Posts Tagged ‘Assessments’

Probably the single most damaging undertaking is the practice of judging ourselves. We judge ourselves, we project how others might judge us as well we judge others in relation to our own self-judgments. You can imagine how much energy this takes moving throughout the day.

In my previous writing I shared how you have set intentions about how your day will unfold before you’ve opened your eyes. That’s because you have set judgments about yourself, life, jobs, money … you’ve set judgments about everything and anything. These judgments take the form of assessments, assumptions, expectations, beliefs and interpretations, and before your feet hit the floor you are operating based on what you’ve already decided will be happening for the rest of the day and how that influences the rest of your life.

In your work environment, suspending judgments begins by flexing muscles that cultivate conscious choice-making regarding who you be and how you be in whatever role you play.

A client of mine, Chuck, works in the marketing department of a Fortune 100 company. At 47 years of age, he’s at a point in his career where he is rethinking what it is he is wanting to do for the next 20 years. Should he stay in corporate work and move up into a director position; leave Los Angeles and move back East to be closer to his aging parents – he carries a worry that if he doesn’t move back now he might regret it in the future; or should he go into a field that he is passionate about. He wanted a session with me in hopes that I could help him figure it out.

Chuck does a good deal of comparing – how he measures up to others around him. He begins to think he should be more like Candice who is strategic, smart, innovative and develops relationships effortlessly. He begins to slump in his chair as he describes Candice’s attributes. In many ways, Chuck is very accomplished and has had an exceptional life; however he continually carries an extraordinary list around in his head of what he should be and how he should be. He has little idea what he really wants for himself in relation to his career because every want is followed by a “Yes, but, I should be …”

Within our session, Chuck began to observe the degree to which he automatically assesses his actions by projecting an assumed reaction from his colleagues. He doesn’t really know what their judgments are, but they influence him none-the-less. He’s judging himself based on some preconceived interpretation about how he thinks he measures up or should measure up. Again, this is exhausting. And, Chuck is not alone. Millions of us are continually assessing and judging ourselves and others and we have little idea that we are doing it.

Bringing shifts and changes into business begins with you. It starts with you cultivating awareness about how you be who you be and by noticing your judgments about yourself and those with whom you share your day, be it your boss, direct reports, customers and clients. It begins with acknowledging this automatic response and then getting curious about where those judgments and interpretations come from. That curiosity will begin to allow you to expand your awareness and wonder how you came to choose what has become so automatic.

What’s the Alternative to Judging?

We will always judge, compare, assess and interpret. These are essential and valuable tools in distinguishing and discerning what works for us and what doesn’t work for us. However, because they are used primarily unconsciously they create more harm than healing. We don’t have to stop judging, but it may be helpful to suspend it long enough to notice the value that judging brings.

If you are wanting to bring change into the workplace, or if you just want to cultivate awareness in yourself, what is it that you want to practice in relation to judging, expecting, interpreting and assuming?

Notice when you judge something as right, wrong, good or bad; notice where something or someone is too slow, too fast, not enough or too much and needs to change. This also goes for noting these thoughts about you. The object of this practice is just to notice. You’ll notice too that you’ll begin to judge yourself and what you notice, saying “yes, but, I am right,  or they are wrong.” What’s the point?

What does judging and assessing as a practice do for you? How does this empower you? Does it allow you to create change in relation to yourself and your environment? Does it allow you to feel righteous and better than, and if so, how does this impact on the reality you are wanting to create for yourself?

Coming back to Chuck for a moment: Chuck recognized that he was afraid of being judged and through his continuous judgment of his work environment he always played it safe, staying within what he assessed as appropriate. And up until our session he hadn’t realized that this practice of judging and assessing is what keeps him from getting promoted to a more senior position, where he would have to lead in ways that would be innovative and may be perceived as risky. He is now at a choice-point where he can choose with awareness, what he wants and what he is willing to practice to support that outcome.

The automatic thinking that we do always consists of judgments. Just bringing awareness to our judgments allows us to be curious about just how true they really are. This allows us to choose differently if it serves us to do so. Enjoy the exploration!

