Inside-the-head manuals: more remodelers are turning to values and behavioral profiling tools to determine how employees respond to challenges and procedures, and how they influence co-workers or clients. Why not? Fortune 500 companies have used profiling for years.

Each month. Grant Mazmanian gets a call from a contractor who exclaims: "I've got a production guy who's a great change order guy. I want to make him a salesman. Man, he'd make a good salesman--look at all the work he brings in!"

And every month, Mazmanian, of Pinnacle Group International,

Inevitably, Mazmanian tells the owner it isn't a match. His production guy is a "warm call" salesman. While he's very capable (he loves to please customers), he doesn't have the high assertiveness, or "D" personality trait, to cold-call prospects.

In fact, the production guy is afraid of customers.

Mazmanian suggests that the production guy take a Saturday to try selling. "They realize it's not for them, and no status is lost," Mazmanian says.

What makes Mazmanian, a certified professional behavior analyst, so certain of the qualities of his client's employees is a combination of experience and tools. He has been working with contractors for 15 years and uses the DISC, a behavioral profiling tool used since 1945 on about 20 million people, and the PIAV, a 20 year-old personal interests, attitudes, and values assessment that measures why people act the way they do and what drives them.

Very quickly, often within hours if they're taken online, assessment tools like the DiSC and the PIAV provide detailed behavioral and values feedback to help build productive teams, develop effective leaders, train sales threes, improve customer service, and ease frustrations and interpersonal conflict.

Some view such tools as voodoo. "No damn computer can tell me all about me," said one production manager who fought DiSC profiling for years, but who is now a devotee. They wonder how answering a short question set (24 questions for DISC; 12 for PIAV) can pinpoint their operating style. But it does. Real and anecdotal evidence proves that these tools work well--uncannily well.

"We wrestled with things like, 'Is this manipulation?' But it's good manipulation" says Mark Scott, of Mark IV Builders, Bethesda, Md., who has worked with Ruhmann Associates of Raleigh, N.C., for seven years on DiSC and PIAV assessments. "It's mole communication than manipulation. We have a hard enough time doing our jobs. Why not use a tool that makes it easier?"