The guys at Geeks are sexy posted a really beautiful mesh up obtained via Cubiclebot .
Here it is.
Posts in category communication
How to setup a skill assessment – supporting evaluators
Welcome back to the third article of this mini series on skill assessment management (first two can be found here and here ).
As I already mentioned, skill assessment is not a simple business for many reasons:
- Is a complex and impacts throughout the organization
- Is risky in terms of sensitiveness of contents, information to be handled and communications to be given
- Is not a one man job but definitely a team work, and is a work that should be addressed in an homogeneous way to ensure results consistency.
So here follow some of the tips deriving from experience that will for sure help you succeed:
- Be sure to spend enough time to setup a clear communication path. Having a dedicated email helps a lot.
- Define a team to manage the assessment and have a clear leader: helps in giving to people the perception of you taking care of them and ensures to be fast in answers
- Do not assume everyone knows the objectives and terms of a skill assessment. Is a best practice to have a repository for FAQs and/or a dedicated number and/or a micro site to give informations in a consistent way
- Remember (again) that the more you support the assessment, the more you will have a clear understanding of people and consistent data to work on
- Be sure to give to people managers a limited set of resources to track. A good rule of thumb is to have 1 people manager coordinate no more than 10 people assessments. This enables an effective control and ensures people taking real care of the task you’re delegating
- If you use a tool to collect assessments be sure to ensure it works, is well feed and supported and that a clear work path is given
- If you use files to collect data, be sure to setup a good naming convention. One that fits, in my experience is Area_Office_responsible_Resource name and surname.
- When competences are assessed, ensure a double check by assessor to ensure there are not error in assessment
- Give a reasonable due date
Next time we will speak about some of the skills that at general level are the most common to be measured.
How to setup a skill assessment – what is a skill assessment
After the first set of articles (you can find references here) on how to evaluate people potential, let’s now move to the world of “skills”.
The freedictionary defines skill as “Proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience”.
This means that, despite you have people working with you on a daily basis, they may have built during their professional experience abilities that represent and define them as a fingerprint.
Though representing a valuable asset, this talents have different weight on your working context, because part can be useful and part not.
So what is important is to have a mapping of skills, crafted to what you need to run your business. And after having acquired the situation in terms of existing and gap toward the desired state, since skills are addressable through experience and training, you can design a plan to address this gap.
But let’s start from the beginning.
What is a skill assessment?
On a “definition basis”, is the process through which you are going to map skills, expressed through actions and behaviors, owned by a person, and map them toward a desired state.
On an “opportunity basis” a way to better know you people and define how and at which risk/cost you can craft your organization
What a skill assessment is not?
A skill assessment is not an hidden evaluation of people, nor a judgement on their personal behavior.
A skill assessment is not a performance evaluation or a way to evaluate potential.
Some preliminary thoughts
As usual we will go in depth through the different steps to have a successful assessment, but some preliminary considerations are worth sharing.
- There’s no one size fits all rule: businesses are different and so are the skills needed to run them
- Doing a skill assessment without acting after results is a loss of time not worth starting
- Be clear on the objectives you’re pursuing to avoid misunderstanding with people
- Skill changes with time and your organization, so is fundamental to update results on a regular basis
- At a macro level you could make a couple of groups dividing the cake in knowledge and personal skills. but this grouping can be different if you move from operational roles to more managerial ones. So to be clear, for the purpose of this article we will focus more on the first type.
Effective meetings
Jeff Magee at his site describes the SMART(c) methodology for managing the meeting the right way.
Essentially the method focuses on being:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attain agreement
- Realistic
- (being into) Timeframe
I had my personal comment:
Be sure the set:
- Expectations from the meeting: what is the objective?
- The right number and level of people: having too much people within the table (physical or virtual) is not an indicator of power nor of social effectiveness: is only a way to have “distributed responsibilities” and at the real end no empowerment in obtaining results. Having the wrong level of participant make procrastinating the only solution.
