What behavioral traits make coaches and athletics administrators high performers in their professions?

While there is no foolproof way to determine how successful a person will be at a particular occupation, finding the answer to that question certainly is beneficial to those responsible for identifying and hiring candidates for those jobs. And the NCAA is involved with an initiative that may help provide some answers.

Ron Stratten, NCAA vice-president for education services, and Cash, Lehman & Associates are in the process of defining predictors of future success in the sports industry through the use of the Pathfinder Career Systems Survey.

Larry Cash, one of the co-founders of the Toronto, Ontario-based company, began developing the concept 25 years ago. It is based on "competency-based modeling."

Stratten hopes it can become commonplace in the decision-making process to fortify equal opportunities for every coach and administrator position by identifying the critical job competencies that lead to job success.

"Competency-based modeling allows us to take a set of competencies that we have benchmarked against high performers,'' Stratten said. "Why do these high performers perform the way they do? What abilities and characteristics do they have that allow them to be successful? There are characteristics that all successful people in these professions have. What we're looking for are those qualities.''

Setting benchmarks

To begin the project, 100 athletics administrators and coaches were chosen to serve as benchmarks in the survey results. Anne Little, director of the NCAA's First Team Mentoring program and the former athletics director at Winston-Salem State University, was one of those selected.

"I've had to go through some coaching searches,'' Little said. "You always wonder about the characteristics that you really can't see first-hand in people. How many opportunities do you have on an interview to observe some of the traits that you would be able to get from a profile that a survey like this could provide? As an administrator it is very interesting to see if he or she ranks highly in a particular area.''

Stratten hopes that assistant coaches or associate athletics directors who have dreams of moving up in their chosen profession will take the survey to show potential employers a candidate who has a predictor of success for a particular position.

The core competencies measured by the Pathfinder, which is a series of 370 questions, are:

• Intellectual ability

• Vocational incentives

• Lifestyle priorities

• Career interests

• Problem solving

• Work habits

• Motivational factors

• Self assessment

• Human relations

• Coping strategies

A person's score is based on how he or she answers the questions. For example, one question in the survey asks about problem solving.

There are seven sets of answers with two choices each from which to select. Scores are based on responses, then compared to those who have been chosen as benchmarks.

So far, research has shown that an overall score of 65 percent or higher is a good indicator that a person will be a high-performer in the coaching or athletics administration professions.

"It was very helpful to see a profile of what you would seek in terms of administrative skills and traits,'' said benchmarker Lynn Dorn, women's athletics director at North Dakota State University. "You also get to look at some of your liabilities. I really valued it. I saw certain areas where (the result) didn't surprise me. It's probably a tool that you can use as a refresher because you've done a job a certain way for a while. It's an opportunity to explore.''

Cash, Lehman & Associates has international clients in several industries that include information technology, pharmaceuticals, retail and automobile manufacturers. The survey's mission is to help individuals discover their best career direction and to help companies realize the performance potential of their intellectual capital.

Through the years, Cash has found in his research that there aren't any common ties to high-performing people from occupation to occupation, but he has found that there are commonalities among successful people within certain professions. In other words, a high-performing politician tends to have more behavioral traits in common with other politicians than he or she would with an engineer.

"The way the Pathfinder is set up, and the reason we developed it, is to measure 85 behavioral traits and 35 career themes of which athletics is included,'' said Cash, who has a master's degree in clinical psychology from North Texas University. "We want to try to better identify individuals and predict what you would actually be successful at. Sometimes it's the same as something you're interested in, and sometimes it's not.''

Cash said if a person's score on being a NCAA coach is in the 70th percentile, there is a 70 percent chance that the person will be among the highest performers. "We're only comparing you to how successful we think you will be," he said. "We're not saying that you're going to be better than 70 out of 100 people. We're saying there is a 70 percent chance that you will be among the top quartile.''

Of course, this isn't an exact science.

"Just like with the weather, it doesn't always happen,'' said Bob Michinsky, a consultant to Cash, Lehman & Associates. "There is a 30 percent chance of rain, too. It could be a monsoon. But the more weather data we have, the more accurate we can be about making our personal plans around the weather. In this case, it's around our careers.''

The Pathfinder cannot display the prerequisite knowledge, skill and experience a person needs to do a job, but it can predict whether a particular person has the behavioral traits that can lead to success in an occupational field.

"This finds ways for people to understand themselves at the degree of detail that would help them become more effective,'' Michinsky said. "'Because there was no single characteristic, (Cash) set out and in effect built an instrument that incorporates the amount of detail and data that you would probably require five or six other tests to duplicate. He did that in a very organized and integrated manner. No one who does Pathfinder has ever encountered anything that can bring so many different perspectives to their own behavior.''

Growth opportunity

If a job candidate rates low in an area, there are ways to improve in that domain, too. For instance, if a person who strives to be a coach scores low in assertiveness, Cash, Lehman & Associates offers self-help strategies to improve upon that trait.

"Not everyone in the world has to be a Nobel Prize winner or a 'who's who' coach in North America to earn a living at it and enjoy it,'' Cash said. "You can use this as a benchmark to identify the two or three attributes or behavioral competencies that you need to improve upon to become more successful in that role. We're not saying you should or shouldn't do it, but we're telling you what you need to do in order to improve your predictor of success.''