Written by Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Profiting from Uncertainty: Strategies for Succeeding No Matter What the Future Brings, paints a clear picture of how responses to uncertainty can make or break a company.

In this post we offer a taste of the first chapter, “Embracing Uncertainty,” because it addresses many of the concepts that Insight does when we work with clients to grow and transform their businesses.

Embracing Uncertainty: An Overview

There is no sure-fire way to plan for the unknown, but let’s be clear: risk is not the unknown. Risk is calculated by identifying known contributors and variables; uncertainty is the space outside of risk. It is the unknowable. “The most challenging uncertainties that managers face,” says Schoemaker, “are those they haven’t a clue about – when they wake up one day to find that the Berlin Wall has crashed to the ground or to recognize that the Internet has merged or faded as a powerful new market space” (2).

Why should managers focus on something so unpredictable as uncertainty?

“Firm-specific actions account for just over half the value of a firm,” and the remainder is attributable to external forces that cannot be controlled, but that a company can prepare for through scenario planning (Schoemaker 6).

A few reasons to give uncertainty due consideration:

• Uncertainty affects the external environment
• The level of uncertainty appears to be increasing significantly
• Humans have inherent limitations in dealing with uncertainty 
(Schoemaker 5).

It is also, says Schoemaker, the only source of superior profits (3). A brief look at past examples reveals that stakes are high and that a future that managers fail to see is the one they failed to prepare for (Schoemaker 3-5).

Why is uncertainty increasing?

There are innumerable factors that contribute to uncertainty. A few that are easily identifiable include:

• More complex socioeconomic systems
• New technologies
• Demographic changes
• Changing values
  (Schoemaker 7)

Discomfort with uncertainty is a human response

Humans prefer the predictable. We have myopic eyes that limit our range of sight and timid souls that miss the bigger picture (13). We tend to trust our instincts, but the inherent problem is that instincts develop from past experiences, and uncertainty assumes that the future will differ greatly from the past (Schoemaker 14-15).

Uncertainty = opportunity

You can profit from uncertainties if you’re prepared, and you can prepare with scenario planning. “The less ambiguity we experience, the more we feel a problem can be structured, managed, planned for, and controlled. But competitors can do this as well, so the opportunity for advantage is diminished. We must learn how to welcome and indeed embrace ambiguity” (Schoemaker 10).

Schoemaker’s book includes a number of approaches that help prepare for uncertainty:

• Scenario planning
• Key success factors
• Robustness analysis
• Strategic vision
• Options thinking
• Dynamic monitoring (17)

Schoemaker, Paul J.H. Profiting from Uncertainty: Strategies for Succeeding No Matter What the Future Brings. New York: The Free Press, 2002.

The Pew Research Center is currently working on a yearlong series of reports that will profile the generation known as Millennials — reports that will enable employers to further understand the drivers and motivators to which this group responds.

What is a Millennial?

The most cut-and-dry identifier of someone in the Millennial generation is that they were born between 1978 and 2002. Attitudinal and behavioral tendencies generally observed in this generation include:

• Prolonged adolescence
• Better educated than previous generations
• “Helicopter parents” have instilled a strong sense of the Millennial’s uniqueness, which leads to the belief that they are special and should be treated as such
• Use of technology comes as second nature

What Millennials mean for your business

The above description of Millennials may indicate that they have a warped sense of reality, and to some extent that’s true. But they’re also a tolerant, tech-savvy bunch that can help move your organization into one that makes more effective use of technology, builds a stronger of community (internal and external), and fosters trust. They were born in the era of laptops and iPods, Facebook and Twitter, and they know how to use them effectively.

Millennials tend to be civic-minded and confident, valuing diversity and achievement

They like to be challenged. They want to like their work and to leave work at work (not take it home like their parents did); if they don’t, they will find more meaningful work elsewhere. Use this information along with their Kolbe Indexes® to align your Millennial employees with your business strategy.

Your business will benefit from Millennial’s persistence, optimism, diversity, confidence, and multi-tasking abilities, though you’ll need to provide plenty of structure and to grow their experience working with people. You can optimize Millennial’s performance by:

• Budgeting plenty of time for orienting them and creating a clear picture of the work environment and expectations
• Learning about the employee’s goals and develop a strategy for weaving them into job performance
• Setting employee goals (short- and long-term)
• Growing  your training department  and providing opportunities for professional development and continuing education
• Demonstrating and developing strong leadership
• Where there are lots of Millennials, consider expanding the size of teams and appoint a strong team leader
• Offering assistance with handling difficult people issues
• Establishing strong mentoring programs – matching young workers with most seasoned people with whom they resonate

What are some ways you have succeeded working with Millennials in your organization?

