With the fluctuations in today’s economy, job market, and global relationships it’s no surprise that employees are at least uneasy if not downright stressed. Too much stress can be problematic to a person’s health and well-being, and as an employer you can help control some of the factors that lead to employee stress. Continue Reading »
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Teddy Roosevelt once said that “the best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
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:
- Create effective teams by choosing individuals with complementary talents.
- Improve how existing teams perform by examining the complete array of talent within a team and explaining how to deploy talent and problem solving.
- Reduce employee stress and conflict and increase communication by understanding how people optimally operate in the workplace.
- Help employees harness their instinctive talents in synergistic ways by discovering their own process to meet a challenge.
- 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.
Posted in Performance Planning, Strategic Alignment | Leave a Comment »
It may be tempting to think of role descriptions as relatively unimportant documents compared to the many other tasks competing for your attention. In reality, though, role descriptions directly relate to organizational efficiency, growth, and success. Carefully written role descriptions guide the hiring process, help chart a course for employees’ future, and properly orient them to the overall strategy of your organization. A well-articulated, detailed role description is the foundation for aligning people with strategy.
The essential components of an effective role description
Title
Should:
- Accurately summarize the position
- Give an idea of the general duties and regular tasks (we call them KRAs – Key Results Areas)
- Reflect the position and function of the role in relation to the overall organizational hierarchy
Should not:
- Apply an inflated title (e.g. do not include “manager” in the title of someone who does not supervise others)
Role Summary
Should:
- Be concise and tightly-written
- Be only a paragraph or two
- Provide an outline of the ultimate purpose of the position, the primary functoin of the employee, and how the role directly contributes to the organization’s objectives
- Delineate how the role differs from other roles by highlighting specialized duties and expectations
Key Results Areas (KRAs)
Should:
- Draw attention to only the essential duties and responsibilities.
Note: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that role descriptions not exclude persons with disabilities due to their inability to perform non-essential tasks of a role; avoid running afoul of the ADA by clearly and explicitly identifying only the essential duties of a specific role. The ADA requires that for a task to be considered essential, the role should exist in order to accomplish the task, there are a limited number of other employees who could complete the task, and those individuals are hired for their specialized ability necessary to complete the task.- Be sure that everything is related to the job. Give serious and careful thought to what percentage of the role’s time will be dedicated to particular tasks, and refine the list of key duties to only the essentials.
- Be listed in order of importance or otherwise weighted
- Explicitly state expectations
Qualifications
Should:
- Note requirements for education level (e.g. college degrees and professional certifications). You may want to include disclaimers like “or equivalent experience” to encourage more applications.
- Include requirements for experience (e.g. years, levels of expertise, and types)
- Include requirements for competencies (e.g. communication skills, ability to collaborate)
- Include requirements for specific knowledge (e.g. proficiency in a foreign language)
Note: Again, be sure to comply with the ADA by including only essential qualifications for the role.
Role descriptions may not be referenced on a daily basis, yet they place a pivotal role in an organization’s daily operations. Further, in a performance management system like BLOOM® role descriptions are tightly integrated with performance reviews, goals, and tasks and form the backbone of the system. The bottom line is that writing effective role descriptions now will pay off in time, money, and company resources down the road. Learn how to write effective role descriptions and you will orient employees to the opportunities for the future.
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As of this week BLOOM® gives even greater flexibility to its users — this time in the form of dual reporting. Continue Reading »
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Note: We have adapted portions of this post from P. Scholtes, B. Joiner, and B. Streibel, 2003, The Team Handbook, Oriel, Madison, WI.
“Team” is a term that means something in the world of athletics, and it’s come to mean something in business, too. “Team” as it relates to sports is easy enough to understand; as it relates to business the concept is more nebulous. Is a group of staff a team, or is it merely a collection of people who happen to work for the same company? For a business team, what defines success?
By definition, a team is a group of people that has a common purpose, mission, or goal. Its members are interdependent, and they agree that they must work together and collaborate to effectively reach their goal.
Characteristics of successful teams
Regardless of whether we’re talking about the Indianapolis Colts or the editorial department of the Indianapolis Star, there are a number of characteristics common to successful teams:
- Clear goals
- Clear roles
- Clear communication
- Beneficial team behaviors
- Well-defined decision procedures
- A plan for improvement
- Balanced participation
- Established norms and ground rules
- Awareness of the team process
- Scientific approaches
There are a number of types of teams, and they are generally distinguished by three key points: their purpose; their duration (permanent or ad hoc); and their membership (functional or cross-functional). Five types of teams generally seen in the business sector are:
- Natural work groups: groups composed of people who work together every day
- Business teams: groups of people who come together for a specific task.
- Management teams: groups of people, usually peer managers, who come together to coordinate actions of the entire organization.
- Problem-solving teams: groups of people who come together for a specific period to analyze a situation and suggest working alternatives.
- New product/service teams: groups of people who come together to design or redesign a product or service.
