Written by There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
Will Rodgers
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Posts tagged Work
Clever
Too clever is dumb.
Ogden Nash
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Sticking to own work is a great thing.
Having a too strict approach doesn’t reinforce your point, makes you only appear not capable of reasoning.
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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.
Working
The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.
Anonymous
Slang
Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work.
Anonymous
Working man
[Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man — he loves to see him work. Winston Churchill
Computers
One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
Anonymous
Bird eye view
In day by day work, it’s easy to sink yourself in a low level view, while It is important to maintain a bird eye view.
This means not having a “satellite” view seeing things at highest level, nor to have a low level view focusing only on details.
Bird eye view behaves like a traveler on an helicopter, making you see thing high enough to see the big picture but maintaining the ability to go deep enough to catch details needed.
Try to raise your sight and you will understand more and give a different sense to what happens.
Networking
Networking is in its broadest meaning, one of the used and abused concepts of our times.
Quite everyone needs to communicate and to be linked to others in many ways: from paper letters of good old times to twitter.
But there are at least two different levels of networking:
- The first one is networking for pleasure, includes lot of medias and comes from the pleasure of sharing with others experiences, thoughts and ideas. It’s what I’m doing right now with you: share some thoughts and some of my management experience just to have a discussion for my own (and hopefully your) growth.
- The second one is networking for work and is quite different
Let’s focus for the purpose of this discussion on this second one and get some thoughts and tips:
- Size doesn’t matter (at least in this case): It is a false myth that the more you are networked the more you’re powerful. Instead It is better to have less connections but trusted and reliable than being plenty of contacts you cannot access nor trust
- Social networking is the beginning, not the end: SN could be a great place to find people with similar interests, but to build a real network thing should go further
- Don’t fake, it’s your interest: could be the simplest rule, but is the one most of the people are not following. We see lot of people on the net and in real life, faking informations on they’re work or situation. But doing so increases only you chances to be un-masked, while flattening the overall perceived level of the people you’re networking.
- Search for quality instead of quantity: again too much contacts of poor quality don’t help you reaching your goals. Try to be rational in building your business network: what you need? Where you can have access to similar people?
- Don’t exchange unless you’re sure: sharing networks is easy as demolishing your own credibility and trash the times and effort you spend in building relationships. Try to present people to your trusted contacts only if you have a very deep understanding of them and they’re goals. Otherwise put on table from the beginning your role, avoiding to fall in the trap of being the Troy horse for someone else.
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