In his November 2009 article “The use and abuse of scenarios,” Charles Roxburgh discusses the ways that scenario planning helps leaders to identify extreme events and their potential outcomes and responses. He notes four features that lead to understanding uncertainty and developing strategy:

• Expand your thinking. “You will think more broadly if you develop a range of possible outcomes, each backed by the sequence of events that would lead to them.”
• Uncover inevitable or near-inevitable futures. “As the analysis underlying each scenario proceeds, you often identify some particularly powerful drivers of change. These drivers result in outcomes that are the inevitable consequence of events that have already happened, or of trends that are already well developed.”
• Protect against “groupthink.” “Often, the power structure within companies inhibits the free flow of debate. People in meetings typically agree with whatever the most senior person in the room says.”
• Allow people to challenge conventional wisdom. “Scenarios provide a less threatening way to lay out alternative futures in which these assumptions may no longer be true.”

He also offers some good rules of thumb:

• Always develop at least four scenarios
• “Crunch” the quadrants
• There should always be a base or central case
• Scenarios must have catchy names to make it part of your organization
• Learn from being totally wrong
• Listen to the contrary voices
• Even modest environmental changes can have enormous impact

We highly recommend that you read the article to get a stronger sense of what we’ve summarized here.

In December of 2008 McKinsey & Company published an interview with Hugh Courtney, an associate dean of executive programs and professor of strategy at the University of Maryland’s Rober H. Smith School of Business, who had recently published a book entitled 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World.

Highlights from the Interview

Courtney developed a four-part framework to help managers think about the level of uncertainly that surrounds strategic decisions:

• Level 1: a clear, single view of the future
• Level 2: a limited set of possible future outcomes
• Level 3: a range of possible future outcomes
• Level 4: a limitless range of possible future outcomes

Following the September 11 attacks and then the financial crisis, Courtney identifies the shift not in the uncertainties that exist, but in the human perception of them:

The financial crisis has actually brought greater clarity because it has forced us to recognize that we have a lot more level three and level four situations than we would have admitted a few months ago. They probably were there all along, yet the bias was toward thinking that issues were more at level one and level two. Specifically, we have learned how interdependent our financial markets are and how systemic failure in any important node of the network can work very rapidly through the system and bring liquidity to a halt. So our scenarios about the availability of capital around the world have changed significantly.

Where to go from here?

Courtney says to rethink your planning process and we at Insight agree as we assist organizations with this process:

Have you been doing strategic planning on an annual basis as a paper-pushing exercise? That will have to change. In the months to come, you’re going to have to make decisions very quickly on fundamental opportunities that may drive your earnings performance for the next decade or more, and you’ve got to be prepared to make these decisions in real time.

When it comes to your organization’s future, scenario planning is one of the tools you must regularly sharpen in order to adapt as necessary. Contact us for more information or to schedule a consultation.

Optimize costs and develop people by outsourcing to specialists

Bringing in HR specialists enables you to focus on your core business while ensuring that a keen eye is on talent and human resource management. There are a number of benefits to an outsourcing arrangement:

• Cost savings are often associated with outsourcing rather than hiring internal staff to manage non-core functions
• Great IT efficiencies through integrated tools
• Readily-available advisors provide another perspective
• Employees do not waste time reinventing the wheel of administrative tasks

Insight partners with Reach 360 to help you streamline & accelerate your people development

Insight is a strategic growth firm that starts with understanding your organizational objectives and goals to help transition the expectations of your culture during changing times. Reach360 provides you relief from the burden of day‐to‐ day business administration through a complete circle of services—including Human Resource Management, Accounting and Financial Services, and IT support—all through one phone number.

Insights’ turnkey performance management system, BLOOM®, aligns people performance functions with your business strategy. Reach 360’s robust IT systems bridge ongoing information exchanges between payroll, insurance, 401K, and ancillary benefit programs vendors.

