Behaviors drive the performance of your top employees

11 / Mar / 2020

The top performers in your business will have the right behaviors that make them highly successful at what they do.

By: Craig Elvin

Behaviour Drives Performance

In every corner of your business, from the CFO to the CCO, CPO, and CHRO, the behaviours that drive performance vary. Yet, they all align with your company’s culture and contribute to success.

Those behaviours drive the performance of the individual. And they differ in all areas of your business.

In conversation with Executive Heads, Johanna Hooper introduced the performance pyramid, explaining how skills and experience can account for as little at 20% of our overall performance.

Image of attitude against knowledge and skills in the blog about behaviors

I fundamentally believe that as a hiring manager you need to understand what behaviours you need someone to possess for them to be successful in the job.

And you need to learn how to measure and assess candidates’ behaviours to ensure you are getting the right behaviours and are setting yourself and a potential employee up for success.

So that they can be a top performer.

Jen Gaster recently explained the three levels of assessment.

Does a candidate “appear to be” what they say they are?

For instance, do they act in the right way and do they have the right presence?

“Can they” – can they do what you need them to do?

Do they have the right skills?

And most importantly, “Will they”?

Will they behave in the right way to be successful in the role and be a top performer?

Image depicting the three levels of assessment in the behaviors blog

If you want more top performers in your business, you must get better at assessing and measuring these behaviours.

Here are my top tips for doing that in your hiring process in your business.

Get alignment: Work with the stakeholders to understand what successful behaviours look like. There needs to be agreement across that group before you start interviewing. In my experience, the reason a stakeholder will veto a hiring decision is frequently behaviourally based.
Measure and Test: You need to either deploy a credible behavioural test or get good at asking insightful behavioural questions that will allow you to measure each candidate
Dynamics: With skills and experiences accounting for such a small proportion of someone’s performance think about the amount of interview time you spend asking skills-based questions.
Stop acting on impulse: It’s often harder to measure and test behaviours but you need to measure and test all the candidates equally. I’ve lost count of the number of people that I have met that hired on “gut feeling” and ended up parting company with them six months down the line.

Testing and measuring behaviours will help you hire more top performers.

Their success will mean that they are a greater asset to the business and more of a positive influence.

They are more likely to be engaged and productive and help you higher other top performers.

If you’d like to discuss how to deploy this in your business or how we undertake it for our clients then feel free to call us on 020 7870 8259 or email info@executiveheads.co.uk

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Behaviors drive the performance of your top employees

Behaviour Drives Performance

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