12 Years of Transformation

As the calendar rolls on I am reminded that I’ve invested a dozen years of my professional career with ADVISA, and I’m struck by the amount of growth and change I’ve experienced at this incredible company. It’s never lost on me when I get the common question:

ADVISA… aren’t you the Predictive Index^® people?

Why yes, yes we are! In fact, this is how I would introduce myself and ADVISA 12 years ago. And we’re super proud of our 37+ years as a certified PI Partner. Long before there were PI Partners, we were considered a “Licensee” with a defined, exclusive territory. For more than two decades, the ADVISA team concentrated on supporting a growing client base who counted on our expertise related to PI data to help them align job fit and make smart hiring decisions. In addition to the value of PI in the hiring process, ADVISA honed our value in helping executive and HR leaders apply the full suite of PI data (behavioral assessment, job assessment, and cognitive assessment) through the entire employee life cycle.

Sidenote: We still think it’s a shame when a client only applies PI in the hiring process.

The greatest value that PI brings to businesses is how the data helps leaders be effective at onboarding, coaching, communicating, motivating, and managing their people and teams. Luckily for us, PI has also evolved their software to include modules that offer employee engagement data, performance management tools for managers (not just HR), and powerful team-level tools to help leaders align teams with key objectives. So, while the ADVISA roots run deep with Predictive Index^®, our solutions have grown with our clients. And one central theme remains consistent; strong leaders create strong work cultures.

While some executives might think culture is a squishy, amorphous HR buzzword, the reality is your work culture is a massive competitive advantage. Work cultures impact employee retention, productivity and results. These are three very real, tangible outcomes that all CEO’s I’ve met throughout my time at ADVISA care about:

1. Employee Retention: It’s costly to lose employees and have to go and hire, onboard, and train new ones. The cost of turnover can be north of 100% of annual salary plus disruption to productivity and output. Plus, a shrinking labor pool makes employee retention an even more important focus area. A loyal employee base is a leading indicator of future success.
2. Improved Productivity: With most businesses trying to figure out how to drive more productivity and output with their existing team and resources, leaders must be capable of coaching, motivating, and managing increases in employee performance. This is critical to helping people reach their highest points of contribution.
3. Business Results: At the end of the day, business owners need profitable results. Research shows that customer satisfaction drives results, and an engaged employee base is far more likely to create satisfied customers. Thus, leaders need confidence that their organization is capable of attracting, developing, and retaining employees who live out an intentional culture that produces the desired results.

Fast forward to how I introduce my company today.

ADVISA, we’re the leadership effectiveness company that helps build cultures where people love to work.

How is culture connected to leadership?

Your leaders’ behaviors create the culture that your employees experience. In other words, the way most of your leaders behave most of the time will become your culture. You can fill the fridge with beer and La Croix, add the foosball table, and wrestle with remote work and flexibility. But far more important is how you prepare your leaders to behave, lead, and manage with intention around the kind of culture you aspire to create. While your managers’ competence is important, their ability to connect is the key to teamwork and trust.

Helping leaders become more effective as the mechanism to build great cultures is what we do. And it’s what we’ve always done when we’re successful at helping companies realize the greatest value from Predictive Index®. Why? Because leadership and culture cannot be disconnected. Effective leaders have 3 foundational abilities:

1. They are self-aware and adaptable.
2. They build confidence in others.
3. They create motivating work environments.

For some companies, establishing a language around these foundational leadership abilities is the place to start. This can be accomplished by adopting a tool like PI, but requires the necessary investment in educating leaders on how to translate the data from the software into actionable, intentional behavior change. Beyond this starting point, most companies require more than an assessment with great software tools to help leaders be most effective. That’s why we’ve built and refined a proven process that helps our clients anchor their investments in leadership development, coaching, and training to the intentional culture they aspire to achieve.

How do we do it?

ADVISA guides executive teams through a proprietary assessment and design process to drive enterprise-wide alignment around two critical factors:

1. The intentional culture to best support the organization’s goals
2. The leader behaviors that will carry that culture to attract and retain the best
   and brightest people

From there, we customize learning experiences for leaders that broaden their foundational abilities into new mindsets and behaviors that map back to the core values and leader capabilities defined as important by the executive team. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to culture. Each business has unique needs, strategies, and goals, and that is why our process allows for those custom aspects to emerge.

Finally, we deploy our facilitators, consultants, and coaches to deliver transformative learning experiences and implement the necessary systems and tools that drive measurable impact over time.

When someone asks me now about ADVISA and our work, my introduction reflects this evolution from a tool centric company to a more strategic leadership and culture partner for our clients. It has been a joy to help drive ADVISA’s shift from “the PI people” to the “leadership and culture experts.” For 12 years I’ve seen thousands of incredible leaders leverage their PI foundation to unlock self and team awareness and productivity. Now we are positioned to build on that foundation a proven process for transforming culture through leader effectiveness so that our clients can be places where people love to work. And that inevitably translates to the bottom line.

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