Stop wasting time with double and triple data entry between payroll and benefit systems

• Bridge information between all of your HR vendors
• Link your strategic plan to the performance management of your people
• Automate role descriptions, performance reviews, employee goals setting, training, tracking, wage scale tracking, strategic status reviews, and more.
• Complete, secure access to information 24/7

Growth with Savings

There is no better combination in business than growing a business with better strategy and decision-making with simultaneous achieving cost savings. Based on our experience, here are some examples of what that can look like in small and mid-size organizations when you integrate improved strategic talent leadership with more efficient HR systems:

Cost Savings

• Benefits: as much as $250,000 annually (average $20,000‐60,000/yr)
• Commercial Insurance: as much as $100,000 annually (average $45,000/yr)
• Payroll: as much as $20,000 annually (average $15,000/yr)
• Recruitment: As much as $10,000 annually (average $7,000/year)
• Time & Attendance: as much as $15,000 annually (average $10,000/yr)

Growth (Manufacturing)

• 18% compounded annual growth for 10 years straight
• $9.6m to $18m in 2 years; industry down 15% per year
• $35m to $165m in 3 years
• $12m to $17m in 1 year; industry down 30%
• $40m to $120m in 3 years

Next Steps: contact us for more information

Contact Insight for more information We are flexible and will independently assess your organization as you wish.

There are three parts of the mind

For centuries we’ve known that the human mind has three parts, unfortunately most recruiting and hiring processes forget this. Often personality assessments are misused as screening tools, resumes are overused, and interviews are only utilized for assessing whether employers “like” a candidate. None of these approaches provides actual information about how a person will perform. None provide relevant or reliable information as it relates to actual job performance.

Particularly for key positions it’s critical to assess all three parts of a candidate’s mind in order to understand how he or she relates to others, strives to perform, and thinks to process information. These three distinct areas can be assessed through a combination of affordable tools, verbal interviews, and assigned activities that are orchestrated during the recruiting process.

We have tested different tools and developed a base process for Whole Mind Candidate Assessment practices.

No process guarantees a successful hire. Every process is contingent on the availability of a continually fluctuating candidate pool. In addition, there may be major internal obstacles, such as a lack of readiness to internally accept a new person due to unstable cultural dynamics or having unrealistic and unaligned management expectations.

Increase your chances of successful selection

Our business turnaround services address such issues as an important parallel track to hiring. As a focused tactical process, our Whole Mind Assessment is comprehensive and gives you far more reliable information than “winging it.” Our process is important for developing an accurate profile of a future employee who will be meaningful to your organization, and is one we encourage for higher-level, key executives and leaders.

Some highlights of the Whole Mind process include:

1.  Properly identify the role you need and compare expectations with peers and others who will interact with the role.
2.  Complete phone interviews and Kolbe Indexes® before live interviews.
3.  Target interview questions to be aligned to specific job expectations.
4.  Complete personality and skill assessments before a second live interview.
5.  Give a job-related assignment for finalists to complete and present the rationale for their solution.
6.  Complete background checks and talk to references.

Our Philosophy

Many people find our practices to be unconventional because we address what others miss. For example, we use instinct tools to determine how a candidate operates in order to assess job fit rather than just looking at job history.

Hiring and training the wrong person costs an organization up to the amount of one year’s salary in time and expenses during the first year of employment. That’s why we do our best to challenge the integration of best selection and hiring practices.

The average person changes careers three times – and usually for the better. Often college degrees are chosen with little consideration for career satisfaction and personal fit. In light of this, we believe that the best candidates are often overlooked because Human Resources reviews a resume, but does not consider how a person will successfully perform. Just because a candidate started in another industry doesn’t mean that she won’t succeed in yours. In fact, knowledge transfer from other industries can be the purpose of gaining a strategic hire that brings you new innovative applications and fills voids of abilities in your organization. Additionally, people’s attitudes and interests change when they are doing what they enjoy.

These realities make it imperative to broaden your organization’s skills and abilities for assessing people.

Many variables present a challenge to proactivity

The “new economy” is changing the way we think about business and its evolving relationships. Kouze and Posner state that the abilities of today’s leaders to stay on top of these factors are increasingly challenged by:

• Heightened uncertainty
• More focus on people versus profit
• Staying closely connected via technology
• Utilizing social capital to create highly productive teams
• Competing in the global market economy
• Sharing information at greater speeds
• Changing workforce demand for higher utilization of talent, trust, and independence
• Making more complete and involved decisions while intensely searching for meaning and purpose

These changes force us to look harder and faster at what we know and what we don’t know, and to make decisions on both long- and short-term horizons within the context of our new, faster yet service-based economy.

With challenges comes opportunity – you just have to look for it.

