Leading At The Next Level LIVE_ You Took the Assessment_ Now What_
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Wes Dove: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Leading at the Next Level podcast with Dove Development Consulting, the show built to provide ongoing support for your leadership journey. I'm Wes Dove. I'm here with my partner in business and in life, Cindy Dove. And if you're watching inside our Leading at the Next Level community, you get the option of video on this, and that is probably being broadcast for a limited time to our Facebook and our LinkedIn business channels as well.
So that won't be for always, but right now, because we're going through some really neat stuff, we're pushing it to a few different channels than we usually do. So I'll say that to say, if you don't have access to that Leading at the Next Level community, make sure you do, because the ones that are going out on Facebook and LinkedIn will not be the case long term.
But we always have this push to our podcast, where you get the audio, and that always has links to go back to that community and some of the different links to this that we'll cover throughout the process. Now, we're doing this. We're super excited to have you with us because yesterday, as we have this conversation today, yesterday Cindy and I hosted our [00:01:00] 2026 Executive Summit event, and it was a fantastic day.
We had a lot of interaction, and oh my goodness, I was tired. But what we took away from the day was watching folks interact around three different topics about from three of the books that Cindy and I have coming out. My next one's gonna be Leveraging Leadership Growth. It comes out in, I think November 19th.
Cindy's book comes out in February, I believe on the 20th of February, if I remember right. And then I shared a snapshot of a manuscript that I just finished called Making the Best of Your Bad Situations, where we wrapped up the day, and it was a little bit rougher than I wish it would've been. But I think folks got some value out of it.
We talked about how bad situations are leadership's best teacher. Now, Cindy, do you have anything to share from the day before we move forward?
Cindy Dove: Oh, absolutely. It's so powerful to have executives and business managers, decision-makers coming together and having time to not only, hone their skills and gain things that they can apply immediately, but they have [00:02:00] discussion with each other.
And that's what I hear between table discussion sessions, and it's not only round table, but you're sitting with a different group after each session, so about every hour or so you're with- ... with a different group. And it's those conversations are the most powerful takeaways that they have with each other.
Wes Dove: Yeah. It was a lot of fun, and we put a lot into making sure that nobody was at a table with the same people twice, that everybody had people from different industries and it was such a cool event, and we saw that good interaction. And one of the takeaways that I heard as we were walking out yesterday just dog tired was our good friend Craig Johnson said that sometimes it's just encouraging to hear that the problems that he, his organization deals with, and it's not that many, because they run a tight ship there.
It's pretty cool to see. But he said it's encouraging to know that other people deal with the same things, and being in a room like that, they get to bounce ideas around and get better together. And that's why we do what we do. That's part of our values. That's the [00:03:00] community and the together that we work hard to make sure we're living for the clients and the teams that we serve.
Now, today we're gonna be answering a question that we teed up the last time we did one of these podcasts, and we worked through the process with the folks that were in the room with us, and we're gonna be talking about, okay, you've taken the POS assessment. What do we do now? I've got my results. It tells me something.
What do we need to do? That's the whole process of what we're gonna work through with you.
Cindy Dove: And if you're just joining us, this is the fourth episode in our series on the People Optimization System. We started with the POS letter, our free monthly newsletter. Then we talked through the six implementation guides.
Last week we covered the assessments themselves, the free POS assessment and the deeper pillar assessments. The big idea we keep coming back to, though, is this: POS looks at the organization as a system, not just as individual leaders. The assessments tell you where to build first inside that system so you get the best return.
And then today is all about, like [00:04:00] Wes mentioned, what you do once you know where that is
Wes Dove: Yeah. So gosh, the moment we get results, one of two things usually happens from any type of assessment. Cindy and I've done a lot of assessments with teams over the years, and we see the same thing every single time.
We see somebody take it and they get a result and they either feel like it's a grade and they get a little bit defensive about what it said and, "Well, gosh, this isn't right, and here's why it says this," and they put it in a drawer. Or they get really excited about what they see, and they try to fix everything all at once.
And gosh, the whole reason that for so many years we've put one takeaway and challenged folks to put one action step into place after we spend time with them is so they can focus on one thing. Because when we try to do everything at once, we stall out, and what's, that's what we see happen so many different times.
Now, the POS assessment says it right on the top of the page. It gives you direction, it doesn't give you a diagnosis, and it points you to one of the pillars, and it ends with one specific action. We were very, very purposeful about doing that. The goal is not to [00:05:00] fix the whole organization in a month.
The goal is to take the next step in the right direction in the right place that gives you that return on investment that Cindy talked about. Now, we've already been able to do some of this with a few individual organizations we're working with. As a matter of fact, one organization that had several people in the room yesterday, we made sure that they requested the email response, the report to come to their email so we could create, and we're gonna be able to really dial this in for organizations moving forward, but we weren't quite there yet.