- The right time: go to a meeting without being prepared is the best way to be ineffective; so take your time and leave to other their
This comments also here
Evaluating people potential – How to conduct an assessment
We covered in previous articles some different topics of people potential evaluation (Article 1, Article 2 and Article 3).
What we are going to deep dive now is the king of all tools: the assessment.
First of all let’s define what this kind of meeting is and which are the main points:
- Is a methodology consisting of a meeting to assess people through practical tests focused on interaction
- Is a methodology that cannot be improvised: so take your time to plan and test the whole package before going live
- The meeting involves up to 15 people and will focus on “behavioral” interactions. This doesn’t mean it will be only a group discussion, but can include individual interviews
As I said before, the assessment day is not something you can take out of your hat in 10 minutes: it needs practice and experience to be managed in an effective way.
The key points to conduct a good assessment are:
- Tell the truth: do not mask the assessment as something different. Be honest and open for day objectives
- Let people be comfortable: take in mind that in any case this day will cause to people some stress that will be at different level of degree from person to person. So don’t start to early in the morning, plan to have some breaks at the end of each activity, make no more than 9 hours including lunch and breaks
What to measure.
Of course meeting people for the sole pleasure of watching is not the aim of this kind of event, so we need to understand what should be assessed.
Unfortunately there’s no general rule to determine what to focus more on, since potential evaluation should be crafted for each situation, but as a general rule of thumb you should consider covering at least this areas:
- Relational area: Everything that relates to building and stabilizing relationships.
- Leadership
- Negotiation
- Social skills
- Team work
- Intellectual area: everything that is related to finding solutions to problem not deriving from operational and decisions. Includes
- Analytic
- Synthesis
- Mind flexibility
- Managerial area: It refers to being capable of being effective in reaching results. It includes:
- Problem solving/Decision making
- Pro-activity
- Planning
- Team management
Some tips to conduct the assessment:
- Be sure to take note of participants positions in terms of seating
- Give them badges with numbers not names
- use abbreviations for repetitive behaviors (e.g. “*” for someone stopping some other)
- Trace anything you feel relevant and then rework on it after closing the event
- Rework on results until you feel confident
Evaluating people potential – Objectives and tools
We covered in a previous article which is the starting point for evaluating people potential. Now we will focus on which are the objectives and tools that can be used.
Why is it important to assess people potential:
- Again first of all because people are your first asset and deserve to be assessed to know “where the bet should be placed” with less risk possible
- Second point is because knowing the break down between people potential and actual situation helps you in tailoring the best approach for their development
- Third point is because if you have a clear map and path you can manage more easily future tasks and position changes in order to maximize results.
To go through a good potential assessment, please take in mind that is a step different and even more complex from performance evaluation:
- both are “evaluations”, but one focuses on current performance, the other (potential) is focused in forecasting a potential state.
- performance is aiming at short term, while potential is aiming at long term, also for rewarding purposes
Stated this objectives, is it clear to understand that tools (in a broad sense) play an important role.
So which are the best tools to be used during the assessment?
Here are my tips:
- Be prepared on person history, both personal and inside the company. This screening must be done before meeting the person
- Opt for direct manager interviews, stating clearly the objective of the meeting or plan homogeneous assessment groups
- Use tests where possible to assess knowledge and potential against a sample of homogeneous people, but remember that tests give you only a point of view, not all the story
- Take time to prepare group assessments (a typical ratio in my experience is 10:1 the first number being the preparation days for each day of assessment. Also this estimate assumes that you have done this before and that you know how to structure the assessment days and where to get material, otherwise you can double the effort)
- Take time to prepare one to one assessments (again a rule of thumb is to take half a day for each interview)
- Don’t improvise
Next time we will focus on expected output and dimensions to be covered
Evaluating people potential – The starting point
Let’s start from an assumption: people are your best asset in any case, since you as a manager rely on their expertise and performance to achieve your result.
So, among manager tasks, choosing right people and identifying those with best attitudes is a key task both for their and your career.
