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.

In the years that followed, a few enterprising entrepreneurs decided these pathology tests (with minor adjustments) could provide them with valuable insights into how people work together to bring about common business goals. After fifty years of testing, we now know the level of accuracy of these tests. We know where they are helpful and where they fall short.

How can you know if the assessment you are using measures up? This Blog provides you with the first of 11 questions you should ask to determine what tool you should use in your recruitment process and to determine the true accuracy.

1: What ‘norm’ are your job candidates being compared to?

Most assessments measure personality and behaviour.

Here’s the simple version of how personality and behaviour based tests are created. As you will see, created is the key word here.

These profiles are created by psychologists who observe the behaviour of a particular group of people. They then create questions designed to show where a person scores in relation to the observed ‘norm’ of that group. In other words, their goal is to match the questions they’ve created to fit the ‘norm’ they are creating.

Every assessment tool in the market place is “culture” driven. When an assessment tool is to be taken in a different culture, they must, again, find the standard of measure, or ‘norm’, for that culture. While this process has some value, there is a massive element of subjective bias involved. Clearly, these tools are affected by many factors including the geography, culture, income, age or gender that group of individuals.

Just know this … subjective bias significantly lowers the accuracy of these tests. Perhaps this is why – after 70 years of trial and error in the hiring process, research clearly shows that typical assessment tools are just not accurate.

Business leaders find it difficult if not impossible to trust the typical hiring assessment. Have you found this to be true for you?

There is a better way…

In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War an amazingly accurate way to measure performance in people was discovered by Robert S. Hartman. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his research in 1973. His approach was NOT based on simply observing behaviour or personality.

Hartman’s theory was that we all think and make decisions in the same way—that there are three core decision making dimensions. He called this, “The Structure of Thought.” Hartman spent the next 40 years of his life proving his theory scientifically (not the few few days or hours some take to establish a new norm!).

He proved his theory with a totally objective mathematical formula. This formula measures how people think and how they make decisions.

This was a major discovery because unlike “subjective norms” that come as a result of observing behaviour and personality, Hartman discovered that the structure of thought has it’s own norm. This norm is the same for people all over the world – regardless of culture, geography, income, age, gender, or other factors. We all have the same structure of thought.

Hartman didn’t create subjective norms. His science validation confirms a norm—an objective norm that already exists in all of us. That’s extremely important because when the measurement is totally objective—you can trust it’s accuracy!

The Axia profile scientifically measures how you think and how you make a decision—what Hartman called your ‘structure of thought’. It directly measures skills, competencies, attitudes, talent, whether or not you are accessing your talent, and much more. The Axia profile will quickly identify precisely who will and will not perform in your company with greater accuracy than other human metrics systems.

A growing list of top business leaders are using our system to make more accurate selection decisions and significantly improve business results.

This has been scientifically proven and is now known as the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”.

The less competent therefore suffer from ‘Illusory superiority’, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from ‘illusory inferiority’. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the mis-calibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the mis-calibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

So if you can not rely on past performance, interview testing or educational background to assess skills competencies what can you rely on. The smart money has completed framework assessment to define the required skills competencies required for each role in their organization. Despite much work to enable them to define competency the difficulty is that many of the required competencies are softer skills that are harder to define and measure.

The Axia Profile competency modeling process helps organisations develop a framework competency. For larger organisations and teams this can be created on a bespoke basis clearly identifying the competencies of elite performers that are missing in the less productive team members. For smaller teams and organisations our generic reports have been developed over many years and already specify the key competencies for general roles such as management competencies and sales competencies. Using the Axia profile not only identifies these competencies but provides a measure of your existing team and a benchmark for all new potential hires.

So to find the most cost effective route to developing your own framework competency and avoid being the victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect at interview contact AxiaMetrics today

On this day in 1910 Dr Robert Hartman the ‘Father of Modern Axiology’ was born in Berlin Germany as Robert Schirokaur. He was a brilliant scholar and held a lecturing post at Berlin University and was also an Assistant District Court Judge.

Hartman was forced to flee Germany in 1932 due to his vocal opposition of the Nazi Party. Having experienced Hitler’s rise to power and what he saw as the successful organisation of evil , Hartman dedicated his life’s work to trying to answer the fundamental question of ‘what is good’

Hartman is credited with the discovery that all value has scientific order based on trans-infinite mathematical sets and for developing the hierarchy of the dimensions of thought. By combining these two discoveries he developed the first values based profiling tool, The Hartman Value Profile.

Martin Gilsenan, a father of 3 was also born on the 27th of January (as he is still with us we wont embarrass him by naming the year!) Martin is a partner in AxiaMetrics a UK distributor of the Axia Profile, which is based on Hartmans original work and profile.