W- we've already started creating their custom dashboard showing the 10 folks in their organization that have taken the POS assessment to figure out which one makes the most sense, and we're gonna have a discussion with their team about, "Here's what each of you saw. Here's what this, the assessment suggests to focus on.
What do you guys think? What are your responses on your individual assessment?" So it's gonna be really fun to see how that happens. Now, we've had a number of folks get a lot of detail, and then really get stuck on, "Well, how do I [00:06:00] address all this?" And again, the answer is you can't address all this. We wanna look at which one gets the attention first so we can make sure everything else we do gets more value moving forward and you don't get stuck.
Cindy Dove: Now let's talk about how to read a pillar result, because it works differently than most assessments that people have taken. First, the questions ask about what has actually happened, not how strongly you agree with something. It's measuring behavior, not opinions. Second, your stage is set by your weakest lens.
The scores are never averaged. You land at the highest stage where everything before it is al- is also solid. If three areas look great and one is struggling, the struggling one sets your stage. That can feel frustrating at first, but it's an honest assessment. A system is only as strong as the part that's holding it back.
And so the f- the... Excuse me. And third, if you're taking it as a part of a group, your individual answers are confidential. Leaders see the group picture, but not who said what, [00:07:00] and that matters because it's the only way that people will answer honestly
Wes Dove: Yeah. And that's, that was a comment that I heard early on and we referenced it a couple episodes back to where we got feedback from a fellow that took it, and he calls me right away.
He left his office one evening at 7:30 on a Friday, and he says, "Gosh, that was powerful." But it's only powerful if you're honest with it, and that's the reality with any assessment. You can BS any system, and you're gonna get BS results if that's what you do. And as a matter of fact, if you put BS results into the POS assessment, you're gonna continue to be a POS with what you got to work with.
That just is what it is, and Cindy probably cringed right there when I said it that way, but- ... that's part of the naming system that we've got. Now, here's the reality. We could have picked any one of the five pillars or the six assessments to talk through with you.
But we're gonna work on values purposefully today, because it's where so much of our work started. When we put this process together, it was as I was finishing up writing the initial manuscript for the original version of 'The Values Advantage,' and I wanted to be [00:08:00] really intentional, and Cindy was encouraging me along the way about how do we make a framework for people to really put this into their organization?
Because what we had seen with Waynesboro Landscape and Garden Center, and the Johnsons, and what they were doing with their teams, we were seeing that roll out in a few of our other client organizations, and we wanted to make it very systematic, and it's since grown into that. Now, the values assessment is free.
Matter of fact, all of the assessments are free, and it has 32 questions, and it takes about five minutes. I think I've already put a link in the comments. It'll be in the show notes, so you'll be able to access either of those things. But here's the reality. A lot of people might only get 16 questions. If you have people report to you, you'll get the full 32 questions.
For, for the individual contributors, if you will... I really don't like that term, but that's the folks that don't have direct reports. They still have leadership responsibility, but that's a conversation for another day. If they don't have direct reports, they'll get the first 16, and we get the look from their lens where they feel like we're at in their organization, so we can really [00:09:00] measure that and understand where we have opportunities.
And then if we have folks with direct reports, they get the full 32 questions, and that walks us through which of the five stages your organization is in, which lens might be holding you back, and which chapter of the values implementation guide that we wanna really work through and we wanna open first, and really dial in on to make sure we put those action plans in place.
Now, the last part of that is now what? What are we gonna do? The assessment hands you a specific chapter, and you don't have to guess where you've gotta start, and that's what we've seen with so many different tools in the marketplace is, okay, this tells me something. I remember taking a specific assessment a couple years ago, and I was pissed off because it gave me a whole lot of feedback, but it gave me nothing that I could do intentionally to get better at it right then.
Stage one of the values assessment, specifically of the values o-optimization, is values void. And my goodness, that's the simple one to work on. This is where maybe there's [00:10:00] value somewhere, but realistically it might not be. What we've seen in so many cases is there's nothing really guiding behavior, and sometimes it's an organization that's just nailing it, but the owners might be good people, the executives might be good people.
They might have strong values, but they've never documented them, they've never talked about what they are or what they look like. And the work here might start being a real frustration if you've never taken the time to really document that and give people here's why you do what you do, and they don't understand.
And now we start to run into some of the same things over and over. And if we have those good values defined and really built out, we can start to narrow down the issues that we've got to deal with so people have a clear framework for what they do and why they do it
Cindy Dove: Stage 2 is stated values. You've named the value, which is a big step, but naming them isn't the same as living them out.
The work is to actually write value as a sentence, write each value as a sentence, with [00:11:00] the behaviors you can actually observe. If the value is care, write what in your daily activities will show care through your behaviors. And then build them into decisions, meetings. Recognize your people for them.
