Category Archives: Human Resources

“Mad Men” came to a close last May but we still find ourselves referencing the series whenever we think about business life in the days of yore. The show had a revolving door of characters that seemed to require a lung or liver transplant as much as new business accounts. But when it comes to its portrayal of the business world, and specifically, the business worker, we ask ourselves: How much has really changed over the past few decades?

We decided to pose this question to Dr. Stephen Byrum, Ph.D., CEO of The Byrum Consulting Group and foremost expert on the Hartman Value Profile. Dr. Byrum has been using the Hartman Value Profile since the 1960s, happened to study under its creator Dr. Hartman and consults for educational institutions, corporations and startups. But before we delve into the details of our conversation, it’s important to mention the basic tenets of the tool. (If you are new to the Hartman Value Profile, you may want to check out an earlier post about the assessment, how it works and why we keep introducing it to clients.) 

In simplest terms, the Hartman Value Profile measures a person’s value judgment on three different dimensions: (1) Systemic or “big picture” judgment; (2) Intrinsic or people judgment; and, (3) Extrinsic or task-based judgment. It analyzes the inextricable correlation between a person’s innate personal attributes and their ability to apply those characteristics to the workplace.

Dr. Byrum helped provide clarity on the moving dynamics of worker culture over the past few decades from thousands of Hartman Value Profile test results fielded in nearly every major industry:

• “Mad Men” era favored leaders with excellent people skills. Decades ago companies put a premium on leaders that had high Intrinsic scores (good judgment when it comes to people). Just think of how much time Roger Sterling and Pete Campbell spent schmoozing clients. “If you went into the agency in Mad Men”, Dr. Byrum explained, “Everything was so very dependent on people being able to be socially acute and establish really good social relationships.” But this social IQ doesn’t necessarily lead to the next big invention. “That emphasis on social skills made people individually successful”, Dr. Byrum cautions, “But was not something that contributed to a person’s ability to predict what the next horizon was going to be.”

• The best leaders connect the dots. What Dr. Byrum knows from administering the Hartman Value Profile is that great leaders actually have consistently high Systemic scores. Meaning, they can scope out a situation and forecast the bigger implication. Strong leaders often have an uncanny ability to piece together seemingly unrelated items to achieve an overall goal. Some of the best leaders we know take time to investigate a challenge and predict implications of their decisions on the whole of the company, not just themselves or their direct reports. They work for the betterment of the brand and the business, and consider consumer engagement an absolute necessity, not just a catchphrase.

• Companies wanted rank-and-file workers with high task management skills; today they expect it from everyone. Companies often sought out employees that had the grit and dedication to complete a specified set of tasks. “In the late 1960s through the 1980s,” Dr. Byrum recalled, “Powerful Extrinsic abilities would carry you through the day if you were in an area that involved a lot of process and tact”. This same trend applies today and is arguably a bigger requirement of everyone in business. It makes sense when we consider that there are fewer people expected to accomplish more work in less time. One of the problems is that being a strong producer of work can cost us in other areas, “Oftentimes is at the expense of social skills and Intrinsic abilities”. Our brains have trouble contemplating implications, seeing big picture dynamics and coming up with creative solutions when we are so overloaded with to-do lists. We look for ways to be better producers but we’re not skilling ourselves for leadership roles and other innovative tracks.

• Between the 1960s and 2015, stress has increased precipitously in every industry and at every level. In the closing scene of “Mad Men”, the fictional McCann Erickson agency created the groundbreaking Coca-Cola “Hilltop” advertisement following a serene shot of Don Draper meditating. The focus on the search for deeper meaning and balance is perhaps one of necessity today. The Hartman Value Profile looks both at an individual’s work-side and self-side judgments, as well as the balance between the two. Dr. Byrum has analyzed thousands of results and witnessed a notable dip in people’s self-side scores across the board. In short, we have become more off-balance and more stressed in our personal lives. About 80% of people have lower self-side scores than work-side scores today, compared to about 60% with the same lack of balance in the 1970s. Dr. Byrum suggests that if we dropped Don Draper in 2015, his life and transgressions would not be that much of a shocker today because our lives are so out of balance: “I think if you went back to that period, most people’s lives were not like that. But if you come forward to present-day, you have large numbers of people whose personal lives have gotten as troublesome to the point where I don’t think Don Draper’s character would be much of an aberration in my neighborhood today.”

