Before making any rash decisions or resigning yourself to uninspired production, be sure to ask yourself one essential question…

Are the right people in the right jobs?

No on likes to think they are made for one type of work and ill-suited to another – we’ve been taught all our lives that with enough gumption and hard work we can accomplish any feat.  And for those employees who have a burning desire to reach a certain goal, their success should be encouraged no matter how much they need to adjust their behavior to match the requirements of the role. 

Yet many workers find themselves in roles that require them to alter their latent behavior substantially without that burning desire to succeed behind them.  Mid-level managers, account executives, and many other professionals find themselves in their current roles not by design but by the natural twists and turns of a career.  These individuals carry on in their positions, working hard to adjust their behavior to their roles for no other reason than they just happened to end up there.

Such situations – which are more common than we like to admit – are examples of people being in the wrong jobs.

But what defines the “right person” in the “right job”?

Some criteria that can be used to measure this are:

• the individual’s desire/motivation to be successful in their current position
• the individual’s goal to continue to advance in this particular career track
• the individual’s level of satisfaction, fulfillment, and company dedication
• the individual’s behavior style matches modestly well with the supervisor assessment of the job

When you have the right people in the right jobs, things just “hum.” In our experience with companies around the world, one of the top issues we find is that people are not in the right jobs for them.  This causes friction, lack of motivation, and in some cases even corporate resentment.

How do you get the right people in the right jobs? There are a variety of ways, but in our experience we have found that nothing works as well as using a Cleaver DISC profile.  Our DISC profiles provide a comprehensive assessment of an individual’s latent and motivated behavior patterns that can be matched and compared to a supervisor’s interpretation of the role. You can learn more about the Cleaver DISC here, or contact a Cleaver Consultant today!

The number of high-performance professionals who feel small next to their peers is shocking to say the least. This epidemic of feeling “not-as-good” has swept through the business community faster than tightened credit since the start of the recession.

Ironically, one of the keys to pulling your sales up and hitting your company targets is dropping this mentality and instead embracing your peer and competitor’s talents.

Talent counts.  But it doesn’t count for everything.  Hard work, perseverance, ingenuity, and vision are just as valuable – if not more valuable – than talent alone.

Taking time to acknowledge and identify the talents of those who surround you in your professional life should be used as a way to spark your competitive spirit, educate yourself on the market, and get ideas for how to proceed next.

Being aware of your own talents and perceived shortcomings is essential to understanding the opportunities in front of you, but should be looked at with a grain of salt.  Everyone, even those people you perceive to have more talent than you, has their own set of gifts and challenges.

The ideal business world is not one where everyone looks the same and possess the same gifts; the idea business world is one made up of the rich tapestry that is myriad and nuanced strengths that cover diverse skill sets.  Other people’s talent shouldn’t be intimidating – it should be inspiring.

Managers around the world are starting to understand that truly effective leadership is accomplished not by what you tell people but by what you know about them.

And while knowing what the name of their dog is, how many kids they have, and what their favorite donut can score you points in the relationship management arena, they are nothing compared to understanding an individual’s motivating values.

What Are Motivating Values?

An individual’s motivating values are the primary forces that influence a person’s life, including their choices in the workplace.  Values can affect how an individual behaves in any given situation, and outline their interactions with others.

Since 1975, Cleaver has been researching motivating values and how they relate to the work environment.  We’ve found that people’s motivations can be broken into 6 main categories:

• Theoretical – The search for truth
• Economic – The desire for wealth
• Aesthetic - The appreciation of beauty
• Social – The improvement of human welfare
• Political - The desire for power
• Regulatory – The deference to a higher authority

These six values, and how strongly (or not strongly) a person is motivated by them, can affect a wide range of potential business responsibilities and roles.  For example, if someone has high social values, they may be willing to spend more time developing a stubborn or challenging direct report.  Conversely, someone with base-line or below ranking social values might be more inclined to simply replace the difficult party.

