APS Blog

Potential, Performance and Promises

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 12:00:00 Z

Traditionally, succession planning has been the process of identifying internal people to move into business-critical positions and leadership roles, often with a confidential, top-down, highly structured approach. Today, organisations are looking for simpler, faster and scientifically valid ways to identify successors; in essence, creating a more efficient talent “pipeline”.

Succession planning is often driven by senior executives seeking to reassure their boards (think classic “what if they get hit by a bus” scenarios) and entrusted to HR leaders to make it work. Creating a successful succession programme is not a simple task and HR leaders face numerous challenges. Organisational politics may influence who gets put on the fast track for promotion, creating disillusionment for those who are equally competent but less skilled at making themselves known. Long-term leaders may feel entitled to that next move up the ladder and be dismayed when external change agents are parachuted in to take the lead. Key talent may have been promised future opportunities that dissipate when business requirements shift or mentors leave.

Trying to ensure fairness and mindful of employee engagement, HR leaders have long sought to instil rigour in succession planning; giving rise to the popularity of nine-box grids and talent reviews. However, the time, money and effort put into assessing potential and reviewing performance often creates mixed results; for all the reasons we associate with the realities of a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous).

Past performance is not predictive of future success if the role changes in scope, scale, or complexity and it may be time to add more rigour to the traditional nine-box framework. Adding inputs from reliable and valid personality-based and cognitive assessments, coupled with real-life performance data (multi-rater assessments , portfolio examples, performance reviews) can create more assurance. Technological innovations have also made it possible to assess skills in virtual environments, adding even more opportunities to identify the strengths and opportunities of future leaders.

Accelerate Leaders’ skills and readiness

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 12:00:00 Z

Building and nurturing a leader talent pipeline is easier said than done and way beyond a simple list of step-in names for disaster recovery planning! Evidence for readiness to step up to the next level is more than a qualification and current role performance. Preparing and supporting the right people to create vision and strategy, and enthuse others in today’s volatile world is surely an imperative.

Understanding individual aspirations and values is the first step to exploring: fit to roles, potential career paths, work climate, or cultural impact. As this translates to natural behaviours, skills and signature strengths emerge. We thus know the ingredients for success.

Readiness to take on bigger roles is typically gained through experience, the pace of this can be planned placement in various business areas or simply left to chance. Placement can definitely help and such exposure certainly helps with the understanding of different channels and cultures. This of course can take significant time, upheaval, and frustrations of tuning in, not just to the participant themselves but to others around them. Also, Leaders may still not have sufficient exposure to the broader pressures, issues and decisions dealt with at the next level up.

Hogan can provide validated evidence around, reasoning ability, motivational values, and natural behaviours to predict success in senior leadership roles. This can help objectively identify possible stars of the future.

The new SkillsPilot platform provides participants with exposure to typical problems for the next level of Leader to address in real-time. It can even include custom issues aligned to a business context. Such challenges are scheduled as a meeting and fit in calendars just like other meetings, minimising disruption and emulating the real-world.

So objectively identifying and accelerating talent readiness for the next role is much easier, more time, and cost-effective using today’s technology.

Discounts are available to trial Hogan Assessments and SkillsPilot, contact us for a chat and more details.

Practise Makes Perfect?

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 12:00:00 Z

Watching the Lionesses and England Ladies Hockey Teams win their respective trophies and gold medals has been a great addition to the summer sunshine this year.

Seeing successful sports teams in action always prompts me to think about what takeaways we can learn from when applied to business teams.

Of course, there are some similarities between successful sports teams and business teams – drive, the right expertise and skills, an effective plan, hard work, effort and leadership, to name but a few, are all key to team achievement in any environment.

Elite athletes, similar to business people, are also often members of multiple teams and might play slightly different roles in each one.

What about the differences?

Although the recent wins on sports pitches have been great to keep the diversity and equality debates alive, it strikes me that there is often less diversity in a national sports team than in business teams.

Why do I say that? National teams usually are made up of individuals from a single gender and culture and, while there is still a lot of work to do, most leadership and business teams I engage with are made up of people from different backgrounds and genders.

However, there are two critical differences that always stand out for me:

Sports teams spend significantly more time practising together, as well as individual training, compared to business teams. I do not know any business team that spends even 10% of their working time practising and training together – they are rarely not in action, save for strategic planning meetings or team workshops.

Elite sports teams engage specialist coaches, measure multiple performance data points and receive constant feedback on their performance both in training and in competition. Most business teams have important KPI information but how much of this is focused on their ability to work effectively as a unit? In some circles, support from a coach is seen as remedial training rather than elite performance training.

While it is not realistic for business teams to spend as much time practising together as elite sports teams, and the good news is that neither can the competition, it is possible to bridge the gap on point 2.

Making the best use of the limited time teams have together to reflect on and practise skills to be more effective is possible. Using quality metrics such as SkillsPilot Exercises, Hogan Team Analysis, High Performing Team Assessment and, as a team, practising skills application with an accredited coach can all help to make a difference – and who does not want their team to be high performing in any setting?