Whilst Martin is not yet credited with the significant discoveries of Hartman he believes one of the most significant points in his working life was the discovery of Axiology. Never before had he seen such a detailed and accurate assessment tool. Unlike many flawed psychometrics that rely on subjective questioning the Axia Profile identifies the takers values using an ordering task which provides over 6 quadrillion permutations possible from the Axiological Norm established by Hartman. Essentially it identifies how we think and process information, why we make the judgements we do and the likely behaviour that will follow.

Martin is proud to share his Birthday with Robert Hartman and hopes for the following two achievement in his future:

1. To see QPR win the Premiership

2. That his personal legacy will be having introduced the science of Axiology to both business and education in the UK for the betterment of individuals and companies alike.

There is not a lot of chance of number one but to help Martin achieve number 2 contact AxiaMetrics today to see how this powerful technology can help your organisation.

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.

AxiaMetrics LLP, the people assessment experts, have launched the Axia Profile, an online service based on the science of Axiology, which measures a person’s values and therefore the way they think and make decisions.

Utilising proven scientific identification of employees’ values and talents, AxiaMetrics provides a vast range of ‘people solutions’ to businesses and organisations helping them recruit, develop and retain the right people.

The Profile’s launch has been hailed as the beginning of the end for psychometric testing which although widely used in the past, is increasingly being seen as irrelevant to the problems faced by businesses and large organisations in the early 21st century.

Nigel Griffiths, Partner at AxiaMetrics, said:

“Businesses have woken up to the elephant in the room and now realise that existing psychometric tests actually provide no value whatsoever when it comes to implementing much needed change. The problem is very simple; psychometric tests are fundamentally flawed as they are self reports based on what the individual says about themselves. The information is then used to categorise individuals into a limited number of predetermined standard groups – all of this through blind corroboration and anecdote. Unbelievably this then purports to indicate the individual’s ability to perform, based on these preset groups, a process that is neither scientific nor objective.

“The Axia Profile is based on Nobel-Prize nominated research and unlike psychometric testing it provides a quantitative standard for measuring people’s values and consistently records and predicts mathematically those value drivers which influence all of our thinking, judgements and behaviours. Crucially, it is the accuracy of the outputs provided by the Axia Profile that then enable organisations in both the private and public sectors to implement much needed change in critical areas like recruitment, training and development, succession planning and effective management. Axiological knowledge is therefore objective, independent from any observer and empirical. Although new to the UK, this profile has been valued, validated and successfully applied in the US for over 20 years, in partnership with leading organisations, including AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ford Motor Company, Goldman Sachs, Hospital Corporation of America, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, NASA, New York Yankees, Texaco The Federal Aviation Authority and Xerox.”

Why ? Firstly they are self reports (Garbage in = Garbage out) and secondly, they are unable to predict an individuals drivers and motivation. Last year I was introduced to the Science of Axiology and after trials on my own sales teams I became so interested and influenced by the power of it as a recruitment and development aid I researched the providers in the US and I set up AxiaMetrics LLP to distribute what I found to be the best available derivative.

It is not a self report but an assessment based on your values, thinking process and judgement. It is an online profile that is impossible to cheat as the questions are not leading and its not coroborative, i.e it does not seek to put the respondents in a group or type. It has tailored outputs that have been developed in conjunction with many major US corporations specifically for Sales recruitment and development. Using this technology larger sales teams are able to competency model their sales team to identify exactly what it is in their organisation that makes their elite performers ELITE.

Validity studies are extensive and whilst it only claims to be about 75% predictor of hiring success it has proven to be over 90% acurate predictor of failure, thus helping sales managers avoid those hires that are destined to fail. I would be happy to provide evidence of validity and if you are curious, why not take the test to see some of the outputs for yourself.

Gary May, the founder of the Association of Sales Professionals states that “for me and the Association of Sales Professionals there is only one ‘test’ than accurately and consistently performs as a reliable indicator as to whether someone can sell. That ‘tool’ s based on the Science of Axiology.” Gary goes on to say “As an example I have taken the Axia Profile twice myself and the level of accuracy and the insight I was presented with was astounding. It identified that although I was brilliant at work based problem solving, there were personal issues that were preventing me from putting them to use. [I’d had a personal breakup 3 weeks previous!]. Another example is how it shows levels of empathy. We all know that empathy is at the route of every great sales person BUT how does someone use that their empathy skill. Someone with huge empathy ability could use it to great use in coaching or developing a team but conversely to know what someone else feels means they’ll also know how to hurt and push the wrong buttons. I know not of a another single profile tool which enables you to have such a wonder insight into yourself, your staff and their teams! ”

We are currently running a large scale trial in one of the UK’s most respected call centres, a times 100 employer and finalist in the recent European Call centre of the year awards as they like me have been so impressed with the depth and accuracy of this as a predictor.

If you are at all considering profiling then I’d urge you to talk to us about Axiology, similarily, if you are at all interested in increasing sales revenues, staff productivity, or replicating your elite performers then get in touch, I can guarantee you that the results will speak for themself.