Developing organizational depth
We had been working with a client company as they rose to a new level of leadership in their industry. Not surprisingly, they wanted to maintain and strengthen their success. But how to do that? In what ways was the success they enjoyed at risk?The company's most senior Human Resource executive spotted an important obstacle to continued success: the senior team, while very strong, hadn't yet built "depth" into the organization and weren't clear on how to do so. The organization needed people at every level who were capable of supporting continued success.
We first worked with the HR team and senior executives to define the organization's critical competencies--those abilities and characteristics needed at every level in the organization. We did this by using the most successful executives in the organization as models, and by identifying the cultural assumptions that had driven the current success.
Next we designed a simple, user-friendly performance management system that people would actually use to manage performance. The system focused on three areas:
- specific employee goals, clearly defined in dialogue with the manager and aligned with departmental goals;
- assessment in the critical competencies; and
- development plans to support achieving the goals and strengthening the critical competencies.
Since this is a new direction for the company and its managers, we've built an approach for sharing information and building skills around the new system. This will allow both managers and employees to understand the new approach and its benefits to them, and to have the skills necessary to use the approach successfully.
Explore Proteus tools for clarifying vision and strategy