I use assessments for almost everything I do. I use them in hiring, for promotions, to understand others on your team (such as coworkers), and even for diagnosing business issues. They can also be used in determining compatibility in personal relationships, although I only focus on workplace relationships in my business.
Employee Placement
Offers are given to people well before the company knows whether or not the person will succeed in that position. This used to surprise me, but it no longer does: companies hire key employees (or any employee, for that matter) with very little information. I believe there is no reason to be taking this risk, as the company cost of a bad hire is thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands.
Assessments are also important for promotions. We have all heard of the Peter Principle, where an employee is promoted to the level of their incompetence. People are promoted inappropriately all the time. Just because someone is a good individual contributor does not mean that person would make a good manager.
Coworkers
As for understanding coworkers and team building, it’s helpful to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each person on the team. In Jim Collins' book Good to Great, the office succeeds because they got “the right people on the bus” and got them “in the right seats.” From my experience, very few companies do the former, and fewer still do the latter effectively.
Additionally, coworkers will work better together when they understand the other’s strengths and weaknesses. It is very common for people working together to get angry with one coworker because they don't understand why that person acts a certain way. By reading a person's assessment, we can know exactly why the person does what she does.
For instance, you’d want a certain type of person to deal with the finances of a company – I would look for a Compliant Behavior (aka High C). But by the same token, a complaint personality is not someone who would necessarily excel in customer service.
Business Assessment
Lastly, there's the business assessment. As a small business advisor, I help small business owners and entrepreneurs reach their goals. It has been my experience that the business owner often does not fully understand the issues that he or she is facing.
Often I hear the symptoms of the issues, but rarely do the owners know the root causes. Without getting to the root cause, the issue is never fully solved, and will commonly come back again in the future. I also see times when the owner doesn’t know the real problem because he doesn’t see what happens at the lowest level, day-to-day.
Stop Guessing - Start Assessing!
The above is a long-winded way of saying and justifying that “When you're not assessing, you're guessing.”TM In my experience, guessing rarely pays off. But as they say, “even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes,” and “a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
Most of the time we do a formal assessment, generate a report, and have a comprehensive, detailed analysis. But assessments can also be informal, and done on the fly by educated guessing. I have coined these “RapiDISC” because I use the DISC Behavioral Assessments. You can learn more about how to do a 60-second RapiDISCTM on this page. This is a good practice engineering that I learned long ago. First, make an educated guess based on experience, and then compare that to the detailed analysis before assuming the detailed answer is correct.
Few business owners run their business with the information needed to make informed decisions. I use fully researched and proven assessments that I have verified first hand, and I leverage this knowledge to advise my clients on the best course of action. Ultimately it is their decision, and their decisions take on less risk and fewer unintended consequences.