FAQ

We believe that what gets measured, gets done. If you want to improve your leadership effectiveness, fine-tune your communication skills, and inspire others to achieve the vision, how do you begin on this journey of growth? To get where you’re going, you need to chart your course, but you must first know where you are NOW. Successful leadership is defined in many ways, and different organizations have different success factors. So, YES, leadership success can be measured. There are hard metrics that may link a leader’s success to his or her increase in sales or profitability. These numbers will certainly tell you what’s been achieved. But more important is HOW the goals were achieved.

• Do you develop and empower those around you?
• Do you actively listen and respectfully debate solutions to problems, and explore innovative solutions that lead to lower costs and more efficiency?
• Do you treat everyone with respect, demonstrate transparency, and act honestly?
• Do you bring out the best in others?
• Do you welcome challenges, seek opportunities to grow and learn, and have clarity about your own strengths and limitations?
• How do you know whether you exhibit these behaviors or not?

The best way to know is to ask those who work with you: those who spend time with you frequently and witness your behavior (in good times as well as the most challenging times), and those who learn from as well as teach you. The perceptions of the people with whom you work can give you the best idea of your starting point and where you are now. From here, you can develop a great map of where you’re going and take a few stops along the path, while really enjoying the trip.

Are you a great leader? How do you know? Perhaps you’ve read many books on the topic and you’ve managed a team for many years. You have the experience and the title. But, are you truly a great leader?

Our research shows that the majority of leaders see themselves differently than others see them. Often, leaders are perceived much more favorably than they see themselves. On the other hand, others believe they’re incredibly effective, but those who work with him or her may have a very different opinion.

To know if you’re effectively leading people, leading teams, and leading organizations, you must know how others perceive you. One of the best ways to find out is to ask. However, most people would be a bit hesitant to sit down over coffee and share their inner-most thoughts about what you do well and what they believe you should improve. Perhaps some colleagues would be willing, but it would likely cover one or two competencies or areas, such as your verbal communication or your delegation skills. For a leader to have a more holistic view of their leadership, it is helpful to have feedback on many different competencies from many different people.

People who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have more of a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe that they’ve “maxed out” their learning, are satisfied with their current state, and/or have no desire to continue the learning and development process). Those who welcome the process of continuous improvement worry less about being perceived as smart and they focus their energy on learning.

Our research shows that organizations who embrace a growth mindset support collaboration and innovation and have employees who feel more empowered and engaged. Employees who work for companies that tend to practice a more “fixed-mindset” philosophy (don’t invest in learning and development, don’t treat mistakes as opportunities to learn) find themselves struggling with succession planning, lack of effective leaders, unhealthy competition, higher turn-over rates, and lower customer satisfaction.

So, what is a growth mindset after all? Growth mindset behaviors include sharing information, taking informed risks, collaborating, innovating, seeking feedback, and admitting mistakes. If you want to find out if your organization has adopted a growth-mindset culture or to find out if your leaders exhibit growth-mindset behaviors, contact us for a preview of our new Growth Mindset Cultural Assessment™.

Every successful organization has key traits that help it succeed. Some are obvious, such as the product they sell, profitability, and customer retention. Other traits are more challenging to determine. These are areas that collectively form the culture of the organization. Assessments provide leaders a quantifiable measure of these critical factors.

Having a metric offers a better opportunity to explore what’s going well and what could be improved. These metrics are helpful to determine employee engagement, customer satisfaction, effectiveness of leaders, etc. This valuable data sheds light on strengths that can be leveraged and opportunities for improvement. Assessment results from multi-rater feedback, employee engagement surveys, personality assessments, and team assessments can all be considered pieces of the overall puzzle. For a complete picture, multiple assessments can be used together to better understand the results of each.

We specialize in helping organizations and their leaders become as effective as possible through learning and continuous improvement. We employ proven best practices to obtain our goal of helping every human with whom we interact to become a better leader.

To do this, we customize our services to best meet the needs of each client. However, our engagements always include assessments. Why? Because we believe that you must first know where you are to chart a course towards where you want to go.