Challenges bring with them an inherent opportunity to engage in more unique and creative working relationships with customers, vendors, and employees.

Our experience shows that leaders are overwhelmed when considering where to begin in developing a business model. They feel more vulnerable and less certain about where the future leads. Many lack supporting information structures to proactively monitor their environments in meaningful ways. Although many management magazines advocate the use of continual feedback loops and red-flag systems, most businesses simply collect historical data – not information regarding future customer and employee needs or satisfaction, morale, and productivity measures.

What do organizations think they know about their business? What do they really know?

It’s tempting to make assumptions based on past performance. Remember, though, that in today’s economy the past will have less to do with the future as our context continues to evolve.

The Organic Structure of Organizations

To understand what information is important for your organization growth requires that you understand the organic structure of organizational information. Rather than thinking of structures in terms of linear or sequential models, consider this more realistic application in which each piece is dependent on the others.

The ultimate direction of the organization begins with its DNA, which includes its mission, vision, values, and basic philosophy. Your organization’s DNA is unique and is the foundation for understanding and developing your unique business model that differentiates you from the competition. If you don’t do the analysis, you won’t know how to prove and build on what makes you unique.

Overcoming Common Research Pitfalls

In human relationships we have a natural tendency to self-sabotage our growth without realizing it. Emotions and emotional perceptions form an undercurrent throughout the awareness and learning process; emotions tend to trump facts and therefore serve as potential pitfalls of the learning curve.

Remain conscious of and honest about what you know and don’t know. Based on your orientation there are different methods in both qualitative and quantitative forms that will get you the information you need to build successful business strategies.

Purpose and Types of Research

At Insight, we believe that the best application of organizational research is to have a person or process assess the state of connections between the moving pieces of an organization, to understand what tends to go wrong, and to provide leadership with more and better information for strategic thinking and decision making.

The three types of research:

• Inside research: culture audits, employee morale/management audits, productivity audits, hiring practices audits, training program assessments, and so on
• Outside research: customer audits that assess customer service, product perception, customer priorities, vendor audits, and so on
• Around research: competitor brand message analysis, industry analysis, literature reviews, macro trends and so on

Deciding which type of research is best for your business requires you to ask the right questions, which you can do by properly identifying areas of misalignment between you and others and by identifying where you (and others) think you are in the learning/change/growth process as part of the strategic process.

Information Supports the Strategic Process

Research about your organization only works if you have a structure to grow it by. One of the most dangerous things an organization can do is to gather information for the sake of having it without having the intent to use it. Collecting information you don’t use wastes time, deflates morale, and kills a sense of value and trust.

Set the context for the research you need

Before you begin to research, engage a strategic process to set scenarios. goals and strategies for the general direction you want to go. This sets the context for the research you need.

We suggest the following process to guide your research priorities:

1. Get ready by engaging leadership. Make sure that everyone is on the same page about key knowledge about the organization.
   • Assess core competencies and organizational strengths
   • Distill vision, goals, values, culture, and leadership styles
   • Identify conflicts and bottlenecks
   • Clarify level of readiness for change
   • Learn about unique abilities of individuals and team dynamics
2. Set productivity by aligning strategy with talent. Get your priorities and resources in line.
   • Develop a strategic roadmap (e.g. scenarios that feed objectives, strategies, and action plans that differentiate)
   • Research the unknowns of current conditions
   • Develop roles and responsibilities
3. Set intended outcomes, performance expectations, and measurements
   • Intend outcomes via execution and performance measurement
   • Allocate resources for action plans (e.g. time, people, and money)
   • Communicate plans, roles, and intended outcomes
   • Set individual goals for team members
   • Monitor progress and outcomes during execution
   • Conduct performance evaluations
   • Modify and refine action plan as needed

To build a strong business model information must mobilize meaningful strategies

Proactive businesses today go beyond historical data and gather the types of information discussed above to support innovative decision making and to build the knowledge and trust among their customers and employees. They understand the value of regular data collection to set baselines for crucial measurements. They then share results to reward excellence and to encourage improvement; they aren’t waiting for annual performance reviews.

Now is the time to find out how many of your business and leadership challenges lead to specific areas of “not knowing.”

When you’re running a business, you need to be sure that the members of your team are right for the job and that the roles they fill are aligned with your overall strategy. That’s what we’ve been talking about in our last few posts, and now we’re shifting gears a bit to further explore how you can use assessments to guide employee development so that your people are consistently performing and form the team you trust to get the job done.

