This wouldn’t surprise Joe Zanola, a consultant with many remodeling clients. The principles of strength management, he says, “interrupt a convention” within the remodeling industry of “basing our hiring on people’s past experience without ever considering if they were fit for the position.” Then three to six months later, he says, “we’re wondering why they aren’t working out.”
Zanola says that programs such as DISC are invaluable for revealing not only whether candidates are the right fit for an organization, but also how they can best contribute and what they need from their employer to meet their potential.
One Zanola client is Mosby Building Arts, a $6.6 million design/build company in St. Louis. “We know what we’re looking for, and when we find talented people, we find a place for them,” says president Scott Mosby (at right in photo). “We build systems around their personality sets so they spend more time doing what they enjoy in positions where they have the best chance of success.”
For instance, Mosby observed production manager Rich Layton (at left in photo) “doing a lot of selling” in his interactions with clients, and, in fact, Layton’s DISC assessment revealed him to be a natural salesman and entrepreneur. On the job, moreover, Layton had proven himself to be “incredibly well-versed in building technology,” Mosby says.
With those strengths in mind, the men identified a need that Mosby Building Arts hadn’t been able to meet: jobs smaller than the company’s typical design/build projects but large enough to keep field staff busy between larger projects. “We would refer these jobs out because they didn’t balance with design/build,” Layton recalls. When it became clear that these referrals were worth more than $500,000 a year, the company established a new division called Total Home and appointed Layton its general manager and sales manager.
Total Home capitalizes on all of Layton’s strengths, from his understanding of construction methods and costs and the design/build process to his natural instinct for connecting with people. The ramp-up wasn’t instant; Layton says he had quite a bit of sales training before getting the division off the ground. But the fit was there, and Total Home now brings in about $1 million in new revenue to Mosby Building Arts, through jobs costing between roughly $7,000 and $75,000.
The Platinum Rule Strength is a team thing; the most successful companies consist not of isolated talents but of talented individuals who understand how to work with and learn from one another. Zanola encourages clients to make every employee’s personal assessment available for all to see, and for individuals to physically “highlight those things that are important to them.”
At Carnemark Systems + Design, a high-end design/build firm in Bethesda, Md., “we DISC everyone and have team discussions about the assessments,” president Jonas Carnemark says. This understanding creates a real sense of camaraderie and helps mitigate misunderstandings that might arise if one person is less expressive or goal-oriented than another, for instance. “We follow the platinum rule,” Carnemark says. “Treat others as they want to be treated, not as you want to be treated.”
Another tool that Carnemark uses to practice strength management happens to be one of Zanola’s favorite business books. First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, is based on surveys by The Gallup Organization of more than 80,000 managers in a wide variety of organizations. Rules underscores the responsibility of managers to hire for talent and fit, and to do everything they can to make their employees successful.