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Transcript

The Gap Is the Signal · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:03
  Edwin, I want to talk about something in how OAD's own survey is actually built,
• 0:07
  because I think most people assume a personality test just tells you who someone is.
• 0:12
  This one asks the same question twice.
• 0:14
  It does, Claire, and that's the entire design insight.
• 0:17
  A hundred and ten adjectives, and you go through the list twice.
• 0:21
  First pass, which words describe you in general, across contexts.
• 0:26
  Second pass, same hundred and ten words, same order, but now the question is which
• 0:31
  of these describe how you must behave in your current role.
• 0:34
  So you're not just measuring the person, you're measuring the person against the
• 0:38
  pressure their job is putting on them.
• 0:40
  Exactly.
• 0:41
  The first pass gives you stable traits, how someone naturally thinks,
• 0:45
  communicates, makes decisions, regardless of what any particular job demands.
• 0:51
  The second pass gives you perceived job behaviors, what the role,
• 0:55
  the manager, and the culture seem to require.
• 0:58
  Same language, two very different signals.
• 1:01
  And I imagine most of the time those two passes look pretty similar for someone in
• 1:04
  the right role.
• 1:05
  Small gap, strong fit, and the right move is just to maintain and develop from
• 1:10
  there.
• 1:11
  A moderate gap usually signals growth or stretch, which isn't necessarily bad,
• 1:16
  that's coach and monitor territory.
• 1:18
  It's the large gap that matters, that's friction or misalignment,
• 1:22
  and it calls for re-scoping the role or intervening directly,
• 1:25
  not waiting it out.
• 1:27
  Can you make that concrete?
• 1:28
  Because "gap" sounds abstract until you picture an actual person.
• 1:32
  Take an introverted analyst.
• 1:34
  Naturally prefers independent, detail-oriented work, that's what the first pass
• 1:38
  shows.
• 1:39
  But the role, as they perceive it, demands constant client-facing interaction and
• 1:45
  high-energy collaboration.
• 1:47
  That's what the second pass shows.
• 1:49
  That gap is real friction, and most companies never see it,
• 1:53
  because nobody's comparing how someone naturally operates against what they believe
• 1:57
  the job is actually demanding of them day to day.
• 2:00
  Which is exactly the kind of thing that looks like a performance problem from the
• 2:03
  outside, when it's actually a fit problem.
• 2:06
  That's the whole reframe, Claire.
• 2:08
  Managers see disengagement or inconsistent output and reach for a performance
• 2:12
  conversation.
• 2:13
  The gap data would tell you it's a structural mismatch instead,
• 2:16
  and those need completely different fixes.
• 2:19
  And this isn't just useful for one person at a time, right?
• 2:22
  You mentioned this scales up.
• 2:23
  Aggregated across a job family, this is where it gets genuinely useful for
• 2:27
  organizational design.
• 2:29
  If everyone in a given role shows the same large gap, that's not five individual
• 2:34
  problems.
• 2:35
  That's the role itself being designed wrong, and no amount of individual coaching
• 2:39
  fixes a structurally overloaded role.
• 2:42
  So it becomes a design diagnostic, not just a hiring tool.
• 2:45
  Both, and that's deliberate.
• 2:47
  It's built for selection, development, and organizational diagnosis,
• 2:51
  three different decisions, same underlying data.
• 2:54
  One clarification for anyone listening who's used OAD's free Top Performer Profile
• 2:58
  before and is doing the math here.
• 3:00
  That's a shorter, seven-minute instrument built as a quick first look.
• 3:04
  The full OAD Survey we're describing today, the two-pass, hundred-and-ten-adjective
• 3:09
  version, runs closer to ten to twenty minutes, since it's doing considerably more
• 3:13
  work.
• 3:14
  Different tools for different depths of the question.
• 3:17
  Right, quick signal versus full diagnostic.
• 3:20
  If you want to start with the quicker one, OAD's free Top Performer Profile is about
• 3:25
  seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours, no credit card.
• 3:29
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 3:32
  But the real lesson today isn't the timing, it's this.
• 3:36
  Stop asking who someone is in isolation.
• 3:39
  Ask who they are against what the role is actually demanding of them.
• 3:43
  That gap is where the truth lives.
• 3:45
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 3:46
  Thanks, Edwin.
• 3:47
  Always, Claire.