People First: How evolvedMD Uses The Predictive Index to Unlock Our Employees’ Potential

Have you ever had a hiring misfire, whether skillsets didn’t align or it was a poor cultural fit? How did it feel? Leadership and management teams across industries want to hire, support, and retain the right people. But without critical insights into who people are, how they work, and where they may need extra support, the employee experience falters, hindering engagement and company performance.

At evolvedMD, where I serve as Director of Clinical Services, we pride ourselves on being radically different. Whether it’s our enhanced Psychiatric Collaborative Care Model or the way we put our people first, we’ve intentionally created a desirable workplace that practices what we preach. For us, a top priority is looking for ways to improve and support growth by bringing in those who best match our mission, vision, and values.

That’s why we partnered with the The Predictive Index, a tool designed to help us uphold our commitment to prioritizing the employee experience and being radically different.

evolvedMD’s Clinical Management team
with Shawna Reed, fifth from right, Principal Partner of EmFluent.

What is The Predictive Index (PI)?
The Predictive Index is a talent optimization tool that empowers organizations to align people and business strategies for optimal results. I discovered it in 2021 when I met Shawna Reed, Principal Partner of EmFluent (a certified partner of The Predictive Index), through the She Leads! leadership training program.

An expert in talent optimization and workplace behavior, she introduced me to PI to help evolvedMD solve for hiring, training, and retaining the right talent.

Through careful analysis of millions of behavioral assessments, PI breaks down distinct personalities into 17 different types of people, or “Reference Profiles.” None are good or bad —profiles include “Venturer,” “Guardian,” and “Altruist” — they simply help leaders make more informed decisions and better understand what drives their people, ensuring a good fit that matches business needs.

How evolvedMD utilizes The Predictive Index

Recruitment
As a fast-growing organization that’s always hiring for diverse positions, we want to make sure we are being thoughtful and strategic in who we hire, rather than just hastily filling open positions, leveraging job targets within The Predictive Index.

Setting job targets helps us determine what kind of person matches best with each open role based on behavioral drives. For example, we can select the desired behavioral traits (i.e., “Using prudent judgment in new situations,” “Developing friendly personal relations with others”). The Predictive Index then tells us which Reference Profile best suits the target and can compare to see if a potential candidate matches the target.

An example of PI’s Guided Job Targeting Process

From there, PI can tell us the right questions to ask during an interview — especially if there’s a potential misalignment. If a candidate checks all the right boxes on their resume, but the tool identifies one of their caution areas for the role as being “tough-minded and directive”, PI’s Interview Guide may suggest we ask a candidate to “Describe a situation when you needed to influence the decision of others.” If they give a satisfactory answer, we may conclude the candidate can adapt accordingly and succeed in that role.

Personal and Professional Development
Known for our commitment to our employees’ personal and professional development, we regularly rely on PI’s many tools so we can tailor the experience to each employee.

Everyone has different strengths and improvement areas. However, it’s not always obvious how to address for best outcomes. The Predictive Index has proven to be an invaluable tool to help managers coach, supervise, and build skillsets thoughtfully and effectively.

The Predictive Index comes with a comprehensive suite of personal development guides, coaching guides, and much more that gives managers an in-depth overview of each employee’s strongest behaviors and areas for improvement. From there, a manager can find insights and strategies for maximum effectiveness.

An example of PI’s Coaching Guide.

In our enhanced Psychiatric Collaborative Care Model, we expect our BHMs to closely collaborate with a practice’s Primary Care Provider and other staff members so that patients receive top-tier care. However, they must also exercise autonomy when they’re not working directly with patients or providers. To maximize effectiveness, PI’s Coaching Guide may provide coaching questions such as “How could you improve your performance during periods when you are working alone?” From there, a manager and their employee can work together to address this gap to boost focus and productivity when the employee works alone.

Fostering Meaningful Relationships
A positive working relationship between a manager and employee is essential to success. However, that’s not to say these relationships aren’t still fragile sometimes. Using PI, we have been able to better foster and nurture psychological safety.

The PI’s Relationship Guide breaks down the working relationship into three sections: Strengths, Cautions, and Tips. Each section offers critical insights into how a manager and their employee can best work together, even if they have seemingly opposite Reference Profiles, allowing for conversations and coaching rooted in shared understanding and language.

For example, our Head of Strategy’s profile is “Maverick,” meaning he tends to be innovative, influential, daring, and direct. His employee, our Content Specialist, is an Operator, meaning he tends to be patient, conscientious, and extremely cooperative. When you compare their profiles in the PI’s Relationship Guide, it presents the following Strengths, Cautions, and Tips:

A manager and employee’s relationship guide.

