A New Way of Identifying Top Talent
Using Simulations to Reach Beyond Training
By Mike Vaughan

As budgets are trimmed and business challenges mount, companies are looking for executive leaders who can thrive in a business environment in which they will be called upon to do more with less while maintaining their poise in the face of unprecedented economic upheaval.

Enter Simulations

But what if there were a way of decreasing the uncertainty surrounding candidate viability? What if there were a surefire method of separating the truly top-shelf talent from the merely mediocre?

That’s where simulations enter the picture. While most of us are accustomed to thinking of simulations as training tools that immerse participants in complex, realistic environments and develop and hone critical skill sets across a wide range of cognitive dimensions, a new trend is emerging in which simulations are being applied to other critical workforce development issues that extend beyond pure training applications, per se—including top talent identification.

In Practice

Recently, a client firm approached us with a question. In addition to helping develop executive-level skills, the firm wanted to know whether simulations could also help it to more accurately determine whether its “high potential” candidates were truly equipped to lead.

TARGET: TOP TALENT Quick Tips When building, buying or customizing a simulation that enables you to spot top talent, here are three design elements you’ll want to incorporate:   Use multiple rounds. A simulation should assess participants’ ability to not only make decisions, but to be self-reflective enough to evaluate the quality of those decisions and modify them accordingly over time. Incorporating multiple rounds into a simulation allows you to do this. During the initial few rounds, participants will make plenty of mistakes as they strive to understand the simulation. As the simulation unfolds over the course of subsequent rounds, however, you’ll be able to gauge which candidates are able to learn from their earlier mistakes by making stronger decisions during later rounds. Throttle-up/throttle-down. By designing your simulation in such a way that the stakes are raised at certain points, you’ll be able to determine how participants deal with stressful situations. And by easing back on the emotional throttle at other times, you’ll allow learners the time they need to regroup, without pushing them too far and risking burnout. Capture the data. Your simulation should come equipped with a customizable analytics and reporting package that allows you to track trends and identify individual performance relative to the key traits you seek in executive candidates. This simulation “dashboard” should be capable of capturing and reporting an array of data types, including: Individual and team decisions. How decisions change over time, and whether decision outcomes are better or worse as a result of any changes. Which participants learn from their mistakes over time by thinking strategically about all aspects of the business, and which candidates are merely guessing. At-a-glance comparisons of individual results, team results, and entire training group performance on a round-by-round and overall basis. The ways in which stressful situations taking place within the simulation impact the quality of each candidate’s performance in key areas.

The firm’s executive team was looking for particular kinds of leaders: problem-solvers capable of making smart decisions when confronted with knotted complexities; critical thinkers able to sift through disparate data points to identify the most important factors while discarding irrelevant information; and systems thinkers capable of viewing the entire business holistically and understanding how individual, departmental and business unit-level decisions impact other areas of the enterprise. Ideally, candidates would possess all three of these key attributes.

Yet, assessing and developing these skills alone, the company knew, would provide it with insufficient indication as to whether candidates also possessed the equanimity necessary to listen to their better angels during crunch time. When under duress, the company wanted to know, would candidates keep their wits about them? Would they maintain their ability to delegate and lead? Would they look toward the long-term stability and well-being of the organization and take informed risks, or would they make short-sighted decisions elicited by their own stress in order to gain short-term relief from stultifying ephemera?

Rather than hypothetically extrapolating from a personality profile how a candidate might perform under pressure, we designed an immersive simulation that grew extremely difficult and stress-inducing at key inflexion points during the learning experience. Then, using an electronic “dashboard” reporting mechanism, we generated results that depicted whether candidates who performed well under normal circumstances continued to do so when confronted with stressful business situations, based on factors such as the quality of their decision-making, their teamwork and delegation skills, and the success (or lack thereof) of their overall performance.

The answers were telling. During the first few rounds, it became readily apparent which managers were most apt to founder under pressure. It was also evident which candidates could take stress in stride because these candidates were generally able to remain focused on producing sound business results, regardless of the various obstacles with which the simulation cluttered their path.

By the end of the simulation experience, the company had not only decreased the level of uncertainty surrounding each candidate’s executive potential, it had all but eliminated the hypothetical guesswork so common to conventional types of talent assessment techniques. Most important, the firm’s leaders felt that they were now far better equipped to make informed decisions about executive promotions and hiring.

Michael Vaughan is president of Regis Learning Solutions. Contact Mike