We also believe that exceptional leadership is not a destination, but a lifelong journey. We incorporate our assessments with one-on-one coaching, goal-setting, action planning, follow-up, and benchmarking over time. We find the greatest satisfaction in seeing improvement year after year in the leaders we work with. We understand that successful leaders will run successful organizations who successfully deliver to their customers and make the world a better place.

Read more about our services using the links below:

• Survey Development
• Benchmarking
• 360 Feedback Coaching
• Action Planning
• Resource Guides
• Pre-Assessment Training
• 360 Coach Certifications
• Statistical Analyses
• Interpretation of Results
• Presentation of Results

Although we have the expertise and capability to develop many types of assessments used for business and leadership success, we specialize in the following types of assessments:

• 360-feedback Assessments
• Employee Engagement Assessments
• Organization Culture Assessments
• Team Assessments
• StrengthsFinder™
• Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Assessments
• Myers Briggs Type Indicator™
• Emerging Leader Assessments
• DiSC Classic™
• DiSC for the Workplace™
• Senior Leadership Insight Assessment™
• Growth Mindset Cultural Assessment™

Some may gather feedback from multiple raters who interact with the leader in various capacities, while others gather data from an entire team, business unit, or organization.

View more information on our services.

Many factors are to be considered when determining whether to invest in customization. Some organizations want to try out the assessment process before investing in customization. Smaller organizations may not have developed core competencies for their leaders, and prefer to start with an assessment that has been developed with research-based success factors. If organizations have already identified their own competency model or are interested in working with Assessment+ to do so, a customized approach will likely result in the most impactful feedback.

There are many options for customization. We offer fully customized assessments, including the questions, instructions, email invitations to raters, branding, and scale(s) to reflect the organization’s unique core competencies that distinguish it from its competitors and give it its strategic advantage.

We can accommodate any scale and/or scale anchors. Our most commonly used scale is a 5-point Likert scale. We also support any number of points on a fixed-response scale, as well as yes/no response scales, multiple choice, ranking scales, continuums, etc. We also offer branching options so that raters may be led to another question or scale based on how they respond to another question.

Assessment+ is proud to offer exceptional coaching services to our clients. All of our coaching is based on some type of quantifiable assessment results. This may include a battery of assessments, such as a DiSC™, a team assessment and a StrengthsFinder™, or a single assessment, such as a 360 assessment. We incorporate benchmarking into our coaching, so that we can provide results that show improvement over time. Our primary experience is connecting the data to future actions taken; making it very likely that organizations not only learn about their current state but are armed with information that helps them further improve. We have our own experienced consultants who have many years of coaching experience and we also partner with distinguished firms throughout the world to engage their coaches when specific areas of expertise are required.

We firmly believe that our personalized team approach is what sets us apart. Each project is assigned to a Project Team, which is comprised of a Project Manager, a Project Coordinator and a Technology SME. A Lead Consultant is also involved if the project requires customization, development of new assessments, data interpretation, analyses, and/or coaching and training. This model ensures that all phases and details of the project are handled efficiently and the team collaborates on solutions and workflow to ensure the best possible outcome. Following are the general roles of each member of a Project Team:

• Project Manager: Manages the project from start to finish. Responsibilities include serving as the primary liaison with the client point of contact, managing the team to ensure best practices are followed and all phases are completed on time and under budget, offering as much value to the client as possible.
• Project Coordinator: Works closely with the Project Manager to handle many of the administrative details, supports the project by providing top-notch, responsive service and technical support to the participants and raters, provides status reports to the client.
• Lead Consultant: Oversees the development and consulting work (survey creation, training, feedback coaching, communications). Not every project requires this level of expertise, so a Lead Consultant is utilized for projects that require more customized development, training and coaching.
• Technology SME: This person is very experienced with our CustoMetrix™ platform and works with the team to help customize the assessment to best meet the needs of our clients, while also providing advanced technical support if/when required.