We recommend the Kolbe Indexes® as most effective tool for predicting performance

The Kolbe A, B and C Indexes® provide a holistic understanding of the natural instincts and unique talents of each employee. Understanding these instincts enables you to form synergistic teams and empowers managers to develop effective approaches for successful leadership. Any size company can benefit from the Kolbe Wisdom® system.

Understanding Kolbe®: How we all solve problems

Human instinct is the power behind all actions and is the source of mental energy. The Kolbe Indexes® supplement assessments that measure intelligence and personality so that you can optimize hiring, deployment, retention, and effectiveness.

Research, both academic and practical, has shown that our creative instincts shape how we accomplish tasks and solve problems. To reiterate what we’ve discussed in previous posts, the Kolbe A Index® identifies four action modes that form these instincts:

• Fact Finder: the instinct to probe
• Follow Through: the instinct to pattern
• Quick Start: the instinct to innovate
• Implementor: the instinct to demonstrate

Ways to use Kolbe® results for employee development

Whether you’re looking to hire someone, choose the best person for an important project, or build a successful business team, the Kolbe Wisdom System® can help you assess and deploy your workforce for maximum productivity.

Practical application: act on the knowledge you gain from index results:

• Help employees set attainable, measurable personal goals that are supported by their natural instincts
• Understand how personal goals further the overall vision of the company
• Identify areas where employee training is needed
• Implement a performance management system (we of course recommend BLOOM) to monitor and track training completion, performance, and goals
• Set new goals when past goals are met
• Regularly and effectively communicate
• Establish incentive programs that encourage and reward personal growth and productivity

An Example: Adapted from Wendy Buckingham’s article, “Basic Instincts” (pdf)

A manager who is a Fact Finder will research all the possible details to present to her team. If the team is largely comprised of Quick Starts, whose instinct is to take an idea and run with it, the team will be frustrated with the amount of detail the manager provides and will be anxious and inattentive. In turn, the manager will feel that her team does not value her work or contributions. By understanding team members’ instincts, the manager can adapt presentations so they are more easily digested by Quick Starts – for example, leading with a summary – and still have all the background information available when questions arise.

Insight is trained and certified in the Kolbe Wisdom® process, and we can apply the results from the Kolbe system to help you:

1. Create effective teams by choosing individuals with complementary talents.
2. Improve how existing teams perform by examining the complete array of talent within a team and explaining how to deploy talent and problem solving.
3. Reduce employee stress and conflict and increase communication by understanding how people optimally operate in the workplace.
4. Help employees harness their instinctive talents in synergistic ways by discovering their own process to meet a challenge.
5. Determine the best candidates for a given position by comparing an applicant’s talents to what a job demands.

Contact us to learn more about how Kolbe Indexes® can impact your organization.

It’s imperative that business owners and leaders take every opportunity to know who their employees are and what they want from their lives and work. Such understanding leads to high workplace morale and high employee retention.

“Improve the odds” of hiring well & getting a person plugged into the right role

At Insight, it’s no question what tool yields the most useful assessments: the Kolbe Wisdom™ system. We’ve used Kolbe for over twelve years now because it’s different from the other indexes; it neither seeks to identify personality style (affective) nor to measure intellect (cognitive), either of which the majority of other tools seek to do. Rather, Kolbe identifies a person’s natural instincts and drive — also known as conative style. Personality can change over time due to circumstances, growth, and experience, whereas one’s natural instincts and ways of taking action remain consistent over time.

The Kolbe A Index® measures a person’s instinctive approach to creative problem solving. In other words, it helps you to predict how a person will solve problems and provide solutions for emerging issues. It describes the natural way each person takes action in four distinct modalities/action modes, and since every individual has 100 percent mental energy or creativity that is distributed across all four action modes, understanding a potential employee’s Kolbe A gives you valuable insight into whether and how they will fit into your organization and contribute to your success.

The four Kolbe Action Modes:

• Fact Finder: The way we gather information. People within this mode range from generalist to specialist.
• Follow Through: The way we organize information. People within this mode range from being adaptive to being structured/systematic.
• Quick Start: The way we deal with time and uncertainty. People within this mode range from stabilizers to improvisers.
• Implementor: The way we seek tangible solutions. People within this mode range from being abstract to concrete.