It is difficult, if not impossible, to keep your personal life from spilling over into your work life. The fact that our personal lives have become more stressed means that our work performance has been impacted as well. Consider the Harvard Business Review’s recent take on the impact of long work hours: chronic overwork diminishes productivity in the long term. The fact that the article mentions an 80-hour workweek is very telling of the dramatic shift towards work-side dominance.

Team SBR periodically takes the Hartman Value Profile to identify movement between the three dimensions of judgment. We love when the results show greater equilibrium amongst the three dimensions (System / Extrinsic / Intrinsic). It is usually a welcome sign that getting a good night’s sleep, taking an extra Yoga class and respecting our own personal time actually makes us better stewards of success for ourselves and our clients.

To learn more about Dr. Byrum, visit Judgment Index and the Robert S. Hartman Institute. 

Companies frequently use new hire assessments as a way to predict a candidate’s potential performance. Over the years we have come across many assessments, from behavioral to personality and IQ tests. But most have missed the mark when it comes to making the inextricable correlation between a person’s innate behaviors, persona or intelligence level and their ability to apply those characteristics to the workplace. For example, being seen as a “nice” person can be a great thing, but there are many “nice” people that struggle to produce work in a timely fashion, to collaborate with their colleagues or to work under mutable conditions. A good assessment tool has to bridge the gap between who we think we are and how we really act.

Several years ago we were introduced to the Hartman Value Profile assessment which looks at a person’s value judgments as an indicator of how they will perform at work. The assessment helps to answer questions like, “When faced with a challenge, will this individual collapse under pressure or determine creative ways to approach it,” “Can this individual generate results amongst cross-functional teams,” and “Does this individual have a tendency to look at long-term implications of their decisions or only focus on what’s directly in front of them?” What makes the Hartman Value Profile different

1. It’s not a personality or psychological test. The Hartman Value Profile measures a person’s ability to judge situations and act upon those judgments. As employers of the ethnographic method (the study of culture) we know firsthand that an individual’s personality is only a piece of the puzzle, oftentimes grounded in their response to a particular environment.

2. It is based on science. Dr. Robert Hartman, Ph.D., created the Hartman Value Profile and was nominated for the 1973 Nobel Prize (the year Henry Kissinger was awarded). Dr. Hartman used mathematics to measure how our value system defined our behavior, ability to work with others and how we make decisions.

3. The “big wigs” use it. We hate to name drop, and as a point of reference, we don’t believe that high profile associations always equate to value. But in this case we can understand why the Hartman Value Profile has been used by different governments and institutions like Yale, Harvard and Pentagon, to name a few.

Judgment is a fairly new term for businesses interested in an empirical performance assessment (as we mentioned it’s not nearly as common as personality or IQ tests). As it turns out, judgments, and our ability to make good ones, might be the next frontier for HR. Take the example of teaching a child how to properly cross a busy intersection. You’ll show them to take notice of road signs, changing lights and to look both ways before stepping onto the road. Eventually, you hope they grow up to be watchful adults that heeded your instructions. But someone who doesn’t display the common indicators for common sense might choose to text on their phone as soon as they see the “Walk” sign without looking for remaining traffic in the intersection. (Spend a weekday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan and you’ll observe these text-walkers firsthand.) The very same judgment indicators that show common sense in life spill over into work behavior as well.

Over the past seven years we have introduced the Hartman Value Profile to dozens of clients with uniquely high rates of success. When it comes to building stronger collaboration amongst teams or matching a person’s skills and experience with how they will function in a particular role, we believe it is the best tool out there. Recently we helped a software client vet candidates for a B2B field sales representative position and the client mentioned how happy she was that we introduced them to the Hartman Value Profile (they now use it to staff all of their positions). Another client said that he is constantly astounded at how accurate the test is, so much so that he thinks the consultant who analyzed the results and provided insights into his team’s performance must be a part-time psychic.

This brings us to a final note on assessment tools. When it comes to using any empirical test, it’s critical to balance the results with an employee’s experience, background, interview and any other factors in the hiring process to score the right people.

To learn more about the Hartman Value Profile, contact us at info@consultsbr.com.