Synergy Screening System®

“Personality Predicts Performance”…The Three Ps

The greatest challenge healthcare organizations encounter with their leaders rarely involves their lack of knowledge or skill. And it also has little to do with qualifications and book smarts. Rather, success is correlated much more with personalities and leadership styles.

All their formal training, technical knowledge, or book smarts do not necessarily guarantee transformative performance.  Beyond everything else, consistently spectacular performance results when people love to do whatever their position requires.

We call it “putting passion into positions” by turning people’s work into play.

The proprietary Synergy Screening System® measures and matches the most critical information needed to ensure the right fit. The first time.

Based on Synergy’s own research, in more than 92% of cases when an executive is terminated or doesn’t perform to expectations, it’s because that person’s personality characteristics are not consistent with what the job requires.

Win-Win Outcomes

All of Synergy’s executive assessment services integrate its proprietary Synergy Screening System®.  At its core, the Synergy approach is an evidence-based, scientific approach to job analysis and leadership assessment that goes well beyond the “gut” (and the all-too-common “lip service” provided by the traditional Big Box search firms) to proactively safeguard everyone involved and to avoid objectively measurable and predictable leadership hiring mistakes.

With the Synergy approach, emphasis on executing all of the right things is deliberate. And they’re done right the first time. This decreases health organizations’ costs and reduces risks while helping to increase productivity and profitability because the right decisions are made the first time.

“Five Out of Six Fits” With the First Candidate

Quality focused leaders know that it always costs less to do the right things right the first time. In fact, in five of six recent Synergy searches, clients were so impressed with the caliber of the first candidates Synergy pre-screened and presented that they chose to meet with and subsequently hired that one candidate.

We found the right fit…the first time.

The Timing: How Long Will It Take?

Prospective clients invariably ask how long the process will take. They have learned to appreciate how the Synergy approach actually is much more efficient because with the Synergy Screening System® all of the right things are done. And, they’re all done right the first time. As the saying goes, “You can pay us now or pay us later.”

This approach decreases healthcare organizations’ costs and reduces risks while helping to increase productivity and profitability, because the right decisions are made the first time.

Synergy’s Evidence-Based Selection Assessments are most often requested when an organization needs objective, expert, third-party assistance to evaluate external and/or internal candidates for a specific position.

The steps involved always begin with a Job (Needs) Analysis, followed by an Assessment, then an Analysis of Results and Planning, and, finally, a Candidate Debriefing (which is optional).

The Starting Point: Job Analysis

Each of Synergy’s Evidence-Based Executive Assessments begins with a Job Analysis to accurately and objectively target the requirements of a position. Are they “square” or “round.” That means that Synergy never recommends forcing square pegs into round holes…or vice versa. Synergy enables client partners to be clear about identifying their wants versus their needs up front.

The How: Identifying and Cross-Validating Requirements for Success

Synergy meets with primary team members individually to identify their expectations of the new leader. And then select team members who will be working most closely with the new hire are asked to complete their individual Job Success Inventory Profiles to help identify the specific characteristics required to succeed in that position.

This proven, added-value step objectively identifies and cross-validates the often overlooked (and potentially conflicting) most critical requirements for measuring success in the position.

The Why: Client Partners Look at Themselves in a Mirror

In the first phase of this process, the evidence is obtained via a proprietary series of structured interviews and carefully crafted, standardized assessment instruments.  Within just a few days, Synergy gathers all of the data it needs to cross-validate the client’s verbally-stated wants with that organization’s actual unique needs for success in a specific position.

Then the combined results are shared with the client and become objective target criteria against which the client’s external or internal candidates will be compared. In effect, with the Profile results Synergy holds up a magnifying mirror that reflects back to our client partners with great clarity what’s most important to their success. The profiles don’t reflect Synergy’s opinions—the client has completed these profiles and Synergy has simply scored them.

The deliverables for each Evidence-Based Executive Assessment are custom tailored to the unique needs of the situation. They typically include a thorough and objective analysis and comparison of each prospective leader’s relative strengths, developmental opportunities, related experiences, and overall potential fit for the position.

In the second phase, the Synergy team conducts comprehensive, customized, highly structured interviews of each candidate (after administering a battery of Synergy’s proprietary leadership assessment instruments) to evaluate each person’s potential “fit” for the position.

Then, Synergy identifies the individual’s primary strengths and non-strengths as related to the client’s needs that have been identified in the first phase of this process.

The Result: The Client Receives A Confidential Executive Briefing

In the next phase, Synergy provides the client with a written Confidential Executive Briefing, which is reviewed with the client to ensure a complete understanding and satisfaction with what results.

This Briefing includes detailed information from Synergy’s analysis regarding each candidate’s potential “fit” along with practical, individualized strategies that the client can use to manage, motivate, and retain each person most effectively—much like an Owner’s Manual for a car.

Also provided in this summary are the results of the interviews, leadership assessments, and a sampling of follow-up questions for the client organization to ask of each candidate—plus their references—to help the client’s decision makers form their own valid conclusions. The result is that our clients receive a realistic, balanced, and unbiased view of the potential for success in that position of each projected candidate (internal or external).