Bob Dylan's Results

Strategic Insights

How much money we make impacts practically every aspect of our lives. It determines what we can buy, where we live, and when we can retire. Someone with remuneration high on their list is likely aware of the power of money, and to some degree, their self-worth is tied to how much they make. Accordingly, their employment relationship needs to be aligned with their life and financial goals. Their pay also might be the measuring stick by which they gauge how valuable their work for the organization is. If what they are paid and how they value themself is out of balance, they will likely be dissatisfied at work. If they see their compensation as an accurate reflection of their worth, they are willing to work hard.

Pay transparency can be critical to those who value remuneration highly. Don’t be sneaky here. A common source of conflict between individuals who have remuneration high in their results and their employers is the differences in pay between employees, particularly if the employee's contribution is viewed as inconsistent with their financial compensation. These issues are exacerbated when that information is discovered rather than disclosed. Be aware of these tensions as you make decisions.

Valuing remuneration does not mean that they don’t care about having a terrible job. A large study of current employees found that across all income levels, pay is not the top predictor of workplace satisfaction. Instead, it is the culture and values of the organization, followed closely by the quality of senior leadership and career opportunities within the organization. These are the hallmarks of good employers. Making a lot of money can help someone achieve certain goals in their life, but it does not make a miserable job less miserable, nor does research find that it makes up for relationship casualties that can come from an unbalanced life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with placing a high value on remuneration. Money creates opportunities and can enable a very balanced, fulfilling life.

Things to Consider for Fit with a Position

• Have very honest conversations about them up front about the possible salary and how they feel about it. You might need to spend some time convincing them that this is not a negotiation tactic and that you truly care.
• Explain very clearly how raises work, and to the extent possible give them benchmarks to achieve them. This will be very motivating to them (and they will feel betrayed if they achieve those and then no raise materializes).
• Are there opportunities to earn additional commissions or bonus pay? Be clear about those, but don’t promise what isn’t there.

Evaluation Questions

This section provides a series of questions, tailored to the tested attributes, that will help you as you recruit top talent, work to retain valued team members, and develop a more effective work culture.

What are your retirement goals?

Bringing up their ultimate career goals, even early in the relationship, shows that you care about their career and are a partner in helping them strategize to achieve their dreams. Listen carefully and think about how you can help them achieve it (even if they are brave enough to admit they don’t necessarily expect to retire working at your organization). This helps you take a more developmental approach with your employees, increases loyalty, and decreases turnover.

What are your five-year professional goals?

Goals are important. They help us know if we are on track for the life we’ve planned to lead. Helping your team meet their goals will improve loyalty and performance. Bonus points if you follow up one these goals with them in the future. They’ll likely feel very cared for and a bit stunned.

How does an employer demonstrate how much they value their employees?

Benchmarks, particularly financial benchmarks, are sometimes a score card for employees. If someone values remuneration highly they may equate their paycheck with their worth. It will be important to what meaning they put behind their pay.

Strategic Insights

A person who values predictability is likely a planner. They get more done when they know what is expected and feel capable of exceeding those expectations. They would likely be frustrated by a lack of structure or when there isn't clear guidance.

For these employees, knowing in advance how they will be evaluated is crucial to their success in a new position. Unfortunately, most employers are rarely clear enough about what they need from their employees. This lack of clarity can lead otherwise talented employees to underperform. Because these employees value predictability, they will likely see the tasks that need to be done before others do. This ability to anticipate needs can make them very valuable to their organization as an employee and a leader. Chaos is not what they are looking for.

Regardless of what work they are doing, clear communication, particularly related to expected outcomes, is the key to predictability (and success) in virtually all jobs. Some jobs lend themselves to this type of clarity more than others.

Predictability can also be a management decision, so you have influence in this. If a person’s manager has not given them a clear sense of what is expected from them, they can and should ask some questions to clarify. But even if they do not, a lot of good can be done by checking in on them for the first few months and asking them specifically if there are any aspects of their job that they wish were more predictable. Asking is caring, and actually making improvements is 10x better.

Things to Consider for Fit with a Position

• What would their ideal working day/work week look like?
• How will they know if they are doing a good job?

Evaluation Questions

This section provides a series of questions, tailored to the tested attributes, that will help you as you recruit top talent, work to retain valued team members, and develop a more effective work culture.

Tell me about a time where a job was excessively unpredictable and how that impacted work.

Stories like these are invaluable for gaining insight into how people actually see the world, what their expectations are, and what negativities they are acutely sensitive too. Listen to their story and pay attention to what they explain as the central things that were “excessively unpredictable” and the negative outcomes they associate with them. How does this fit with the position you are considering for them?

What is the importance of quality control?

