Org-Fitness Today!

LinkedIn Partners with Typepad

Typepad sent out an e-mail update today talking about some new features. One that was featured, their new association with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an up and coming business and professional service that allows people to create a professional profile. Read more about it here. There's a new widget that allows you to show your LinkedIn profile on your Typepad site.

I guess I was ahead of the curve on this one, I joined LinkedIn about a week ago and put the link to my profile up earlier this week. You can read my profile by clicking on the LinkedIn logo on the upper left side of my site.

Great Teambuilding Resource

Tom Heck is offering over $300 is specials with the purchase of his Teambuilding Puzzles book. Just click the link below and for $29 you will receive access to the 9 bonuses worth over $300. I've ordered my book and have already put to use one of these bonuses. I highly recommend this resource if you are interested in leading teambuilding activities. A couple of these bonuses will disappear after November 30, so if you want all of the $300 in specials, order it before the 30th.

Book: Teambuilding Puzzles

Tele-Seminar on Leadership Development

I recently posted about how organizations are going to be losing leaders due to retirement and the aging workforce. I received this announcement in my e-mail today--an on-line interactive webinar on how to develop leaders in the face of this looming crisis. Click here for the details. This is a free webinar offered by the Forum Corporation.

Leadership Development: How's yours?

How's the leadership development in your organization? Do you have a full bench of capable leaders ready to step up to the next level?

If you were able to answer both these questions positively, you are in the minority. Many organizations and entire industries are facing almost crisis-level shortages of leaders ready to step up to the next level. Unfortunately, it might get worse.

Demographics and the aging Baby Boomer generation are partially to blame. The following numbers are just an example of what we are facing: There are about 76 million baby boomers and only 46 million in the next generation, Generation X. Of those baby boomers, up to 50 percent of the management workforce will be eligible to retire over the next five years. So, what's a leader do today that can help make a difference?

The Hay Group offered up their ideas in the July 2006, Insight Connections. The seven steps are outlined below.

1. Encouraging leaders at all levels to create work climates that motivate everyone to perform at his or her best.
2. Making leadership development a priority for everyone involved.
3. Helping leadership teams work more effectively together in addition to helping individual leaders improve.
4. Providing job shadowing opportunities for mid-career managers.
5. Ensuring that high-potential employees receive 360-degree feedback for leadership development—early on.
6. Ensuring that mid-level managers have the time to participate in leadership development early in their careers.
7. Providing external coaches for senior managers.

These are all great ideas for building leadership capability and bench strength in your organization. If you would like to talk more about these ideas, feel free to contact me or click on Comments below. Click here to read the full Hay Group, Insight Connections.

Organizational Assessment Tool: Infotool

The best tool I know to find out what is going on in your organization is Infotool. Infotool is a web based organizational diagnostic tool. It is very easy to use, can be customized, and provides results back almost immediately. Here are some of the features:

An advanced, on-line organizational development diagnostic tool:

• Design and build a unique survey for your needs -easily customizable
• Instantly sort and analyze millions of critical data bits
• In-house analysis in minutes-not days
• Immediately isolate, with targeted precision, barriers to workforce productivity by each demographic

Instantly measure how effectively employees are engaged, managerial effectiveness and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Infotool is a diagnostic tool which precisely identifies critical pathways for changing a corporate culture from one of mistrust to trust, narrowness to openness, staleness to innovation, silos to collaboration and dilemmas to solutions.

Click here to see a partial list of Infotool clients.

Let me know if you would like to learn more about this great tool.

Why Use Assessments?

I am a strong believer in the use of assessments for developmental or executive coaching. Maybe I should say, I am a big believer in assessments for development and learning in general. In my own experience I have taken numerous assessments over the years and find the results of these assessments to be very informative.

Assessments help me learn about myself and confirm what I already know and sometimes I learn about blind spots or get feedback on areas of my behavior that I was not aware of. Regardless of the assessment, the important thing to remember is that assessment results are just data or feedback. What I do with that data or feedback is up to me.

Recently while engaged in coaching a client, I was doing some interviews with people around this client. I use interviews (kind of like a verbal 360-degree) to help me learn more about a client and to confirm (or not) assessment results. Asking some very straight forward and simple questions I learned from Marshall Goldsmith, these interviews are an easy way to verify information about the client.

I use the assessment results and the interview data to coach the client and provide actionable feedback. Actionable feedback provides the client with something they can actually use. Of course actually doing something with the feedback is all up to the client. As a coach, I can only do so much. It is up to the client or the person being coached to make the change.

Essentially a good assessment provides a faster way for clients to learn and understand themselves. One assumption I make is that most people want to do their best. Focusing on behaviors that people can act on is key. Assessments help in this area.