Org-Fitness Today!

Assessment Use Growing?

According to the Institute for Corporate Productivity, the use of psychological assessments for selection and development is on the rise. The percentage of business organizations that currently use assessments for these purposes is 58.3 percent and it is expected to rise to 75 percent.

With estimates of between 3000 and 7000 different assessment tools available, it's important to choose a good tool when using assessments. If you would like to know more about some of the things to consider when trying to choose an assessment, please contact me and we can discuss your interests.

What is it I do?

Recently someone called me and was asking what I did for work. They knew I had the MSOD degree from Pepperdine University however they wanted to know more specifically.

Some of my friends think I do fitness related work within organizations. That would be nice, however it's not the case. Certainly fitness is a serious interest of mine, however that's not what I do everyday as a vocation.

So as I talked on the phone with this person, I described what I do:

"I am an organizational consultant who uses his training in OD consulting to provide management and leadership development training to organizations. I often times bring to my clients expertise and experience in team building, communication and dealing with strategic change. Additionally I provide executive coaching using assessments to provide a developmental framework for my clients."

After I finished the call and it went on for a while as we discussed this and some of the challenges this person was facing in their work environment, I realized this was a pretty good summary of what I do. For this reason, I wanted to capture it. We all have our niches and areas of expertise, this is mine.

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.

Facilitating Strategic Planning

For the past year I have been involved with several different clients helping them with their strategic planning. In some cases this has been for the whole organization and with other clients it has been with just a department or unit of the organization.

I try to use a similar process regardless as it provides a consistent framework to work with. Obviously each client is different and the results vary with what we are trying to achieve. The great thing about this framework I use is that it is scalable. In other words, it can be used for a large organization, a small department, or even an individual participating in executive coaching. The number one question we continually ask clients is to think about what is important. What's important? This question leads to the who, what, when, where, and how we will know. My colleague, Mike Jay says it this way; "How will Who lead Whom to do What, When, Why, and Where?"

The framework typically starts with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and surfacing assumptions. From this we get a good sense of where we are (present state)and then we start looking at where we want to go (future state). The future state is the vision for the organization. The vision is a descriptive picture of where the organization is headed.

The time frame for a vision, as with strategic planning, is shorter these days. With change happening so rapidly these days, it makes little sense to do planning beyond 18 months to two years. This is true for visioning as well. This also relates to my belief in the perspective of strategic planning being a dynamic versus a static process. In the planning process, I recommend that plans be revisited quarterly or semi-annually at the very least.

The next couple of steps help the organization understand its decision making process and how it will operate or behave. We take a look at organizational values and the other ways with which the organization makes decisions. Sometimes these are called unwritten rules or guiding principles.

Once we have identified all of these things about the organization, we can focus on what's important--the strategic objectives and plan the specific steps for achieving them. Organizations may go about this part of the process differently. Essentially this is where the rubber meets the road or where the real work takes place. It's important to focus on strategic objectives that really matter and to establish effective measures for each objective. The final step in this phase is to make sure adequate monitoring and follow-up is built into the system or plan.

The final phase in this process has clients look at a creating a purpose or mission statement that encompasses all we have learned and are implementing. Ideally, this statement includes the key values and overall objectives of the organization into 25 words or less. It is a powerful statement for all stakeholders to understand what this organization is all about.

If you would like to hear more about this process or have questions, please feel free to contact me.

Cool Site: Bob Sutton's Work Matters

Bob Sutton is an author and professor. He has co-authored several popular business books including The Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. I'll add more later however if you are curious, check out his site Work Matters.