Putting True Senior Commitment Behind The Process
A leading multi-site Healthcare organization already had a sophisticated but manual Strategic Planning process. This defined long-term objectives, strategies, key performance indicators, and measures. Employees were experienced in developing personal Objectives that linked directly to the strategic plans. There was also a separate Multi-rater Feedback process to promote development of Leadership competencies. The challenge was to integrate these processes and add effective processes for planning personal development, monitoring progress against plans, and periodically evaluating performance.
A web-based HR Pulse® system was commissioned. This enabled senior managers to develop and interlink their strategic plans on-line, and to publish these to staff through the same web-based system.
Further functionality enabled managers to elicit multi-rater feedback; a central administrator managed this process. The cumulative data for each manager was fed back into his or her Performance Plan and subsequent Appraisal.
The third component was a development planning process to help each employee link their objectives, the resulting competency demands, and their apparent competency to a specific personal development plan. This took employees through the steps of crafting a truly focused competency-based development plan.
An on-going performance monitoring and periodic appraisal feature was added for tracking and assessing performance.
The logic underpinning most personal development strategies, processes and systems seems infallible. Unfortunately, logic is not the only force at play. A small percentage of individuals take their personal development very seriously; they will plan their development and implement it despite the organization, their manager or the HR processes; but some individuals will probably not engage in development activity no matter what is done for, around, or even to them.
The majority of executives and managers do see their personal development as a priority. However, on a day-to-day basis, they make snap decisions about what they are going to do; emotions and preferences play a large, if not larger, part in those decisions. Personal development is often just one priority among many; unfortunately, it is usually just one level below what gets done. Personal Development is typically long term (important but not urgent) and painful (“I have to change!?”). Phone calls, requests from the CEO, meetings, etc. are immediate demands - not necessarily genuine priorities but apparently urgent enough to take precedence.
Likewise, managers of people, find it easier to do things that they are skilled at - but often this does not include coaching. So, the urgent and tactical things they are good at get attended to. Does this mean that these managers or executives are bad? Does this mean that their managers are incompetent? Not necessarily. They are simply human!
Pilat worked with this client to address this fundamental challenge. The client already understood the issue and had assigned very senior staff to provide one-to-one coaching support, to raise the urgency of development, to act as a conscience to the senior leaders, and to make development happen.
Therefore, the latest feature added to their system was a unique interface to enable these internal coaches to access the details of the staff they coach (performance, competency and development plans), record the results of coaching events, set automatic reminders to revisit those they are coaching and their plans, and track progress and leverage the implementation of development plans.
To date the quality of performance and development plans has increased, more employees have personal objectives and development plans that align with organizational strategy and values, and process compliance rates continuously increase.
Most importantly, coaches report that the combination of the process, coaching, and technology has led to a dramatic increase in the quality of development activity (not merely plans).
