Developing the Right Environment for Success

In the post-Credit Crunch world, no sector is going to have to adjust more to the fiscal challenges to come than Defence. With Government procurement programmes facing their greatest challenges yet, he reality for many is that the status quo is no longer an option – at AxiaMetrics we are working with experienced firm s in the sector by using the Axia Profile as to identify the ‘people issues’ which hold organisations back. This is part of a suite of services jointly established to offer procurement teams a suite of proven tools, skills and resources to help organisations – large or small, Government or industry – to work at the peak of their effectiveness and efficiency.

In the current environment, firms may feel beleaguered, but they have to ask themselves the following question, “What stops success”?

Below are things that we hear day in, day out which stop firms achieving the desired results:-

“There is no real vision and no strong, clear leadership.”

“The customer isn’t clear about what he wants, or indeed what we need to know, in order to be able to help.”

“We’ve measured everything that you can measure, but we don’t have the right skills and resources to address the evidence.”

“Relationships are not good, there is little trust and as a result, behaviours are not constructive.”

“Dialogue! What dialogue? Communications are none existent.”

If any of these statements apply, progress is often slow, excessive staff turnover and cost overrun can be at epidemic proportions.

AxiaMetrics together with its key partners – Christopher Lewis Associates, Digital Meeting and Precision Leadership offer an end to end solution to provide procurement teams with a range of services that help build relationships, confidence and communication. This includes the development of bid and delivery teams, plus the provision of the best collaborative working environments for successful defence projects and programmes.

Through implementation of the right skills, tools and resources on the soft issues, the right environment for success is created – it’s about going beyond commercial agreements, process, governance and above all, measurement. Through delivering the right culture, attitudes, behaviours, leadership and communication, goals are understood and achieved. It’s about creating a sense of shared ownership aided through timely, transparent information; it’s about the individual and team and psychological contract providing the ability and agility to sustain the right environment through the life of the contract.

With proven success in delivering sustainable improvement throughout the supply chain, our specialist skills will help procurement teams identify where and what critical issues need to be addressed, when they need to be addressed and will deliver the appropriate solutions.

When calculating the above, most researchers accept that it isn’t simply the salary and benefits of a bad hire they need to measure, painful though this is. They reason, quite correctly, that the “real” cost also includes factors such as reduced team productivity and missed client opportunities. The truth however, is the cost is much, much greater than that.

A bad hire has a profoundly negative effect on co-workers’ productivity and morale and can change their perception of the company “How could they have employed this person?” the rest of the workforce will say to each other, “How could they have got it so wrong?” is what they actually mean.

The biggest cost of a bad hire – by far, is the psychological impact on the leadership of the company – I should know I went through it myself with my 2 co-directors and close friends when we ran our own financial services brokerage between 2003 and 2007. “How did we employ this person?” we quite rightly asked ourselves. Then we had the subsequent cost in management time, coming to the conclusion that we had to get this person out of the company, then finally starting the process to actually do it. This, in turn engenders stress both at work and at home – the conversations with your spouse about that person, about how they drive you absolutely crazy, and about how you can’t believe that you ever offered them a job in the first place? The frustration that “you knew deep down” that you were making a mistake, but made the offer anyway and are now living with the consequences.

What a waste of money! More recruitment and training costs are incurred again – but what are you doing differently? It’s all the more reason to be absolutely sure that you’re making the right choices when it comes to adding new staff. Ask yourself the following – are you using a consistent hiring process to ensure that every open role is afforded the same level of care and attention? Do you have a method of filtering CV’s or applications? Do your staff know the right approach during interviews? Are you conducting thorough reference checks?

You may feel you have learned some lessons about people, one being that clients, customers and colleagues can be upset not only by a bad hire’s incompetence but by their attitude – again though, the same question needs to be asked – what are you doing differently to find out whether a person shares your company’s values?

The answer is simple – use the Axia Profile to underpin your recruitment process. New to the UK and based on Nobel Prize nominated research, this quick, online solution is specifically designed to help employers recruit the right people.

Saturday was an unusual day, instead of the usual taxi service for the kids and a trip to Loftus Road to see QPR play Middlesbrough, I found myself presenting to the Board of Governors at a leading London College, discussing the accuracy of axiological science as a tool of measurement when I should have been discussing our forwards lack of accuracy in front of goal.


Anyway, you’re probably asking yourself what I was doing there and why, so I will tell you. Nigel Griffiths, my Partner at AxiaMetrics picked up through the I.O.D. LinkedIn Group, a request from a member of the Board of Governors at Westminster Kingsway College (who also happens to have a highly influential day job) for help with a specific problem. He was looking for a tool that would enable him to assess the Board’s collective attitude to risk. Although inundated with offers of help from experts wanting to run a multitude of subjective testing and analysis (the “tell me what you think your would do in this situation, and I’ll use blind corroboration to analyse your risk profile”, brigade), the Board member concerned picked up on Nigel’s offer as we knew we had the perfect output to measure this and discussions began.


Over the next few days, 20 members of the Board of Governors took the Axia Profile online (quick, easy and only 15 minutes to do) and we generated our Risk Tolerance Assessment report which measures your internal influences in 10 key areas of risk based decision making. By doing this, we were able to pinpoint where the Board stood collectively in their approach to risk as well as providing each member with their own individual report. Running through this with them on Saturday gave me an insight into the really valuable work which they do for the College and their commitment and sense of responsibility was frankly, inspiring.


This does not mean to say that it was all plain sailing though, it is a big ask for a group to understand in one hit why Axiology enables us to identify our internal valuing system which influences our perceptions, decisions and actions – basically “why” we do what we do. I have to say however, that as a group they were both open minded and genuinely interested in Robert Hartman’s pioneering work and the fact that we were able to define where they were in terms of attitude to risk so accurately. Individual members have already been in contact with me since and I am meeting with them in the days and weeks ahead to discuss how they can use some of the 50 outputs from the Axia Profile in their places of work.


Post Script


Anyone who knows the score from the QPR V Boro game on Saturday will know that I used my time wisely by not being at Loftus Road. Is it really too much to ask for 2 good results in one day? If ever a team needed the insight of axiology…hey, there’s an idea, I must refer them to Nigel’s blog on Football vs Business.

Interestingly in a world awash with sales trainers, management experts and psychometric profiling most managers are still  unable to identify why despite having a similar qualifications and receiving the same training certain members of their sales team regularly and consistently outperform the others, despite having exactly the same opportunity. Thus making them the firms elite and most valuable sales people.

In most organisations an ability to replicate these ‘elite’ performers would have an incredible effect on their bottom line but until now the ability to identify what makes them ‘elite’ this has proved elusive.

Using the Axia Profile competency modelling tool we are able to accurately identify the specific traits and values that differentiate your elite performers from the rest. This information and the production of their job specific ‘success blueprint’ enables partner organisations to implement targeted training to replicate ‘elite’ performance levels across the team and to only recruit new employees that have what it takes to be an elite performer.

For companies that do not have the in house expertise we have teamed up with the Association of Sales Professionals and will produce together a  training & development program enabling you to replicate sustainable elite performance across your team.

Naturally, we expect demand for this service to be high as this knowledge will provide forward thinking organisations with a huge competitive advantage, imagine  the damage it will do to you if your main competitors whole sales force were ‘elite’ performers!