What is performance evaluation? More or less simply is assessing you people in order to identify those with better skills and attitudes. Said in a more “professional” way is an assessment of people potential in terms of attitudes, skills, knowledge, flexibility to determine their ability to deal with more complex and different tasks.
Assessing people can start from different points, but main source is your direct observation. Of course is a complex matter if your team is big or your role gives you a line of managers, but you can bypass this limitation through a structured process: the more you can get similar informations, the more you will have a consistent situation to work on.
Some tips follow:
- People and work change and so does potential: an important think to know is that you’re assessing a person potential on the specific situation he’s in. Potential is not something “absolute” nor fixed
- Grab as much information you can from:
- Resumes
- Knowledge
- recent performance evaluations
- Goals
Next time we will talk about objectives for Potential Evaluation and tools
Building confidence
In building your career you, for sure, should go through having some specific skills.
But this is not enough, because you should be confident in yourself, your means and your potential.
The bad news is that if you are not self confident by nature, building confidence is not easy things and goes through a personal “trip” more than a professional one.
The good news is that the achievements go beyond the professional sphere and are worth the effort.
There are some key points you can focus on:
- Believe you can do it: You should start believing you can do things. You may not be a superhero, but definitely have the skills to succeed. This feeling will grow and reinforce as you achieve progressive goals
- Make the steps short and measurable: not too small to be not meaningful but enough to aim at a reachable target. After you get more confident, you can set more challenging goals
- Take your time: patience is the key
- Selective knowledge and learning reinforce you: don’t aim at being a generalist, but try to choose an area to become an expert. The more you learn, the more you will become aware of your potential
- Change the mind, shape the body: more your are confident with your body, the most you’ll be sure in doing things. More you are confident with your mind, less you will hesitate in your action
- Learn from others, but be yourself: you exist despite the others, but you don’t need to copy them and be unnatural. But you can “copy and customize” what fits also to you naturally
- Go for priorities: Aiming at perfection is a waste of time, try to focus on less things but make them well
- Clean up: throw out of your life as much as many things that are giving negative feelings. Again not all at once, but try to eat the elephant spoon by spoon
- Take your time: patience is the key…. oops did I said it before? Worth repeating
- Go for selective experience: try gradually new things, avoiding old good ones and discovering new sensations and experiences. After each situation, take time to debrief yourself and recognize things that went good and what went wrong
- Find your personal balance: more stability helps building confidence
- Decide: Don’t wait for others to play the game for you. try to have you on the helm and decide.
- At least you are like the others: don’t think of yourself worse than the others. At least you’re going for a draw.
- Throw yourself over the obstacle: think than at a certain point act. Some times you may fail, but at least you tried and this will reinforce you
- Grow your armor: start building your line of defense around you to avoid being hurt
- Praise yourself for every achievement. Be rational on your defeats: they are part of the game.
- Immediate action payoff is not applicable every time
- Be honest you can make errors (in decisions, in actions,…) just like any other. Again it’ part of the game and is hones to admit it.
- Fear is useful. Panic is not: use fear to set your readiness alert, but avoid at all costs it develops in panic.
- Everything can be done or at least tried, so if you feel uncomfortable with something, try to face it and see what happens
A sample training evaluation form
Training isn’t a one way communication, both during the training and after it is finished.
And it’s an important moment of growth also for faculty and team behind the course.
To help in improving quality of course, it is useful to have also trainer perspective to be processed at a later time to better understand course results.
What follows is an example that can be customized at will:
Training evaluation form
Course name: ________________________________
Trainer name(s) ________________________________
Participants attitude toward course contents:
- Interested
- Not Interested
- Polemic
- Other
Notes _______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Prevalent type of interventions during training:
- Clarifications
- Deep dive
- Polemic
- Other
Notes _______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Prevailing attitude toward training:
- Collaborative
- Non collaborative
Notes _______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Prevailing acceptance toward training content and messages:
- High
- Medium
- Low
Notes _______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Prevailing perception and attitude toward tests and workgroups:
- Interested
- Not Interested
- Polemic
- Other
Notes _______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Recent Comments