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Tagged as: assertions, Assessments, career, Dr. Rosie Kuhn, failure, Judgement, Judgment, Leadership, management, promotion, Spirituality in Business, success

Today’s global market requires a greater level of corporate agility than ever before. The financial, economic, environmental, regulatory and business climates are constantly changing. Competition is getting fiercer. How do you ensure your organization has the bench strength it needs to compete and succeed, both today and tomorrow?

Identify and Define the Competencies that are Critical to Organizational Success

Start by asking: What differentiates your organization? Is it customer service, product excellence, technical expertise, market awareness or value-based selling? It’s important for every organization to know and understand what sets it apart.

Once you’ve identified your differentiators, take a close look at the underlying competencies, values or behaviors.

This requires more than just identifying “Customer Service” or “Communication” or “Teamwork” as your corporate competencies. You’ll need to identify the competencies required for success in leadership roles, as well as in each area of your organization. And you should identify the skills that are needed today, and those that will be needed tomorrow.

Then take it a step further. You need to define what each of these competencies means to your organization. What does demonstration at the various levels look like? Are there examples or scenarios you can describe to help better define each competency? What learning activities or work experiences can help develop each of them? If you use generic competencies and generic descriptions, you’ll get generic results. For competencies to be true differentiators, you need to “customize” them to articulate your unique corporate values.

Systematically Assess and Develop those Competencies in your Employees

As products and services become more and more rapidly commoditized, organizations need to understand that their only true sustainable competitive advantage is their people. So your people had better embody the competencies that support your success.

To entrench these differentiating competencies in your workforce, you need to regularly assess each employee’s demonstration of organizational and job specific competencies. Where performance gaps are identified, you need to ensure that development plans are put in place. You should also follow up to ensure the development activities are actually effective in improving performance. If they’re not, you’ll need to identify new learning activities that will.

This is where all the hard work you did in identifying and defining competencies really pays off. If you’ve been thorough, you’ll have clear definitions of each competency. You can use these definitions to communicate organizational priorities and values to your employees. You can also use them to help you identify or create learning activities that truly help develop these competencies in your workforce.

Regular competency assessments and development activities will also give you a view of how your organization is performing overall, and identify performance or skill gaps in departments, divisions, or the entire organization. Using the data from your assessments, and analyzing it in this way will give you key insights into your bench strength.

Identify and Retain High Potential Employees

While you want to develop the competencies that are your differentiators in all your employees, there will always be a smaller body of employees who excel at them. Your organization will also have employees who show potential for assuming broader roles or more responsibility. These are your high potential employees.

It’s vital that you identify these high potential employees. If they’re valuable to you, they’re likely also valuable to your competitors and to companies in other industries. Consider using your performance appraisal process or a separate talent assessment process to identify your high potential employees and assess their risk of leaving.

Once you know who your high potential employees are, you’ll want to take measures to ensure you retain them. Typical retention tactics include compensation and training/development opportunities. But since everyone is unique in what they value, and in what motivates them, you should consider a more personalized approach.

You should also pay careful attention to grooming successors for your high potential employees. Developing bench strength is about developing pools or groups of employees, not just individuals.

Conclusion

Identifying your core, differentiating competencies, and then developing them in your entire workforce, but especially in your high potential employees helps to ensure your organization has the bench strength it needs to compete and succeed.

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Tagged as: Assessments, Business Strategy, employee retention, management, Sean Conrad, Talent management

During the past few years, it has been increasingly obvious that the whole point of writing a book is not to sell books, but to build long-term and profitable reader relationships.

Yes, there are authors who support themselves with six figure advances and huge royalties, but there are also those who buy one lottery ticket and win millions of dollars.

In either case, you can’t count on favorable outcomes. The odds are too much against you.

A much better strategy, with a much higher probability of success, is to consider your book the core of your long-term self (or business) marketing plan. In this scenario, your book becomes the hub of a relationship-building strategy that begins long before your book appears and continues for years afterward.

Building “hooks” in your book

Long-term success requires inserting “hooks” into your book intended to drive readers to your website. This important marketing and profit task deserves your attention as soon as possible. There are two reasons why:

1. While you’re planning your book, you need to select the type of relationship-building bonus content you’re going to offer readers and how you’re going to promote the bonus in your book.
2. While writing your book, you need to be setting up, or delegating and supervising, the set-up of the online support structure needed to distribute your book’s bonus contents, i.e., autoresponders, landing pages, etc.

