Don Turbiville
ProScan
Creating a Vibrant Workplace
In 2004, Don Turbiville, President of R.S. Stover, responded to an invitation to attend a leadership program through the University of Iowa. As the president of a leading company in HVAC Products, Process Controls, and Engineering & Project Management, he was interested to see what he might learn to benefit his company. PDP Representative Dan Schneider, who was facilitating the leadership seminar, had assigned pre-coursework for participants to complete, including taking the 60 item, ProScan Survey. Remembering to complete his “homework” just before coming, Don quickly completed the ProScan Survey and ran off to the seminar. During the seminar Don was handed his ProScan Comprehensive Report that he says, “just nailed him.” What Don found so impressive was that it took such a short time to complete, but was amazingly accurate. ProScan was something he wanted to learn more about!
Far Beyond Selection
Don began using ProScan as part of his company’s standard process for interviewing people. In fact, it is the first step they do now when hiring. From his training and experience with PDP, Don and his colleagues now have a good sense of what behavioral characteristics are needed for different roles within the company. They have found that ProScan provides a quick and effective way to get a snapshot of candidates and how they might relate to the position.
Don uses ProScan for much more than hiring. In 2005 all Stover employees took the ProScan Survey and, as the president of the company, Don sat down with each of his forty-one employees and went through the results with them one-on-one. From these coaching sessions he was not only able to talk through each person’s results, but he was also able to gain additional insight into that person’s job, insight that would not have been possible otherwise. One such insight occurred with an individual who was primarily responsible for “inside sales.” Surprisingly, his ProScan results indicated that he would be better suited for outside sales. Through a series of conversations, the employee agreed to transfer to a position where he could leverage his personal strengths in the outside sales arena. While initially being hesitant to make this change, he soon discovered it was the best decision!
Knowing Your Team
After Don finished his individual sessions in 2005, he took advantage of the TeamScan reports to obtain a picture of his entire organization. To his delight, he found that his company was quite diverse with regard to its trait distribution. Each of the high traits (Dominance, Extroversion, Pace/Patience, & Conformity) were represented by 25% of his organization. To utilize this knowledge, Don took bits and pieces from the TeamScan reports to create “cheat sheets” for his employees about how each perceived and communicated with each other. These cheat sheets helped his employees better understand how their colleagues naturally communicated to others and how they preferred others communicate to them. Don credits this action for eliminating potential conflict between employees, which in turn has boosted morale.
Adapting to the Adaptable
For Don personally, the most beneficial aspect of using PDP was helping him to understand his employees with “mid-line” profiles. These individuals have equally developed each trait, thus they tend to be very adaptable. Often the challenging part of managing these individuals is that the manager does not know who will “walk in the door” that day. The question is, for example, will the person who walks in that morning want to take charge in a very high dominance fashion? Or will that person choose to be more supportive and amenable to whatever the situation is? Using PDP, Don was not only able to better understand that these individuals are naturally very adaptable, but he was also able to coach them to be more constant in their approach to tasks day-to-day, creating more consistency overall.
Don counts employee coaching using ProScan and improvement in team perception through TeamScan as two huge benefits to R.S. Stover. This story also illustrates how crucial it is for a company to have an executive who is dedicated to improving the bottom line of his company through positively engaging his employees both individually and collectively. Because of these successes, Don has scheduled another round coaching sessions with each employee during the last quarter of 2009, and plans to expand his use of PDP to help grow his company in the future.