Why Are They Important?

To many managers, the task of guiding and leading their direct reports is a real challenge and often a surprise.  Someone who you expect to do well at something may drop the ball completely, while someone else who you had almost given up on can step up in the last possible moment and blow you away.  Understanding an individual’s motivating values can help reduce the challenge and surprise of working with your people and improve productivity and effectiveness all around.

When you have a clear understanding of someone’s motivating values, you have a clear understanding of what drives them to do what they do.  Will the potential for a bonus kick them into gear, or will a desire to meet expectations instill more initiative?

Once you begin to understand how much an individual’s values influence what you see in the workplace, it is hard to imagine that any manager can lead without a knowledge of them.

To learn more about the tools you can use to understand your direct reports’ motivating values, contact a Cleaver Consultant today!

Impactful. Powerful. Beneficial. Supportive.

These are the words we hear most frequently when receiving feedback on the programs, workshops, and retreats Cleaver Company puts together for our clients.  Our exceptionally high client retention rate and long term relationships with our clients (an average of 19 years!) are what we consider our greatest accomplishment.

While our products have been used in thousands of businesses across hundreds of industries world, it is the responses we get – from HR managers, employees, financial officers, and CEOs – that drives our success year after year.

“I feel lucky to have participated.”

Our products and services, though grounded in immutable diagnostic principles and up-to-the-minute research, are tailored for each company we work with to ensure they are identifying, addressing, and improving the issues and struggles.  The result? Clients continually tell us how much we’ve advanced their organizations.

“Once-in-a-lifetime experience. I would recommend everybody get a chance to participate…”

From 5-day retreats to individual consulting sessions, the team at Cleaver works with our client organizations to create the greatest positive impact possible. If you want to see how Cleaver Company can help your company get where it wants to go, contact one of our Cleaver Consultants today.

The original impetus for many of Cleaver’s tools is found in the writings of William Marston, who postulated a theory of human behavior as a function of the environment and the individual’s reaction to it. Marston theorized that an individual will perceive a stimulus or environment as either antagonistic or friendly. He further theorized that each individual will either have a positive, active response to control the stimulus or environment, or the individual will have a passive, reactive response to the stimulus or environment.

Combining these two general dimensions provides a matrix from which typical patterns of interaction could be described along four characteristics: Dominance, Influence, Compliance, and Steadiness.

These four characteristics formed the base for the Cleaver DISC Profile, and John Cleaver worked to further Marston’s theory by adding constructs that defined behavior in jobs and linked them to the behavior patterns in people.

Since the initial construct of the Cleaver DISC, other elements have been added on to further develop the precision and accuracy of the tool.  Today, Cleaver offers over 50 tools born out of this same method of combining groundbreaking research with practical diagnostic framing.  Our clients around the world will tell you that when they reach for their Cleaver products and tools they are confidently reaching for a proven strategy for success.

Click here to learn more about the tools and contact a Cleaver Consultant today to learn about what they could do for your organization.

As a young industrial engineer, John P. Cleaver observed that two out of every three working people were unhappy with their jobs. Low productivity, negative attitudes, absenteeism, and accidents were costly results of poor job compatibility.  It was costly for the companies and unrewarding for the employees, thwarting the economic goals for both.

Cleaver revolutionized management technology by blending two disparate disciplines; the logic and efficiency of industrial engineering with the emotions and varieties of human behavior. The result was a People Management System with its own new language for communication and a set of tools for measurement of job compatibility and motivation.

Today, Cleaver Company is a creative management resource firm considered a leader in methods for managing people. It serves executives by building their companies to achieve growth and profit objectives and develops their individuals to gain job satisfaction, productivity, and career succeed.  These two forward thrusts are inextricably inter-related and enhance one another. Properly applied, employees progress and the companies profit, a winning situation for both parties.

The tools and strategies utilized by Cleaver Company were developed in the real world of industries, offices, and sales territories and are therefore highly efficient and practical business solutions.