Predictability can coincide with reliability. Some aspects of your operations particularly need to be performed consistently, repeatedly, and reliably. While no one likes boring or exessively repetitive work, someone who values predictability might be ideally suited to work on products that don’t vary as much but have a standard that must be met. They know what to expect every day, what it will take, and when they have done a good job. This question will help you assess a person's capacity to help in these situations.

Tell me about a time when something you were asked to do changed and you had to adjust. What did you do? How did it make you feel?

This question will help you learn how someone deals with change (and emphasize the importance of some degree of flexibility).

Strategic Insights

A person with variety in their top attributes is ripe for jobs that don’t necessarily look the same from one month to the next, or even from day to day. One option for them could be jobs that are project-based. They may also enjoy working on a team where everyone needs to wear multiple hats from time to time (for instance, most startups). Variety comes with unpredictability, which might be a perk for these employees. They get to solve problems, and often thrive being thrown into situations in which they are not yet an expert. Variety creates opportunities to gain competency and experience in many different areas. This person will enjoy situations where others might be stressed.

Variety doesn’t necessarily mean a chaotic or unpredictable workplace (though it can in some fields and may be what some want). Some jobs, such as K-12 teaching, coaching, and construction, have variety built into them because of the different topics, lessons, projects, and people these professionals interact with every day.

This person is well suited for positions that have structural reasons for why their work varies. Does the position entail working for a variety of different clients on their various needs? From consulting to accounting to home remodeling, working with clients is one way that variety can be built in. Another often overlooked source of variety is working on a small team or in a small organization. As part of a smaller firm, day-to-day tasks and problems must be addressed by relatively few people, so an individual must pitch in across multiple areas for the venture to succeed.

Things to Consider for Fit with a Position

• Is this a position where they are working with different clients at any given time, and how different might the jobs be for various clients?
• What will their day-to-day work look like? (Often, in positions with high variety this will be a hard question to answer well, and that can actually be a good thing.)
• How big is the team that they will be working on and how do job assignments get handed out?

Evaluation Questions

This section provides a series of questions, tailored to the tested attributes, that will help you as you recruit top talent, work to retain valued team members, and develop a more effective work culture.

What steps would you take if you felt that your job was getting too monotonous?

Repetition is a comfort to some and agony for others. When a person craves variety the most important thing you can do to keep them engaged is to honor that need and build their work profile accordingly. Start a conversation that fuels a conversation around workload balance.

How do you keep yourself challenged at work?

Helping your team feel a sense of ownership for their own progress is important. A need for variety highlights the importance of constantly creating personal benchmarks. Helping your team members challenge themselves will help you keep them engaged.

Describe the project that you most enjoyed working on in the past ten years (not the project that was the most meaningful, but the most enjoyable) Why was it your favorite?

A happy employee is a productive employee, and a productive employee is more likely to be a happy employee. It’s a virtuous circle. Starting a conversation around a good memory will help you learn how to structure their list of tasks in a more compelling way to maximize enjoyment and performance.

Strategic Insights

Someone with clarity high in their results is looking for positions that have clearly defined processes, outcomes, and expectations. Many of the most satisfied employees are so happy because they can see that they have become very good, even expert, at something. The feeling of mastery, and making progress toward mastery, is one of the greatest gifts work can offer.

This doesn’t mean that this person needs their hands held to succeed, far from it. It simply means that success must be clearly defined. Through hard work and ingenuity, with clear benchmarks and expectations, they can become more successful in their role every day. They will do best in jobs where there is little mystery to how success is measured or achieved. They want to spend their time becoming great instead of guessing what they’re supposed to do.

One great way to add some clarity to their role is to provide clear benchmarks of success and failure, and especially, benchmarks for promotion. This helps them and others keep track of what they are capable of doing. Clarity in what these employees need to know lends itself to clarity in what they need to do, which is something they appreciate, and for good reason.

Also remember that, as with predictability, many times you can increase the clarity of a position by encouraging management to set clear, realistic expectations for success up front. Nearly all will benefit from moves in that direction, whatever the case.

Things to Consider for Fit with a Position

• What would their typical day at work look like, and how will they know if they’ve done well that day?
• What would your dream employee for this position eventually become excellent at? Is this a match with what the applicant wants? Be open about this in the interview process.
• How clear are the expectations for how success is measured in this role?

Evaluation Questions

This section provides a series of questions, tailored to the tested attributes, that will help you as you recruit top talent, work to retain valued team members, and develop a more effective work culture.

What questions do you have about the job description or this role?

The job description frames the job to be done but also sets the employee's expectations for performance review. Benchmarking is important for a person who values clarity highly. Unfortunately, most job descriptions are poorly written or only capture the minimum standard. A conversation about the job will help you and your candidates get on the same page.

Tell me about a time when you were asked to do a job but weren’t given directions on how to do it?