It’s important to recognize that Cautions do not indicate weaknesses. They simply identify how each person’s respective profiles differ, and how these differences might manifest in everyday situations. The Tips section does a great job highlighting how these two employees can play to their strengths while also making a concentrated effort to adapt their behaviors to better support each other. Ultimately, this helps both of them create a more meaningful and engaging work relationship.

Further Insights from evolvedMD’s Leadership Team
We believe so fervently in The Predictive Index that we want to share each member of our leadership team’s individual profiles, their interpretations, and how they use this innovative tool for maximum impact at evolvedMD.

"As a Collaborator, I love working with other people. I am supportive, empathetic, loyal, and people focused. I also need freedom from rigid structure and the opportunity to delegate details. Using The Predictive Index to understand the strengths and drives of every employee means that we are actively striving to match people with the positions that best fit them, as well as helping them develop professionally in a much broader range of aptitudes.”

“At face value, there are probably not two more complimentary titles than a Salesperson and a Persuader. What I love about it when you dive below the surface is that Persuaders motivate and inspire to bring out the best and collaborate with others, which is spot on me. The Predictive Index has been a fantastic tool for me to understand the strengths of others and strategies to connect with anyone whether it be our external or internal customers."

“I think there’s a great deal of validity to these PI profiles, both for myself and for the rest of our Leadership Team members. At the same time, though, as with all such personality frameworks, I think it’s important to recognize that these profiles don’t limit or define who we are as professionals or how we operate. Every individual can learn to develop skills and areas where they may not naturally be strong, and these trained or learned behaviors can figure prominently in our professional development if we focus on them consciously. This informs how I use the PI profiles of my team members in their own career growth. I don’t want my team members to be pigeonholed based on their PI profiles; instead, I treat their PI profiles as a baseline or starting point and then identify stretch opportunities from there.”

“Anyone who has had the opportunity to work with me either as a college student, fellow board member, or in the community knows that Sentari the Maverick is spot on. As a Maverick there isn’t anything I find too daunting or too challenging to achieve and in fact, telling me that it can’t be done is a quick way to see it done with ease. The Predictive Index has been a wonderful tool not only for insight, growth, and self-awareness but for coaching with my team and colleagues on how we best work together and how to maximize our strengths while minimizing our blind spots.”

“Spot on! The PI affirms what many other personality tests have indicated. I’m a natural leader and motivator—which I am proud of! I will take risks if I believe the outcomes will be valuable to myself and others. I am a natural delegator and embody confidence. I utilize the PI for maximum fit when recruiting team members. The PI provides insight into profiles that will best align with organizational roles. Having candidates complete the PI as a part of the hiring screening process allows for an efficient approach in determining a candidate’s overall fit for an open position. Additionally, the PI helps me understand how to communicate, collaborate, and coach my team members in an effective manner.”

“The profile description is dang close… First, I love to talk about evolvedMD and I am very passionate about pushing the market to integrate behavioral health services within the primary care space. I also enjoy getting a team or a larger group of people to rally behind a cause. My most passionate cause is the expansion of behavioral health services and I believe in evolvedMD’s ambition and intend to play a major role in ensuring we become the market leader. When it comes to decision-making I don’t like to sit and stew, I like to collect information so I am informed and then I like to take action! I am comfortable with taking risks because I trust in the process and my instinct. And when I make a mistake, I give myself some grace and then just go back into problem-solving mode.”

“My PI “The Venturer” is spot on! It speaks so strongly to my continual desire to take on new projects and push the status quo. As a Venturer, I thrive in an environment where I can drive my own workload, and step into things that haven’t historically been in my wheelhouse. The PI has helped me to not only articulate to others how I tend to operate with my own work, and how I can be optimized, but also how I like work with others on a team. Within the developing of my own team, I don’t necessarily look for individuals to be a certain PI to fit a role, but I reflect on their PI to learn how to best support them as a growing professional, and what tools will be most helpful to developing our rapport.”

“As an Altruist leader, I get my sense of satisfaction from being supportive and an interest in developing others. I value connections with others, crave variety and change, and enjoy structure and processes. I lead the People team by utilizing my strengths of being a natural team player, completing work collaboratively, with precision and organization.”

At evolvedMD, we’re committed to treating our people well and curating a meaningful employee experience. By hiring great people and showing we care for them, we’ve maintained a low turnover rate compared to most companies in the behavioral health field. The Predictive Index helps us meaningfully invest in our people and treat them well. And if you’re a dynamic professional interested in exploring a company that utilizes tools like PI and others to create a world-class employee experience, check out our Careers page.