So your talents have been TIPS-ed, now what?

So your talents have been TIPS-ed, now what?

Category:
Business
Innovation Method
TIPS
Published On:
May 22, 2023

Suppose you’re a human capital manager in a start-up venture, a business unit, or a mature organization. Suppose further that your organization has just profiled a larger number of managers and employees with TIPS, Thinkergy’s cognitive profiling test for business and innovation. By using TIPS, how can you better manage your organization’s human capital along the talent management lifecycle? And how TIPS help you to better support your managerial business partners in their human capital decisions? Here are eight actions that you can take as a human capital manager after your company has been TIPS-ed.

1. First, understand your own talent profile

First, as a human capital manager, deepen your self-awareness of your own talent profile before attempting to gain greater awareness of the other talents in your company. Study your personal TIPS profile and test results and take the actions suggested in a related earlier article titled So you’ve been TIPS-ed, now what? (Part 1 | Part 2). This introspection and review of the TIPS methodology from your own perspective will make it easier to apply the concept correctly on others later on.

2. Review the collective TIPS result of your Human Capital Management team

Next, review the results of the other members of your human capital management (HCM) team and how they plot out on the team profiling map of your HCM function. Study and reflect on the team composition of your HCM team, and consider opportunities to further the team by checking our related article, So your team’s been TIPS-ed, now what? (Part 1) and (Part 2).

Here is another interesting exercise that you can do: For each of the four TIPS bases (Theories, Ideas, People, Systems), consider adding up the scores of all the members in your HCM team. Then, divide the total numbers by the number of heads. Ideally, the highest TIPS score of your HCM team should be at the People-base to reflect your functional focus on human capital, talents, or in short: people. (While this is still the case in most start-up ventures, the day-to-day requirements on human capital managers in large or multinational corporations often lead to the collective HCM team profile resembling more the scores of an All-Rounder than that of a Partner.)

3. Overview the results of your talents in a matrix and in maps

When you’ve profiled a larger number of talents in TIPS, your TIPS coach or our TIPS Support team at Thinkergy can provide you with a TIPS Profiling Results Spreadsheet featuring the test results and related personal data of all your profiled colleagues. The spreadsheet lists each talent’s TIPS talent profile, test scores, and cognitive styles, among others. We can also add other relevant information to each profiled talent (such as perhaps business unit or function, role, etc.) if you share these data with us upfront, which makes it easier for you to subsequently link the TIPS results to other essential human capital data that you regularly work with.

Moreover, we can also visualize the test results of specific business functions or work teams in TIPS Team Profiling Maps if so desired and ordered by you.

4. Identify opportunities for talent realignments

As a human capital manager, you can support your managerial business partners by checking for role misalignments. Thereby, the objective is to make sure that, indeed, everyone in a team works in the right job that perfectly suits their TIPS profile and their preferred cognitive styles (or at least aligns reasonably well with this). Of course, Thinkergy or one of our certified TIPS coaches can also assist you in such a review and make recommendations for possible role realignments in a business unit or work team.

For example, some time ago, we supported the group’s human capital manager and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of an Asian marketer & distributor of premium wines and spirits in reviewing the results of a regional TIPS Profiling Exercise. Thereby, we flagged up that the group’s accounting manager profiled as a pronounced Partner in TIPS, which isn’t a good fit for the quantitative, paper-shuffling role of an accountant. Our comment fell on receptive ears with the COO, who had already noticed that she was not living up to his expectations of a savvy accounting manager. So, we agreed to try her out in a more people-oriented role in the sales team, and she subsequently began to shine and became a high-performing sales manager.

5. Increase the odds of hiring the right talents for open positions

What is even better than realigning role mismatches in a business? Avoiding them in the first place by hiring the right person for an open position.

Like many other personal assessment tools, TIPS can help you as a human capital manager to check how well candidates applying for a vacant position fit the particular job profiles. TIPS can help you understand what TIPS profile is the ideal fit for each open position and what other profiles are good fits. This enables you to identify possible mismatches early on, and to sidestep the problem that you bring talents on board and later need to realign them to unleash their full potential. I discussed the underlying process in detail in an earlier article titled How to hire the right talents with TIPS.

6. Individualize the learning & development initiatives for your talents

In the coming years, the human capital function will have to drive major upskilling and reskilling initiatives to equip your human talents with the know-how needed to meet the demands of the digital innovation economy. Here again, it is critical to consider the cognitive side both with regards to putting the right talent into the right learning & development (L&D) program but also to select the right content and delivery formats to allow each talent to shine. I elaborated on these topics in greater detail in earlier articles titled Who should be trained in what and How to develop talents the right way with TIPS (Part 1) and (Part 2).

7. Fit output focus and performance targets to everyone’s natural talents

As a human capital manager, once you’ve helped the business managers to put the right person into the right job, you can also support them in agreeing with their subordinates on suitable performance targets and outputs for the next performance cycle. While in most organizations, the overall performance targets for a business unit or work team tend to be set on a senior level (to ensure they contribute to the achievement of the strategic objectives), the individual performance contributions of each team member are ideally aligned with the natural output and performance focus of a talent as related to their TIPS profile.

Each TIPS talent profile has a particular set of skills and talents that allow them to excel and naturally perform easily, effortlessly, and enjoyably in certain activities, tasks, and projects. So in TIPS-based talent performance: management, the aim is to align as closely as possible the organizational, business unit or team, and individual performance priorities. I discussed each TIPS profile’s natural performance and output focus and how to best align talent and output focus in a team in a separate article titled How to boost work productivity and performance with TIPS.

8. Embrace TIPS as a useful tool in your HCM toolkit, but tread cautiously

Personality tests and cognitive profiling tools like TIPS are valuable because they allow organizations to “look into the heads” of their talents and better understand what makes them tick. Little wonder that most organizations have made one or more of these tests a vital element of their HCM toolkit. As a human capital manager, part of your role is to decide which among the more than two thousand profiling tools available in the market best suit the needs of your organization, and if you prefer to settle more on “classic” assessment tools such as MBTI, HBTI, or DISC, or rather embrace a modern profiling tool like TIPS that is purpose-designed to meet the needs of the dynamic innovation economy.

One important word of caution, though: All personal assessment tests are just simplified models of the complex reality of a human being, and that “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” as the British statistician George Box noted. So as a human capital manager who supports business managers in business units and functions in their human capital decisions, please make sure that they treat the results of personal assessment tests not as ultima ratio. Instead, such profiling results serve as an additional data point next to other equally or more important decision criteria, such as talent performance track record, educational and professional background, knowledge, skills, experiences, and possibly others. So, resist making a personal assessment tool the chief basis of human capital decisions. Or put in plain words: Never hire, fire, promote or sideline a human co-worker based on results of any of such personal assessment tools alone.

  • Do you want to learn more about TIPS? Check out our TIPS website or download our TIPS booklet.
  • Are you curious about what’s your TIPS profile? Buy your TIPS online profiling test coupon for USD 89 now.
  • Would you like to find out more about how we can support your human capital management initiatives with a tailor-made TIPS project for your organization? Contact us to tell us more.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2021