The above are too important, and too complex, to be left to the last minute.

Using your book to drive website traffic

Let’s start with the basic premise; readers who buy your book are your best source of coaching, consulting, and speaking profits.

If someone invests $20, or more, in a copy of your book, they’re raising their hand and indicating that they’re interested in what you have to say. Their purchase is proof they have problems they want to solve, or goals they want to achieve.

More important, by spending their hard-earned money on your book, they’re indicating that they think you’re the one to help them; you’re the obvious expert they trust, and they want to know more!

Your job at this point is to provide opportunities to learn more about you and the services you provide, information that shouldn’t appear too prominently in your book! No one wants to pay $20 to be advertised to- -save the infomercials for late-night television!

Registration and bonus content

Your big challenge, as you plan and write your book, is to come up with a way to subtly drive readers to your website.

Once readers of your book are at your website, you can introduce them to your marketing funnel; you can offer them access to bonus content in exchange for signing-up for your e-mail newsletter. In addition, once they’re at your website, you can describe additional ways you can help them solve their problems and achieve their goals.

As described in my Streetwise Guide to Relationship Marketing on the Internet, there are several categories of bonus content you can share with readers of your book:

1. Assessments. Assessments are worksheets or interactive forms that help readers self-assess their understanding of your book, or evaluate the areas of their business where change is needed, such as my Making the most of Microsoft Word assessment.
2. Checklists. Checklists, are similar to assessments in that they can either be downloadable and printed or filled-out online. Checklists help readers monitor their progress as they complete tasks described in your book.
3. Deeper content. Ideas that are only introduced can be converted into detailed case studies and, often, step-by-step procedurals that will help your readers put your ideas to work.
4. Excess content. Often, working with your editor, you’ll discover that there is no room for some of your best ideas. Instead of discarding them, use them as downloadable bonus content to thank your readers for buying your book.
5. Pass-along content. One of the best ways to promote your book to new prospective book buyers (and clients) is to provide readers with information that they can pass along to their friends and co-workers.
6. Specialized content. As an alternative to going deeper, i.e., great detail, you can adapt the ideas in your book for different vertical markets, such as different occupations or industries. You can also adapt your book’s content into beginner’s guides or offer advice for more advanced readers.
7. Updated content. New ideas and examples are certain to appear the day after approval of the final proof of your book. Although you can, and should, use your blog to share new content, often you can use it as reader rewards.
8. Worksheets. The best worksheets are those that help readers overcome inertia and avoid procrastination by immediately starting to implement the lessons described in your book. My sample Book Proposal Planner is an example of an online worksheet.

You can distribute the above bonus content ideas in a variety of formats; Adobe Acrobat PDF’s, password-protected pages, streaming audio or video, or- -if appropriate- -as mailed reports or CDs and DVDs.

How do you limit bonus content to legitimate readers?

Many authors only share their book’s bonus content with readers who register their name and e-mail addresses. Others limit distribution to readers who enter a password that appears in a specific location of their book, i.e., The second word at the top of Page 138.

These limiting strategies can be self-defeating and project an inappropriate image. The goal of writing a book is to build lasting and profitable relationships with readers, not test their persistence.

One of the techniques I used with my Relationship Marketing book, above, was to offer downloadable PDF’s of each of the worksheets in my book, and include the URL for the worksheets on the pages of the book referring, or displaying, each worksheet.

Getting a head start

As you can see, authors who only begin to think about marketing their book after it’s been published are at a significant disadvantage compared to those who address reader relationship building while planning and writing their book. Don’t make the mistake of failing to have a plan for converting readers into clients by driving them to your website as they read your book

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Tagged as: active garage, Assessments, author's journey, authors, building relationships, business books, checklists, Content, promote, publishedandprofitable, readers, roger c parker, roger parker, Worksheets, write, Writing for Business

I am sure we have all experienced how when we meet someone for the first time we draw a gut feeling about someone – the saying goes “first impressions count!” What many people don’t realize is how this impression affects their decision making.

