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Home » Blog » Organization Design » Strengthen your strategy with this powerful assessment.

Strengthen your strategy with this powerful assessment.



At OPTIMA 2019, The Predictive Index® unveiled two additions to its product suite. Design and Diagnose have joined Hire and Inspire to form the PI Talent Optimization Edition

With the new-and-improved PI, you’re empowered not just to hire the right people and inspire your talent—but also to design your strategy and diagnose engagement within your organization.

One of the most exciting additions is the PI Strategy Assessment. The foundation of the Design solution, the strategy assessment helps you align your business and talent strategies—so you can optimize your workforce to deliver the results you crave.

Describe your business strategy in people terms.

You may understand your business strategy inside and out, but that doesn’t mean everyone else on the senior leadership team does. 

The PI Strategy Assessment offers an approachable way to articulate your business strategy in people terms. We came up with 20 strategic objectives for you to describe your key business goals. Examples include:

  • Foster and cultivate creativity or a new vision for the company.
  • Increase employee engagement to improve productivity and retention.
  • Implement new systems or processes.
  • Outmaneuver our competitors and be the first to the field.

Senior leaders are prompted to describe their desired business strategy by selecting among these people-centric key initiatives. It’s easier to create an aligned talent strategy when your business strategy is expressed in people terms. 

Gain alignment on strategy.

The PI Strategy Assessment measures leaders’ agreement on these 20 strategic objectives. By using the assessment, you’ll receive crucial opinion data from your key stakeholders. Have you identified Foster and cultivate creativity as one of your key initiatives? You may be gung-ho about it, but for others in your executive circle, it may be a lower priority—or not on their radar at all.

The strategy assessment also asks execs to rate their confidence—either high, medium, or low—in their company’s ability to fulfill each initiative. The assessment then aggregates the priorities and confidence levels of all stakeholders, identifying areas of misalignment. 

Empowered by the survey results, you can bring these issues to light. More importantly, you can begin the tough conversations needed to get everyone on the same page.

Once aligned, you’ll have renewed confidence and clarity with your business goals. Better yet, you’ll be able to implement a talent strategy that sets you up for success.

stakeholders aligning on strategy

Design your talent strategy.

It’s our belief at PI that business success comes from people success. And to have people success, you need an airtight talent strategy.

Using the PI Strategy Assessment, you can examine how your business goals translate to talent optimization. On an interactive graph, the strategy assessment will plot your organization’s strategic emphasis across four categories: Exploring, Cultivating, Stabilizing, and Producing.

Have a business strategy that focuses on implementing structures, refining your product, and improving efficiency? Your vision is a Stabilizing one; it’s focused on optimizing performance and closing gaps in your processes.

Conversely, do you put a premium on innovation and quick decision-making? If so, your strategy sits within the Exploring category. You could even have initiatives across multiple strategy types. It all depends on what you and your stakeholders have aligned on.

By understanding your business’s areas of focus, you can then leverage leadership, build teams, and foster a culture that live and breathe your strategy.

Leverage the right leadership.

Leadership is an important piece of any good talent strategy. Even if your organization has alignment on its business strategy, without effective leadership you’ll never get your ideas off the ground.

The PI Strategy Assessment gets to the heart of this issue. Too often, ineffective leaders aren’t the result of poor habits or bad character—they’re simply misused. Using the strategy assessment in tandem with the PI Behavioral AssessmentTM, you can see how well your senior leadership team’s behavioral drives map to your business strategy.

Have a strategy that’s Stabilizing and Cultivating, but a leadership team that’s predominantly Stabilizing and Producing? Your team may be well-positioned to execute your Stabilizing strategies, but lacking when it comes to implementing your Cultivating vision.

Having identified this leadership gap, you can take steps to fill it. This may mean promoting mid-level leaders within the organization who will champion a Cultivating strategy. Or it could mean recruiting new talent, engaging consultants, or adapting the company’s culture to encourage Cultivating behaviors.

Aligning leadership with your business strategy isn’t a trivial matter. It requires trust, commitment, and honesty from all involved. By taking a holistic, data-driven approach to leadership strategy, you can optimize your leadership strategy. This ensures you’re leveraging everyone’s strengths—and avoiding potential blind spots.

Take your strategy to the next level.

Want to learn more about the Design aptitude and the PI Strategy Assessment? Schedule a demo, and get where you want to go faster.

Join 10,000 companies solving the most complex people problems with PI.

Hire the right people, inspire their best work, design dream teams, and sustain engagement for the long haul.

Enhance your strategy with a workshop.

Looking for additional ways to implement a talent strategy that aligns with your business goals? 

The PI Execute Strategy with Confidence workshop is designed to guide you through the phases of the PI Design aptitude—from understanding what strategy type you’re working in, to developing actionable talent plans that’ll help you implement your strategy.

With the help of your facilitator, you’ll learn to address areas of misalignment, leverage the right leadership, and establish a culture that promotes behavior matching your strategic goals.

Austin is the director of assessment research at PI. He raises chickens and plays banjo.

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