How to use conative information

Understanding how instincts combine with intelligence and personality will help you optimize the hiring, deployment, retention, and effectiveness of your employees. Assessing and understanding the instinctive methods of all of your employees will create a less stressful work environment in which employees are more satisfied and more productive in their positions.

To see and achieve the big-picture vision you must use multiple assessment tools

You need to use more than the Kolbe A assessment to make a hiring decision. While it does provide information about the person who completed it, the Kolbe A does not tell you whether a person will be good at a particular job – that’s where Kolbe B Index® and Kolbe C Index® come into play and measure the potential gaps a person may have in a role per your expectations of the job or the current or past match of a top performer doing the same job.

The Kolbe B Index® is similar to the Kolbe A, but instead measures the person’s own expectation about fulfilling the job. A significant difference between an employee’s Kolbe A and Kolbe B indicates a stress point or strain. This is useful for comparing current and past employee’s perception of the required job performance for the position you are hiring to the results of the candidate. It is helpful to know the view of a person who actually performed the postion before in order to set your expectations for the job.

The Kolbe C Index® builds on A and B to measure the supervisor’s requirements for the job. A significant difference between the results of the Kolbe C and the Kolbe A identifies another point of tension.

The only way to use the Kolbe A Index® result in hiring is to compare it to the instinct demands of the job you’re filling. When you bring in the complete trio, you have data from both successful people already in the job (when applicable) and from supervisors and others who know the demands of the job. Under fair-hiring laws in the United States (and many other countries), employers must be able to prove that the criteria that they use in hiring are related to the successful performance of the specific job. Implementing the Kolbe Wisdom™ system enables you to demonstrate and document your compliance.

Insight is an expert in the Kolbe process

We’ve developed a recruiting process called “The Insight Whole Mind” that uses the Kolbe Wisdom™ system among other assessments to help our clients in their hiring and workforce development. I am a Copper Circle Member, the only Kolbe Certified Independent Consultant in Michiana, and have more than twelve years of experience and training using the Kolbe system. Feel free to contact me to set up a consultation and to explore your organization’s workforce development plan.

We believe that by understanding that each person has a distinct talent you will frame how they will approach their interests and their work. We also believe that the greater a person’s ability to match his talent with his work, the better his attitude and by his extension productivity will be. In our experience, most organizations don’t encourage the time and effort it requires to provide this advantage, and we can provide some advice on how to make this happen.

Job matching is ultimately a collaborative support process.

The keys to understanding and implementing a unique competitive advantage are to define your organizational goals and expectations and to know your people and support their growth. Integrating these two ideas is a powerful, effective method for increasing efficiency, improving performance beyond your expectations, and as a result retaining your best people.

Before we get to how to match people with jobs, let’s take a step back.

Any business initiative can be derailed without committed purpose and people supporting the necessary actions. The overarching reason for failure is a lack of understanding of these two elements. Specific issues include:

• Not identifying and/or consistently communicating a common purpose
• Losing focus on priorities
• Too much responsibility in too few of hands
• Too little attention to detail
• Poor matches of people to jobs
• Lack of individual ownership toward change
• Pessimism
• Erosion of innovation and creativity
• Complacent leaders without vision

Leaders must work to develop clear, understood purpose and actively align employees and roles with initiatives, otherwise hard work will continually be wasted effort, which in turn will deplete employee morale and retention.

How to get started matching people with the right jobs

Job matching requires meticulous detail in developing a process that is consistently implemented throughout your organization. We find that the best approach is to start in one specific area that is experiencing problems and adapt the following steps to your organization’s needs.

Three Phases of Development: Ready, Set, Go!

To prepare the development of your job matching process, start with completing the following steps:

Get Ready: Inspect and reinforce your organization’s foundation

1. Utilize a process to set specific organizational goals
2. Develop a three-year vision and set up one-year goals for the organization and for individual departments
3. Learn about your employees! Support managers with processes and tools for learning, understand each person by using assessments, and comprehend and track their short- and long-term goals

Get Set: Articulate specific expectations for your job matching process

1. Create job centers for each department by categorizing the main functions in each department. For example, separate job centers in a product department may include line operators, shipping, receiving, and packaging.
2. Detail specific job profiles in each job center, specifying the responsibilities, competencies (i.e. skills, talents, and attitudes), work environment, and training and education requirements.