To be effective, teams have a number of needs that must be met, including:
- Clearly defined purposes and goals that serve the organization
- Clearly defined parameters
- Ability to communicate within the organization
- People with the necessary knowledge and skills to accomplish their tasks.
- Knowledge of how they are going to accomplish their tasks.
How teams operate
To accomplish their purpose and mission, teams must collaborate effectively. Teams that follow a proven process often achieve their goals. An effective process includes:
- Identify the clear purpose, problem, or issue the team will address
- Determine a problem-solving process
- Hold effective meetings (e.g. agendas, ground rules, and established roles)
- Conclude collaborations (e.g. summarize decisions, review action items, and evaluate meetings)
- Follow up (e.g. distribute notes and complete assignments)
In summary, businesses often say they have “great teamwork” but the proof is in the process and the results.
Posted in Leadership, Performance Planning | 1 Comment »
Conflict is a natural part of human interaction. A healthy approach to conflict leads to greater understanding of one another and more creative problem solving. An unhealthy approach to conflict leads to wounded egos and frustration. When we understand our individual styles of dealing with conflict we can begin to understand how we can approach it; we can also then identify whether it is within our ability to solve or is too volatile or complex for a resolution.
Dealing with conflict takes self-awareness, respect, careful listening, honesty, and structured dialog in order to be positively resolved.
Disrespect breeds an unhealthy approach conflict.
Respect is the foundation of understanding differences. If you do not respect the person you’re engaging, then you likely have little true desire to discover and negotiate your differences.
Disrespect typically comes from one of three sources:
- Some form of emotional, physical, or resource-affiliated abuse
- Denial of rights for a person to act or feel a certain way
- Misalignment of ethics and core values between two people
Be honest with yourself and identify whether any of these issues exist. If they do, you may need to accept that some level of conflict may always exist and that conflict management may be more realistic than conflict resolution. If maintaining a relationship requires conflict management then you need to understand some facts:
- Choosing to be in situations that include an obstacle to successfully handling the demands and responsibilities of a relationship undermines your ability to construct and maintain a positive self image.
- One of the most consistent and strongest findings in research about conflict is the significant relationship between conflict and stress-related health outcomes, which include: psychological strain, anxiety and depression, somatic complaints, elevated blood pressure, and substance abuse.
Approaches to conflict
Self-awareness goes a long way in dealing with conflict. Knowing how you operate initiates the process of understanding the skills you need to handle stressful situations. Your personality, values, beliefs, instincts, and intellect all affect how you handle stress. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument identifies five conflict-handling modes.
According the Thomas-Kilmann, in a conflict situation a person’s behavior can be described in two basic dimensions:
- Assertiveness: the extent to which the person attempts to satisfy his/her own concerns
- Cooperativeness: the extent to which the person attempts to satisfy the other person’s conflict
These two dimensions further flesh out to define five methods of dealing with conflict:
- Competing: assertive and uncooperative, this is a power-oriented method.
- Collaborating: both assertive and cooperative, collaboration may take longer but provides a win-win outcome.
- Compromising: intermediate in assertiveness and cooperativeness, compromise offers a middle ground that is often lose-lose.
- Avoiding: unassertive and uncooperative, avoidance does not address conflict. This along with the following method often lead to passive agressive behaviors.
- Accommodating: unassertive and cooperative, accommodation is the the direct opposite of competition and leads to habitual self-sacrifice.
Once you understand how you approach conflict you will begin to develop conflict-resolution strategies that are relevant to how you behave under stress.
Convert conflict into constructive energy. Working through conflict is better than putting up with it. One of the best processes we’ve found is the Kolbe Conflict Counter Actives™ that leads to mutual understanding, defined goals, and resolved conflict around a specific issue.
A conflict-resolution dialog. There are many layers of discovery required when people explore core issues and root causes of conflict. Here are some modified steps for dialog that demonstrate the types of considerations needed:
- Listen, listen, listen. Listen actively for words and feelings. This means to listen with empathy and without evaluation. Be present. Be encouraging. Reflect back to the speaker what you heard before you respond.
- Write down and define specific examples of the conflict. Discuss your examples. Are they based on similar situations? Do you agree on what isn’t working?
- Reaffirm your mutual trust.
- Identify the areas where you leverage each other’s talents.
- Develop a list of shared goals. Discuss differences and commonalities.
- Discuss the amount of time you spend together, what materials and resources are shared, and whether one person has more control than the other. Do you agree on how it should be and why?
- What disagreement do you have about each other’s feelings, thoughts, and actions? Where do your perspectives differ the most and why? How are your perspectives the same?
- Are your natural approaches to problem-solving different? If so, name the differences.
- What are the consequences of your conflict? How do they affect the other person’s expectations?
- What are more realistic expectations? How will you achieve your common goals?
- What action steps are you each willing to commit to? How often will you meet? How will you define success?