We offer a “menu-based” pricing model, which allows our clients to determine which services work best with their budget. We promise not to “nickel & dime” our clients, so although our pricing is based on the specific services our clients request, we also provide as much value as possible. We understand that some of our clients have the internal resources to handle some of the administrative, management and consulting services we provide, while others do not. Therefore, we provide only the necessary services that will result in the most effective initiative possible.

Many factors are considered when we price an assessment project. Because we customize for the majority of our clients, the pricing will depend on the level and complexity of this customization, the type and length of the assessment, the volume, and the number of languages utilized. If you are interested in having us scope your project and provide an estimate, please contact us!

We rely on our many years of experience and proven methods to streamline assessment projects. We adopt a team-approach that ensures all areas are covered, from set-up and development to implementation and interpretation of results. Our goal is to provide a high level of project management, superior service, and quality work to ensure the most valuable initiative. We have many resources that complement the assessment process, including:

• Online action planning and goal-setting, online resources and development guides
• One-on-one, extended coaching engagements
• Aggregate reporting which offers an overview of results for departments, business units, locations, demographics, etc.
• Customized follow-up survey process that lets leaders know whether their changes are resulting in improvement

We offer various resources to help leaders get the most value out of our assessment processes.

Online Resource Guides: We support the integration of customized Online Resource Guides, which can be designed and developed to be aligned with your unique competency model and customized assessment. These resource guides offer developmental suggestions, recommendations for how to leverage strengths, suggested reading, etc. We can also simply link to one of your existing resource guides. We have the capability of adding tutorials, videos, links, etc., that will provide relevant, helpful information to those receiving feedback.

Interpreting Your Feedback: We can develop or provide existing material that helps leaders understand the feedback they’ve received. This type of resource will help the feedback recipient understand how the feedback is presented in their reports.

Action Planning: We offer a proprietary, online Action Planning feature that is integrated with our online reporting. This helps the feedback recipient easily review their feedback results and build an action plan with meaningful goals in an efficient and streamlined manner. The most important part of an assessment process is to actually USE the information to make positive change. The Action Planning feature does just that. It will track goals, action steps, review dates, due dates and even allow the leader to send a copy to their manager and/or provide access to their coach, who can also offer input and suggestions.

We offer a proprietary, online Action Planning feature that is integrated with our online reporting. This helps the feedback recipient easily review their feedback results and build an action plan with meaningful goals in an efficient and streamlined manner. The most important part of an assessment process is to actually USE the information to make positive change. The Action Planning feature does just that. It will track goals, action steps, review dates, due dates and even allow the leader to send a copy to their manager and/or provide access to their coach, who can also offer input and suggestions.

Reliability and Validity aren’t the most accurate measures when it comes to feedback assessments. However, we rely on an assortment of other best practices to ensure the quality of our data. Read more here.

CustoMetrix™ is our proprietary online assessment system that was developed and is maintained in-house. This assessment system is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, which is a distribution model that allows our customers to access their assessments and dashboards anytime with an Internet connection.Our assessment platform allows our customers to utilize our assessment applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with a comprehensive assessment initiative. This approach offers a secure, state-of-the-art assessment solution, updated in real-time without the need for installing software.

We do not sell software. Rather, we offer a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, which is a distribution model that allows our customers to access anytime with an Internet connection. Our assessment platform allows our customers to utilize our assessment applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with a comprehensive assessment initiative. This approach offers a secure, state-of-the-art assessment solution, updated in real-time without the need for installing software.

We guarantee the protection and privacy of your personal information. We never share emails and only share any feedback you provide in the intended manner, which is outlined in all correspondence. We utilize dedicated, secure servers for all assessment data and contact information, and these servers are stored in a highly secure hosting facility with the highest levels of redundancy. To view more detailed information about our privacy, please click here.

We work with organizations throughout the world. We currently offer services to companies and government agencies within 5 continents and 18 countries.

The majority of our clients are considered large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, or medium-sized organizations employing 1,000-10,000 people. Depending on the project, Assessment+ also works with organizations who employ between 100 – 1,000 people.