Go: Integrate the information from steps 1-5 to match people to specific jobs

1. Use a methodology to match your employees with the job profiles
2. Dialog with each employee to discuss fit
3. Set goals (3, 6, and 12 month) with each employee
4. Create a communication plan for each employee to discuss progress
5. Always reward accomplishments with a consistent company reward system

Introducing job matching to your employees

It’s important that a job matching program be a positive, non-threatening process. Here are some tips to achieve that:

• Leadership must communicate the program and already be successfully implementing job matching with their managers
• Leaders must be involved in the training process by sharing their personal experiences implementing the program and the desired expectations
• Don’t enforce the whole system at once. Find a specific starting point, and introduce it bit by bit over a year or longer. You may want to break your job matching process into phases and sequentially introduce each phase throughout the organization, or you may want to implement the complete process one department at a time.

For additional tips and more extensive information let us know, and we will send you an article that includes details about leadership involvement, implementation, feedback loops, and collaborative support.

Research studies have shown that 73% of companies that have a clearly outlined strategy have managed to achieve their growth goals. Imagine how much smoother the processes could be and how much greater a percentage would succeed if strategy and workforce development were in sync. By tending only to strategy or only to employee development, businesses fail to fire on all cylinders and reach peak performance.

A solid strategy and direction helps set a path . . .

Most business leaders would agree that having a business strategy — a focus, goals for growth, and a plan of action — is an undoubtedly vital element of running business. Companies spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money identifying a strategy, acquiring and implementing the right equipment, technology, and processes. Of course they do! Otherwise they leave themselves wide open to unimaginable risk. The fact is over 60% of employees state they have no idea what their company’s strategy is, or how their job fits into the success of the strategy.

. . . and the right personnel enables your company to stay on course and on pace.

We know that “people issues” can have a negative ripple effect on productivity, quality, sales, customer service, and growth. Having the right people implement your strategy — whether she’s the one who can properly run the equipment or he’s running client meetings — means you won’t fall into the bucket with the many, many companies whose mismatched roles, lack of organizational clarity, and employee turnover cost them thousands upon thousands of dollars annually in lost productivity.

Often we encounter companies that are examining strategy and workforce development simultaneously, but they lack a comprehensive focus that explores how the two align. They fail to see successful business scenarios for success and how their people should fulfill strategy.

The kind of people and strategy we’re talking about really is possible.

At Insight, we see that people drive organizations. Your people plus your strategy forms the DNA of your business, and it’s that DNA that sets you apart, makes you unique, and gives you your competitive advantage. And when you align your people with your strategy and reach optimum performance, that’s an untouchable  recipe that your competition cannot replicate.

Ask yourself the following questions about you and your organization:

• Do you have active compelling business scenarios, a strong brand proposition, and focused market strategies that are aligned with the trends and uncertainties of our time?
• When was the last time you developed and evaluated your strategic initiatives and communicated them to your management team?
• Do you agree that you have the right people on board?
• Are your people aligned correctly in the right roles?
• How are you tracking their development?
• Are your strategies outlined well and broken down into measurable and time specific tasks that can be assigned to the right individuals and teams within your organization?

It’s a busy business world, and Insight can help you align people with strategy and see the results with BLOOM® Performance Management System.

BLOOM® is propriety, web-based software developed, implemented, and provided by Insight. It’s a customizable system that will enable your organization to communicate long- and short-term strategic goals and tasks, who’s responsible, and when they’re due. BLOOM® goes even further; it tracks progress, specifies training, defines roles, measures performance, and completes all other common strategic planning and human resource performance planning functions. In short, BLOOM® knows where your organization is heading and the steps they will take on that path.

Benefits of BLOOM®

• Serves as a central location for all strategic initiatives with corresponding people development tracking
• Reduces phone tag, paperwork, and data entry
• Provides secure online access so that you can view and update information anytime, anywhere
• Enables single source access to the most recent versions of information
• Automates time-consuming, often avoided processes
• Facilitates unified communication to all employees
• Grants multiple security levels to display information at the Individual, Managerial, Executive, and Administrator levels

Features of BLOOM® include:

• Performance log
• Performance reviews aligned to specific role descriptions
• Employee compensation analysis per company wage scales
• A unified location and tracking system of all strategic initiatives (e.g. scope, objectives, and budgets)
• A way to link individuals to assigned strategic priorities
• Self-service access for employees to review to their information and assignments

What’s more? It’s intuitive.

Call us at 866.250.8710 to schedule a free, no-obligation demonstration. We even offer a 30-day free trial so that you can see BLOOM® in action and discover the difference it can make for your organization.