The guide even builds in checkpoints at six weeks and at 90 days.
Wes Dove: Yep. Stage 3 is a common stage. It's called values avoidance, and we'll spend a few minutes on this one because it's where organizations often get stuck. The values are clear, but they're not necessarily applied evenly. Exceptions get made for certain people, and I've seen it in so many different organizations.
Not because they don't mean something, not because people don't understand what they mean, but sometimes there's an apprehension about holding somebody accountable when they have a certain skill set that's not easy to find, when they've been with the organization for a long time, we care a lot about them, and they've had a bad day.
And the challenge with that is when we allow that to happen, that values avoidance sets the tone [00:12:00] for, gosh, are they really that important? We've done the work to define them. We've gotten out of stage one. That stated we have stated values and we're in stage two, but if we're not, if we're taking the time to state them and we're not really holding them as our marching orders and here's what we stand for consistently, we're missing the boat.
Cindy Dove: Stage four is values disconnect. This is where values are known. You could find them somewhere and they're often be- able to be found inside the building, but they're loudly and proudly marketed on the outside. So inside, your people know what you're promising, but outside, it's a promise that really draws people in.
Marketing, TV it's through a lot of messaging, and the challenge is this. There's a gap between what you're promising publicly and what customers, new hires, or people who are leaving the organization, what they actually experience. So the work is listening to these groups, getting outside feedback, and closing that [00:13:00] visible gap between what you're saying you offer through your values and what people are experiencing at different levels in your organization.
With your values there
Wes Dove: Yes, indeed. Stage five has changed. When we did the initial keynote, your framework for applying the values advantage a few months back, and we rolled that out, we were really happy with it. Cindy was the one that crafted the five different stages and what they looked like and what they meant.
But we changed stage five, and I don't remember what the word was for it, but the reality is we didn't want it to be something that felt like a destination. Stage five is values in motion, and it's how your values hold up even when the leaders aren't in the room. And the reality is it's not somewhere we get to.
It's a place we can land, but we've got to make sure we stick with it. It requires maintenance. We've got to protect what we've done. It means we've got to assign ownership. We've got to make sure that we've got stories that show the values in action, so all the new people and everybody around have that clear picture routinely, and we've got to [00:14:00] keep reviewing on a schedule and make sure that we're preparing the people that are gonna come next to, to uphold those values and really cascade them through the organization indefinitely.
Now, I want to come back. I touched on it a little bit more than I meant to because I was excited about it, but I want to come back to the idea of the values avoidance, stage three. This is where everybody knows they've got a clear picture of here's what the standard is, and everybody also knows, gosh, it doesn't apply to a couple people.
And the reality is, I've seen this so many different times. I've seen it where a top producer blows gaskets. Cindy's seen it in her career as well. Gosh, she just told a story about that yesterday. And where somebody might be rude, and they get away with it because they're doing really well on a lot of things, and different things happen with that.
Maybe the long-term manager, nobody wants to confront them about being a jerk to all their team members, and they've got massive turnover. Regardless, it's, that's where the void is. "Hey, we've got these values except for in that one spot," right? Now, I spent a lot of years with safety, responsibility, and manufacturing.
I had it in [00:15:00] construction, I had it in mining, and we saw the same pattern there. In construction, it was usually because we had this super high, long-tenured person that had the skill set that it was just hard to find somebody to replace them, and they would bend a rule. Maybe it's not safe, m-maybe they're not wearing safety glasses.
Maybe they're not wearing a hard hat. But then when something happens, gosh why did you let them get away with it? And the reality was in manufacturing, I saw it happen a lot too. There it was lockout tagout. That's the type of thing that if you don't do it, you could lose a limb, you could die in those situations, and it was easier.
But my goodness, I also saw where if people would skirt the rules and not be held accountable, it would set the tone for everybody else watching. So we had to make sure it was done consistently, because if we don't do that, we're gonna lose all trust. Now, the moment somebody sees that standard's not gonna be applied even, it's no longer a standard.
We've set a new standard, and it's not the one we wanted
Cindy Dove: And we've created implementation guides at each stage, and the guides work at this [00:16:00] stage is really practical. You write down the accommodations that you've been making for individuals. You name that specifically on your paper. Maybe you talk to it if you're in a group, talk about it if you're in a group.
You prepare for the hard conversations, because behavior change will have to come. And then you make accountability part of your normal routine so it doesn't depend on one brave person speaking up.
Wes Dove: So the beauty of those assessments is they give you a clear picture for which stage you're in. Then the implementation guide comes in, and each stage, if it says, "Hey, you're at a stage three, you're at values and avoidance," you'll start stage three by looking at here's these questions that you need to answer to say, are you truly out of stage two?