We recommend using a facilitator help you to learn the comprehensiveness of the process, especially in complex situations.
Posted in Talent Mangement, Tips for Down Times, Training & Learning | Leave a Comment »
(Elkhart, Indiana) – 11/11/2009
As a performance management system BLOOM® is an all-in-one tool that enables businesses to track and communicate their organizational, departmental, and employee goals. The latest round of updates builds further on BLOOM’s Roles and Goals modules to provide even more detail and faster access to the data human resources managers and executives need most often.
Measure an employee’s performance with standard Key Performance Areas
BLOOM® enables Human Resources managers to get rid of the countless spreadsheets they likely use to track information and to instead manage roles — including descriptions, education and training requirements, and now Key Resource Areas (KRA) — in a centralized, web-based location. When it comes time for an employee’s review, BLOOM® pulls in the person’s corresponding KRA and other applicable data that their supervisor will rate as appropriate. By tying roles to reviews, BLOOM® ensures that reviews are unique to each employee and that reviews occur regularly. That helps managers keep a bead on performance trends and human resources to have the information they need to make personnel decisions.
Meet goals & objectives through action plans & assigned tasks
Companies can already enter their organizational goals into BLOOM®, breaking down each goal into multiple objectives and each objective into multiple action plans. The latest updates to the Goals module enables Human Resources to assign a leader and multiple team members the responsibility and even to associate multiple files with each action plan. Each employee’s BLOOM® dashboard summarizes objectives, action plans, and due dates so that they have a clear picture of what’s required.
BLOOM® is a web-based, fully-integrated performance management system that supports individuals and working teams. BLOOM® was developed by Insight Strategic Concepts® Inc. For more information contact Julie Warner Miccichi, Director of Business Development, at julie@insightsc.com or 574.970.1322.
Insight Strategic Concepts® Inc. is a strategic growth firm that focuses on building business strategies that are unique to an organization’s products, services, customers, employees, systems, and culture. Insight assesses these areas to define the organic construct of an organization. They then develop unique business goals, market strategies, products, services, role structures, and technologies to promote organizational growth. For more information visit www.insightsc.com or www.bloomware.com or email info@insightsc.com.
Posted in BLOOM News | Leave a Comment »
If you’ve been following our blog, you already understand how to align the right people with the right jobs. Now you need to know how to hire for success, too!
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.
Posted in Recruiting and Hiring, Strategic Alignment, Talent Mangement | Leave a Comment »
One of our latest blog posts highlighted the inevitable success that results when you align the right people with the right strategy.
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
- Utilize a process to set specific organizational goals
- Develop a three-year vision and set up one-year goals for the organization and for individual departments
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- Use a methodology to match your employees with the job profiles
- Dialog with each employee to discuss fit
- Set goals (3, 6, and 12 month) with each employee
- Create a communication plan for each employee to discuss progress
- 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.
Posted in Performance Planning, Strategic Alignment, Talent Mangement | Leave a Comment »
(Elkhart, Indiana) – 11/6/2009
Clarity and simplicity form the backbone of the BLOOM® Performance Management System, and as part of BLOOM’s expanded feature series, more new releases extend BLOOM®’s emphasis on usability.
BLOOM® incorporates a number of functional modules that integrate to make performance management painless. The Reviews and Employee Assessments modules received new features and updates that further clarify and simplify communication between managers and employees and provide executive-level users with the critical information they need for making personnel decisions.
More commenting space enables comprehensive note-taking.
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More space for all responses and comments by the employee and by the manager.
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A place for the manager to add final comments before the review is approved.
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A new page that indicates that a review has been completed.
Automatic imports pull the relevant information into the corresponding review sections.
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Each review imports essential duty categories from the employee’s role description so that a manager can rate each duty individually.
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Administrators can include/exclude some elements on the company’s standard review form.
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Employee goals are weighted as a percentage when they’re entered. Reviews import the goals and their weights to calculate the overall rating for the review’s section on goals.
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Default setting during the approval process is now “signed.”’
Attach files and enable fine-tuned executive access to Employee Assessments.
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A new option to upload individual assessment files (e.g. Word or PDF)
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Executive-level users now have access to a results report for all employees so that the user can compare and contrast talents for job matching.
BLOOM® is a web-based, fully-integrated performance management system that supports individuals and working teams. BLOOM® was developed by Insight Strategic Concepts® Inc. For more information contact Julie Warner Miccichi, Director of Business Development, at julie@insightsc.com or 574.970.1322.
Insight Strategic Concepts® Inc. is a strategic growth firm that focuses on building business strategies that are unique to an organization’s products, services, customers, employees, systems, and culture. Insight assesses these areas to define the organic construct of an organization. They then develop unique business goals, market strategies, products, services, role structures, and technologies to promote organizational growth. For more information visit www.insightsc.com or www.bloomware.com or email info@insight.com.
Posted in BLOOM News | Leave a Comment »
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