncomfortable place to put people. In fact, our role as a leader is to be able to find the right fit for people.

Now maybe in this case, there wasn’t a right fit for this particular person in this organization and you need to look at that as reality as well. We only have a certain amount of flexibility and we all need it, because there isn’t any such thing as the perfect personality for a job. We all need to recognize there is a time and a place where we need to modify what our own nature is to accommodate the requirements of that position. In some ways, we all have bad personalities for what we do. Hopefully, it’s more good than bad and we can take advantage of the good and when we need to, adjust, so we could be effective in our role.

Thanks for your time.

Tags: Bob Kreisberg, candidate assessment, OPSUBOB, Performance, personality

Posted in candidate assessment, Performance | 1 Comment »

OPUSBOB: Are personality profile tests legal?

The topic of our blog for today is one that comes up very commonly in conversations regarding personality profiling tools and what some people call personality profile tests. And that is: our personality profile tests legal? Well, you’ll often get a very abrupt response from people in the trade, and they say, of course, they are legal. We wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t legal. The reality is the topic deserves a serious response and here’s what you need to be able to understand. Personality profiling can be used in two ways within an organization. It could be used as an inclusive tool or it can be used as an exclusive tool.

It’s very simple to understand the difference. If you’re using the tool as an inclusive tool, it means that you have already evaluated your candidates at some level; you’ve reviewed their resumes, perhaps you’ve talked to them on the phone, maybe you’ve even met with them in person. You recognize that this is a person that you are actively interested in including in your organization. The profiling tool provides you with new information that allows you to better understand the nature of that person. You want to know how to better manage them, how to provide leadership, how to provide guidance and direction, and to understand a comparison, in some cases, between them and other candidates that you are looking to include.

In that situation, utilizing a profiling tool is very easy to build into your overall evaluation process. Using it as an exclusive tool is completely different. That means that you’ve made a determination that you want to exclude candidates for no other reason than their behavioral profile results. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re hiring flight attendants and you’ve determined that your top flight attendants all have patience as a high trade. And you’ve said we are going to use a profiling tool and anybody that has patience as a low trade is going to be excluded, no matter what else may exist.

Well, in that situation, then an organization need to be prepared to show that your evaluation of that top performer trade crosses across all minorities, all ages, all genders, you need to be able to show that you are excluding people in a fair and proper way. So, utilizing a tool as an exclusionary tool really takes a bit more work, and it’s a completely different application. Our clients and the nature of the work that we do are utilizing our tool as an inclusionary tool. They’re looking to understand the strengths of an individual and evaluate that how person can fit into their organization. It makes the process much easier and much clearer from a legal perspective.

Should you have additional questions about this specific topic, please feel free to reach out to me, and I’d be happy to respond to you one-on-one. Thank you.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

OPUSBOB: Hunter vs Farmer definitively defined

Probably the most typical vernacular that I hear when discussing the personality profile of a salesperson is using the phrase hunter versus farmer. And more often than not, a vice president of sales or even a CEO will say, “What we really need around here are some hunters. We’ve got farmers but we really need hunters.” Help us find some hunters and in fact, it’s one of the critical reasons why people work with us and utilize our candidate assessment and personality profiling services is to be able to determine whether or not the candidate is a hunter or if that person is a farmer.

Now we can talk about whether or not a company really does need hunters versus farmers because we’ve definitely found situations when companies are looking for hunters yet, in fact, their top performers are farmers. But that’s a topic for a different video blog. We’re talking today about understanding the personality profile difference between a hunter and a farmer. And it’s very simple and it’s very clear. There are four behavioral traits that get measured in a personality profiling tool. Dominance, which is the level of aggressiveness, extroversion, which is for sociability, haste, which is rate of motion, be it fast pace, go – go or slower moving, slower going, and then structuring detail. Detail oriented or not detail oriented. What’s very clear to define a hunter versus a farmer. Hunters are aggressive personalities – so their dominance will be high. Hunters are impatient personalities, so they will be fast-paced and they will be action oriented. And hunters are traditionally big picture oriented people, so their conformity will be low.

Farmers on the other hand, are consensus oriented people. They are collaborative and consensus oriented, therefore their dominance is low. They are typically good listeners and they pay attention to what is important to the client’s needs and they take their time to understand. Therefore, their patience is high. More often than not, they are process oriented and procedural and they will follow the steps necessary to do what needs to be done. Therefore, their conformity is high. We didn’t talk about the extroversion trait because in both cases hunters and farmers, more often than, not the extroversion trait is high. That’s not the measurement that makes the difference between a hunter and a farmer. What we look at in candidate assessment, personality profiling is the positioning of the dominance trait, high is hunter, low is farmer. The pace trait – high is farmer, low is hunter and the conformity trait – high is farmer, low is hunter. It’s very easy to define and it’s also very easy to be able to see the grey areas as to when somebody combines certain traits of both hunters and farmers.

Thanks for listening.

Tags: aggressiveness, behavioral traits, candidate assessment, conformity, dominance, extroversion, Hunter vs Farmer, personality profiling, sociability, top performers

Posted in candidate assessment, Performance | 3 Comments »