Are these things in place routinely? Are these fits? Or maybe do you need to go back and touch base on a few of the things in stage two? How do you look through the different things that might be holding you back? Now, when we m- as you open values optimonta- [00:17:00] optimontation, values optimization implementation guide, easy for me to say, right?
You figure out which chapter you wanna be in, that's the stage that you're gonna be working through. And again, each has that map check, and it really is geared at making sure that you're truly where you're gonna be. Because the goal's not to kick you in the, the shins over things. The goal is to make sure everything that you're doing is very sustainable.
We don't want you to redo work that's not necessary, but we do want all the work you do to give you massive results. So those questions at the beginning of the chapter to make sure that previous stage is truly in place saves a ton of wasted effort, because if you don't have the previous stage in place, you'll never be able to build the current stage to where it needs to be.
Now, throughout the guide, we've got a ton of resources. We've got 'em... They're called printables, and the beauty is if you're catching this on the podcast, on our community, wherever, you can go in the framework, the links that I've put in here, and you can dig into some of those printables for each of the, the pillars at no [00:18:00] cost.
But in the workbook, there's a lot more content around that, so you can really dial in and figure out which of those resources make sure that you're getting the most from it. And how do you work through some of the things like Cindy talked about, that you can work through and put the action in place with your teams as you get there.
Now, if you wanna get those free printables, you can go through the website. There's plenty of links with what I've shared, whether it's at the values page or whatever. It will ask for your email, but that's not signing you up for a list, that's getting you access to those as a download. And they're between 26 and 40 printables for each of the different pillars, as well as for communication.
So there's a ton of content that we've made available at no cost, because we want you to be able to get the value from the tools that we've put together
Cindy Dove: So we have made this incredibly simple. It might sound like a lot, it's a lot of tools for you to use, but it's a simple process. If you want a simple plan for the next 30 days, here it is.
One stage, one lens, one action. Pick the one action the guide gives [00:19:00] you for your stage, and the lens that's holding you back. Bring a small group into it rather than doing it alone, because values only work when they're shared. Then put a date on the calendar to retake the assessment so you can see whether things moved.
So that's it. It's not glamorous, but it's real change that happens in your organization.
Wes Dove: Yeah, and I'm gonna share one thing real quick. Sometimes you work through your result and you realize the gap isn't the system, it's a specific leader who needs to grow. And that's a challenge, but we're able to work through that.
That's where the rest of what we do on the Dove Development & Consulting side, the, the content that we've built over the last 10 years, is designed to help the, the, the individual leader, even if it's not a systematic process or a sys- systematic problem. We've built courses, we've built individualized things that, that we're rolling out right now as we speak, and we look forward to sharing more about that, that we can build a structured, custom-tailored leadership development plan based on [00:20:00] reviews that's specific to different folks within the organization out of our full library.
And we can build in the coaching and the tools to make sure you get those measurable return on investment for everything that you're putting in. Now, the People Optimization System shows you what you build into the organization. The rest of the leadership development tools that we've created is built to help people inside that organization grow into what you're building so the two work cohesively together long-term
Cindy Dove: If you haven't taken it yet, the free values assessment is at posframework.com.
It's about five minutes. And if you want a bigger picture first, the free POS takes about four minutes and tells you which pillar to start with.
Wes Dove: Yep. All six implementation guides as we share this, they're now available on Amazon. They're packed. They're not just workbooks that you fill in the blanks.
They've got a ton of content. They've got a ton of explanation. They've got some cool stories that model the different stages of each of the pillars that we've built into there. It's a [00:21:00] powerful thing. We've talked about that. Leadership Growth and Experience went live just about a week ago as we share this.
And if you'd like to get a monthly snapshot of this, we challenge you to sign up for the POS letter so the organization's not a POS, right? And that comes out, I think there's a link to that at the bottom of the, the posframework.com page. And we always wanna say, hey, thanks for being part of this Leading at the Next Level podcast with us.
The caveat that I always share at the end is if you've got a need for continuing education credit, we do the bulk of it in our Leading at the Next Level program. We've been approved providers with a number of different entities, most specifically the, the Society for Human Resource Management and the Human Resource Certification Institute for more than six years, going on seven years now, and we've got more than 200 lessons, each approved for a credit, and with behavior-based assessments and a lot of different tools built into that so you can get those credits to renew your [00:22:00] certification, your credential, but just as importantly, so you can get those measurable results that we talk about and so many different things that we share.
Cindy, anything else you'd like to share before I wind it down?
Cindy Dove: No. posframework.com. Take the assessment if you haven't already, and we look forward to hearing the feedback from you and to seeing you back here in the Leading at the Next Level podcast.
Wes Dove: Indeed. Thanks so much. If you have a need for those credits, send us an email at admin@dove-development.net, and we'll hook you up with a 14-day opportunity to kick the tires at no cost.
Make it a great day. We'll see you soon. God bless.