Let’s say we go in to buy a car at a dealership, the smooth looking salesman walks over and introduces himself and immediately gets down to business of asking pointed questions so that he can make the quick kill sale. Your immediate reaction is to draw a negative impression about this individual and you prepare yourself for the situation ahead of prying questions and being cornered into signing on the dotted line! Our muscles tense, our bullshit meter goes into the red and we physically begin shutting down. We would challenge everything they claim and scrutinize every detail of the paperwork presented to us – if we even got any further with the individual.

What then if the same salesman cracked a joke about his approach saying he was only joking, just wanted to see our reaction and then graciously introduced himself and offered his help in an open and friendly manner. Provided we see the funny side of the situation we would have our bodies relax, we might then engage in conversation and move forward in working with the salesman. What we will find is that as the salesman addresses us by name and provides references we trust or believe we may then begin to like interacting with the salesperson.

Are we losing our minds? Here are the same two people coming together for the same reason under the same situation and yet the situation changed so much in the way we wanted to interact. I am sure most people can associate to a similar situation in their lives if not often.

Now let’s look at the results of these two situations –later when the buyer asks does the car have climate control? The sales man replies and says “yes, it has air conditioning”. To the piqued buyer at the initial reaction, they will inquire further – does it automatically adjust and how many zones does it have? The salesman can then answer that “no that is only available on the next model up costing $X more”. To the buyer when they had warmed to the salesman and were now trusting of the salesman, they will accept the response and likely ask another question, but in their mind they will have come to the conclusion that they have an electronic climate control with the features they envision.

This is not about the stereotypical auto salesman or placing in doubt the ethical nature of the sale – the issue is that the buyer comes to believe that they are told by the salesperson that they have climate control when the salesman answered “air conditioning”.

I see this happening in many areas of business. For me it shows up often on projects where people build up their own interpretation of what the future situation will be based on their wants and desires – this can be a shock when they confront reality and realize that the situation they were expecting was based on assessments they drew, from their own answers.

Life is too short not to make gut decisions – so where decisions matter to you, make sure you have a good assessment for granting someone your trust, then ask the questions you need to make the right assessment.

Tagged as: active garage, Assessments, buying, interpretations, managing, sales

Every day I hear the same thing “I am so busy, that I should /could /didn’t/ nearly…”. Well maybe it is time to think about what it is to be busy? It sure doesn’t sound like the recipe for success?

Every day we go to work with tasks to complete, over and above that we get emails, have to answer telephone calls and interact with colleagues – and those never have any task requests?? So we end up being incredibly busy throughout the day juggling our tasks to get through as many as we can. Sound familiar?

Busy by definition is to remain occupied? “Remaining occupied”, by itself alone, doesn’t sound like it is going to produce extraordinary results, does it?

So, what is it that produces extraordinary results? It is “Purposeful Action“.

Purposeful Action:

1. Produces Results. Results that are well thought of. Results that directly address real concerns.

2. Produces careers. Not just “Busy Work”, but Careers and Careers last a lifetime.

3. Produces Accomplishments. Accomplishments produce powerful identities. Powerful identities produce trust. Trust works like an invisible force that helps your customers choose your offers over your competitors.

4. Is Strategic. It takes care of concerns over a long-term, not just the short-term.

5. Produces Peace of mind. Busyness produces panic. Clearly, peace of mind is a better place to be than a perpetual state of panic.

Now apply this to the Projects you invent… or the project that is your life. Projects are constituted to enact change to move from one situation to another, which is more favorable. There is no guarantee that being busy every day will produce results. However, what is guaranteed is that it will surely produce fatigue. To produce effective change you need to take purposeful action and that is constituted with tasks that are thoughtfully designed, planned and executed.

To act is to produce effective action. To effect positive outcomes for our lives we need to stop Busying and start Acting. Purposefully. Start with an action plan for your life. Be purposeful when you do that… and you’ll see the results!

Tagged as: Accomplishment, Action, active garage, Assessments, Busy, Busying, Busyness, careers, design, Fatigue, Guy Ralfe, http://activegarage.com, Identity, Panic, Peace, planning, purpose, Purposeful, Purposeful Action, Trust