What do elite military commandos and business executives have in common?

What do the worlds best business executives have in common with elite athletes and military commandos? The ability to pay attention, to avoid becoming distracted under pressure and the ability to remain focused on the task at hand.

For several years, the worlds top business executives have taken the The Attentional & Interpersonal Style (TAIS) assessment. TAIS is a 144-item, self-assessment inventory that can be answered directly on the computer. Over 25 years of applied research in business, sports, and the military provide direct evidence of the link between changes in physiology, as a function of increasing or decreasing arousal, and the ability to concentrate. Those changes have critical implications for performance, coaching, and skills training programs.

TAIS inventory were developed by one of the world’s leading sport psychologists, Dr. Robert M. Nideffer, Ph.D., ABPP Diplomat in Clinical Psychology. Dr. Nideffer is highly regarded for his work in attention control training and his performance coaching techniques. The TAIS inventory helps identify those performance situations where mistakes are likely to occur, their causes, and strategies for minimizing their effects or preventing them all together, thus enhancing actual job performance.

TAIS is used to gain crucial information over a wide range of applications including:

• Executive Coaching
• Team Building
• Sales Training
• Selection and Screening

During this week, we conducted TAIS for one of our Expansion Stage portfolio companies to enhance Management Teams performance. While people were skeptical going into the assessment (takes 15 minutes online), at the end of the day, I believe they found high value in understanding everyones style attributes and how to best harness this across the team to achieve high productivity and results.  

While I have taken Myers-Briggs several times over my career, I especially like TAIS because it gets to the core of how people will react in high performance situations. Lets face it, this occurs almost everyday and people are thrust into various tasks, projects and roles that they may not be well suited for, thus heightening their stress level and lowering productivity. Unfortunately, this does not benefit the individual or the company. Ideally, we want to match peoples strengths against these assignments to promote high levels of productivity across the organization.

In Jim Collins 2002 book entitled Good to Great, he explained that one of the common
denominators of success that turned ordinary companies into consistently
extraordinary performers was the ability to get the proper people on the team,
or the bus, as he put it, and the right people in the right seats.

As a Boston Venture Capital firm, we at OpenView Venture Partners are continuously looking for ways to enhance our Growth Stage portfolio companies in building high performance teams. This is generally something that takes back seat at most companies, however, people are the greatest asset we have.