Perfect clarity is impossible. But those who value clarity are often good at self-direction, particularly when they know the parameters of the task to be done and their latitude for discussion making. This question will help you assess their judgment.

What are the responsibilities of the manager and the employee in clarifying how a job should be done or a problem solved?

Employment is a relationship. Learning a candidate's views on the roles you and they will play in that relationship is important – particularly if the candidate values clearly defined roles.

Strategic Insights

Scholars often delineate between ‘generalists’ and ‘specialists.’ Because this person cares less about being a specialist, they can focus all of their efforts on being an excellent generalist. Great generalists are extremely valuable, and generally make excellent managers, because they can “speak the language” of different areas of expertise and help them work together. The best generalists are excellent at making connections between different specialties because they have some familiarity with all of them. Specialists are generally less equipped to do this and must rely on generalists to bridge the gap between different groups. A team of all specialists, with no generalists, is likely to be producing at far below their capacity because they are short of people who understand the various parts well enough to effectively combine them. This is why generalists often become the best managers (and specialists are somewhat less likely to excel in management positions).

The generalists who thrive are often, in reality, specialists in organization and social politics. What this means is that they are particularly good at helping teams work together, organizing their efforts, smoothing over social mismatches between various factions, and helping everyone get the most from their work. They can be helped tremendously by being given the vision of themself as a generalist who needs to get pretty good at lots of things but doesn’t necessarily have to be the very best in any one thing. This can be extremely valuable.

Strategic Insights

A person with location low in their results can confidently pursue the best opportunities regardless of their location. They are highly adaptable and can adjust to life in the big city, small town, near family, or far from it. This does not mean that they don't have preferences, just that those preferences do not strongly determine their level of satisfaction at work.

Location agility can be a very powerful advantage when job hunting. (Note: Location preference is a domain that often changes over the course of a career. It may be in their top three at one stage of their career and in the bottom at another. Don't assume because it’s at the bottom now, which suggests that they can be happy working anywhere, that they will always be so locationally versatile).

Strategic Insights

If someone has purpose at the bottom of their list, it does not mean that they don’t care about meaning, nor does it mean that they aren't passionate. It means that they do not rely on their employment to satisfy their need for life purpose. In fact, for those who find purpose in supporting their family, just having a job can be very purposeful. This group of people are also more likely to score low on needing purpose from what they do at work. This often means that they use the resources provided by their job to facilitate the things that give them a sense of purpose. Despite all the “follow their passion” rhetoric they were taught about their future career growing up, they are more clear-eyed about using their work to allow them to find purpose elsewhere and facilitate their other passions. This is very healthy, and more likely to lead to a happy/fulfilled life than trying to find all or most of their purpose from their job.

This doesn’t mean that a job devoid of purpose will be delightful to them, and it often does mean that they will find extra value in things like flexibility, which allow them to better contribute to the things that are giving them purpose.

Some people are willing to compromise on other outcomes in favor of working somewhere purposeful. These employees can find a position that maximizes their other career goals, even if it means they aren't working for an organization with a mission about which they have deeply held feelings. They can still enjoy the satisfaction of contributing to the efforts of their fellow employees. Flexibility, free time, and even money are great tradeoffs for them.

Strategic Insights

With training at the bottom of their results, this person is likely comfortable figuring it out as they go, or they are at a point in their careers where they already have a lot to offer. Since they don’t feel a great need for new training, there’s a good chance that they want to make significant contributions now. Look at what IS meaningful for them, and you’ll get much better insight into what they want out of a job right now, and it’s likely to include making a meaningful impact.

For these employees, opportunities for training become fewer and fewer as their responsibilities increase and they work independently. That said, we all need training, and the best are constantly learning. Just because this person scored low on a desire for training right now doesn’t mean that they are untrainable, it just means that learning new things isn’t a large value-add to them. This is often the case with seasoned managers or those who have already earned the title of “expert” in something. Figure out what they feel they are expert in.

Strategic Insights

A person scoring low in sociability is not necessarily bad at socializing. This score does not give you secret insight into who might be a jerk. Nor does it mean that this person works best alone. What it means is that they do not require as much social interaction to be fulfilled at work. With sociability low in their rankings this person might not be greatly impacted by relationships with their co-workers or is ok working more independently. Office politics are likely to have less impact on their life unless it makes getting the job done more difficult. They can be considered for employment that is remote, or independent, with more confidence than most.

Sociability is one of the rarest attributes to find in the bottom of someone’s results. Interacting with others helps us achieve a degree of personal satisfaction. This person is likely getting their social connections elsewhere. That said, there may be some benefit to occasionally going out of your way to help them feel welcomed and valued as a member of the team. Even those who aren’t looking for a lot of sociability at work want to feel respected and valued. This is particularly true if they are in a leadership position.