Interpersonal skills, Adaptability, Team leadership and bottom-line results drive personal success

The attached article does a nice job of summarizing middle management and senior management required skills, and needs for personal success.

Adjusting to change, which each and every person, company and organization faces regularly, especially if they are looking to grow and remain dynamic in the ever changing economic climates within countries and even local regional economies, is a key component to organizational and personal success. The reference to Organizational Culture in the article, indirectly relates to Pre-Hire competencies before On-Boarding, and Competencies for a specific position, especially as it relates to "Job Fit and Company Fit." If assessments and succession planning tools and systems do not have the ability to identify competencies for good job fit, then filling positions and promotion, is mostly based on "gut instinct," some past performance criteria, and arbitrary factors,which are not necessarily the strongest ways to build a business in today's world.

As has been well documented in the past couple of decades, about 90% of a person's Thinking Style, Behaviors and Interests are hidden from immediate view and only become partially visible over time. Today's assessments can help to identify this "submerged/hidden" portion, subject of course to validation, making it much easier to identify competencies of success along with "Benchmarking/Job Pattern/Competency Models" for that position and thus people who are more likely to succeed in a given position. Why place a person in a situation with a high probability of failure because they may lack the correct interpersonal skills or adaptability that may be needed? Normally there are many other opportunities within an organization, regardless of size, where the person can thrive and contribute, but the right tools are needed to help HR, management and organizations to identify the right Job Fit or Job Match and to establish a good succession plan.

Leadership and Communication skills can also be identified through 360 Reviews and assessments, and should be used at least yearly if not more often. 360 Reviews properly done, can clearly target competencies and skills, while identifying developmental areas for individuals, as well as for organizations. These skills can be learned, hence training can be effective where and when needed.

All of this leads to bottom-line results; and, where proper KRA's are established, these results can be tracked to individual performance and personal success.
Wall Street Journal Article:
Interpersonal skills, Adaptability, Team Leadership and bottom-line results.

Analyze, Decide, Lead says Columbia's Business Dean

It is interesting that even Columbia's Business School is talking about "...weaving topics such as decision-making and ethics into classes across all disciplines." Assessments can help along these lines, and in pre-hire, ethics can be assessed, and of course a good background check will help validate the results.

Both good decision-making and ethics can help drive engagement  in an organization. The reverse can have detrimental effects on an organization's engagement from entry level, to Front-Line managers and to all management levels in an organization. This effects motivation, morale, and indirectly profitability and retention.It is the responsibility of HR and Senior Management to ensure that people with good ethics and with good common sense/decision-making abilities, are brought into the organization, as this helps to increase the asset value of the company, short and especially long term.

The question is, is your organization and HR focused on these issues, from Pre-Hire, On-Boarding, Training and Promotion? Don't you think that they should be? Shouldn't they be part of your Core Values? The decisions made today lead to the sustainability over time.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303365804576429974256934518.html

Performance Evaluations - How to start?

Performance Evaluations can be the most critical and stressful part of Management regardless of whether it is for, or as, a front-line Manager, Senior Executive, or CEO. It is a critical component/activity as it identifies areas of proficiency and developmental areas for the individual and sets the stage for the coming period of performance for the employee.

Done well, it can be invigorating, supportive and motivating. It gains heightened engagement from the employee and this cascades and helps to build engagement within the organization.

Done poorly, it can result in an employee(s) who can: become demotivated, have poor morale, and can become a critic of any and all operations or activities within the group, division or company. Obviously, this needs to be avoided at all costs.

One of the easiest ways to start the evaluation process is to clearly communicate what the process of the performance evaluation will be. Communicate how it is to be initiated, the forms that will be used, metrics and standards employed, whether it will use a 360 review process, and what input the employee will have in the process. Obviously, the final Performance Evaluation or Review will be a document placed in the employee's Personnel File and should be communicated accordingly.

Objective of this blog

The objective of this blog is to provide CEOs, Senior Executives and Human Resource (HR) Managers, ideas and methods to increase: engagement, productivity, retention, and profitability for organizations and  their employees. These can apply most times to Non-Profit organizations also.

This blog is based on 35+ years with Fortune 100, and SME's (both public and private), as well as Turnaround and Change Management experience, actual present-day field observations and data, as well as current research, published and unpublished.