Nice provocative headline, of course the truth is I am referring to all those assessment profiles that you have done, the latest leadership assessment by external organisations that for some reason always abbreviate their name to 3 letters. I am talking about the 250 page document that justified some exorbitant consultancy fee...yep, the one you never bought in to, never used beyond the initial feedback and frankly you always disagreed with anyway.
I couldn't tell you how many people (because it's a lot, rather than I can't remember) when we start getting talking about "profiling" internal people already have swathe of assessments, tests, reports and all manner of psycho babble on themselves. I estimate that £4.325 billion (completely made up number but you get the point) is just wasted on profiling management and executive teams, so why? Why does this always seem like a good idea and then just get neglected, only to be done again a few months later...simple really, "language".
Eh? "language", yep that's what I said.
We have a bit of a reputation for making this stuff "stick", we haven't got oak panelled assessment rooms (god forbid), we don't charge £000's for doing it, but we do believe in complex inputs and frighteningly simple out puts. I mean it, so simple that a child could understand and this creates the "stickiness".
The output of any assessment/development profiling work has to be that the individual does something different the next day, and if they do 1 thing that's a great return, if they do 3 that's brilliant! They have to be able to describe themselves in a way that someone else can understand, in a language that's common, clear and bereft of psychological abbreviations and nonsense. They have to know their strengths and how this means they are perceived by others, touch on their development needs but maximise their strengths.
So spend a £1,000 (if you are spending more than a £1,000, ask for some oak panelling as part of the deal) putting one of your management/senior people through a piece of profiling, and then insist on simple outputs. If the development report is more than 5 clear, simple, well communicated bullets, chuck it out, it'll never be used. If the individuals boss does not understand the profile or the report, chuck it out, it'll never be used.
One language, that the individual understands, the boss understands and HR can play their interventions in to.
Oh, while I am ranting...if all of this is being done in to a competency framework that is more than 3 pages long...chuck it out, seriously I saw a competency framework that a client had bought the other day from a leading "development" consultancy and it was both incomprehensible and so bloody long, the document could not be lifted by hand...it came with a forklift truck as part of the fee! Aaaarrrrggggghhhhh, come on, how is a busy line manager meant to understand that "language" it might as well be in Cantonese.
I need to make clear that i don't think line managers are thick and therefore don't understand our HR like wizardry, just that they are busy and the tools we provide them are meant to enable not disrupt and disable.
LANGUAGE, simple, clear and useable, it's the key to delivering high impact people interventions and therefore the key to business performance...that was easy :-)
R
PS: My sincere apologies for my poor grammar. I have the unfortunate affliction of writing as I speak, therefore both my written and verbal communication is rapid and littered with missing commas and full stops. Funny thing, language.
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Posted by: Jennifer | Monday, June 29, 2009 at 09:00 AM