As a company owner, group head, or HR manager, you may be seeking to find a personality test or assessment for various reasons. Reasons could be to understand how your team will work best together, if a candidate is a good fit for your practice, if someone can perform the tasks you’d like him to, and much more.
You’ve considered personality tests to help you assess candidates. As you probably found out quickly, you have a bevy of assessments and inventories you can implement with potential or current employees.
But, how does one go about selecting the best personality test to achieve firm-specific goals, especially goals that require significant soft skills such as grit, conflict management, persuasion, influencing, psychology, communication and many others that are essential to the role you are hiring, coaching or promoting around?
Choosing the assessment method that best aligns with your needs may feel overwhelming. You have probably seen the full menu:
And much more
One that you may not be quite familiar with is the one we at Select Advisors love to use, which is called The Harrison Assessment. The Harrison Assessment offers company leaders the opportunity to analyze their employees’ behavioral preferences to understand if a candidate is a best fit for a given role. Our preferences tilt us towards tasks we love to do; and when we love to do something, we inevitably get better at it just due to sheer practice and habit. What we don’t prefer, we tend to procrastinate, thus falling short on our goals.
In this article we will share with a you a bit about the Harrison and how we have used it with our clients to help them set a benchmark around their goals, coaching and training their employees to match up to that specific benchmark.
Watch our video showcasing how we have used Harrison successfully to help companies and leaders quantify qualify-able goals.
Schedule a call to see how we can customize this test and our coaching around your specific goals
Harrison Assessment History
Thirty-five years ago, Dan Harrison created the Harrison Assessment centered in his own beliefs and knowledge about human behaviors. His assessment is not personality-based, as many others are; instead, the test takes inventory of an individual’s personal proclivities, interests, and passions. The assessment has 175 specific character traits and is completely customizable so that employers can pick and choose traits they desire for a particular job.
Unlike people’s personalities–which are often considered to be unchangeable–behavioral preferences can change over the course of a lifetime, and even within the context of a job. This can be ideal in a business setting: If an employee becomes aware that they are displaying a behavior that does not align with the company’s goals, they can be offered coaching to change the behavior.
The Harrison Assessment is grounded in two theories: enjoyment performance theory and paradox theory. Enjoyment performance theory holds that we tend to practice and hone the things we love to do, while tasks we do not enjoy are overlooked, neglected, or ignored simply because we do not find them pleasurable. Research indicates that if we enjoy roughly 75% of our daily tasks, we are primed to be fairly happy. The Harrison Assessment attempts to align what a job requires and what a person both wants and loves to do.
Paradox theory specifically makes the Harrison Assessments quite unique. The world around us is filled with paradoxes which may seem contradictory, but that actually complement each other. For instance, you might consider whether you prefer to be more frank or more diplomatic when communicating important information to others. A good leader should be able to do both, depending upon what the situation entails. The Harrison Assessment offers 12 paradox graphs one can use to examine the paradoxes within our own behaviors.
Select Advisors Institute has partnered with Harrison Assessment for close to a decade, helping build various role benchmarks that can help company owners and group heads marry their business goals with their employees’ preferences.
For example, our firm has built the Select Advisors Rainmaker assessment.
Our Rainmaker assessment makes use of Harrison’s Job Success Analysis. This assessment offers company owners an overall level of fit. To construct this assessment, we analyzed the traits of real, successful business leaders and noted where their strengths overlapped. Based on the responses your incoming or current employees give, you can provide coaching. Is the employee too assertive? Could their analytical skills be sharpened? Might the employee need some work on their self-confidence? The Rainmaker assessment helps employers understand where employees might be getting in their own way.
The Harrison Assessment can help businesses to identify where they are struggling. In the current tumultuous market, every day brings new challenges. Perhaps your business thrives on a specific organizational strategy, but right now, that doesn’t seem to be working. You can use Harrison to help identify ways to improve your practices in the moment.
If your business is going through a merger, focusing on change management might behoove you. If you hope to assess employees for their potential leadership capabilities, you can use the Harrison Assessment to view an individual’s flexibility, optimism, and communication preferences. There are countless ways that Harrison can benefit your organization.
The contemporary American business landscape is rapidly shifting as Boomers are retiring and employers are feeling anxious about the incoming generation of leaders. Let Select Advisors take the lead by signing up for a group coaching session. We also offer individual coaching with psychologist and Harrison Assessment ambassador Anne Sandberg.