Leadership Competency Modeling and 360° Feedback:

Rationale

• Do you know what critical leadership skills and behaviors are required to deliver on your key strategic objectives?
• Does current leadership understand this and model it on a daily basis?
• Are these leaders focused on ensuring that they are building a bench of future talent that is embracing and developing these critical skills and behaviors?

In an era of increasingly limited resources it is critical that organizations get the most out of their leadership development dollars. This begins with making sure you know what leadership competencies are critical to your strategic success and that leaders are modeling the way while developing the next generation of leaders along the same path. Only then can you target these precious resources where they will have the greatest impact on business performance.

Competency Modeling coupled with a 360° Assessment and Feedback process is a highly effective and efficient method for ensuring you are accomplishing these priorities.

Process Overview

Potentia’s approach consists of a 4 step process:

• Step 1 - Competency Model Development
• Step 2 - 360° Assessment
• Step 3 - Feedback & Coaching
• Step 4 - Team Development & Planning

Step 1 - Competency Model Development: our belief about leadership competencies is that there are some number of attributes, skills and behaviors that are commonly important across most companies. At the same time each organization has some number of competencies that are unique to the business challenges they face. Therefore, we begin with a set of standardized leadership competencies that our extensive experience in this arena has taught us tend to matter the most for the vast majority of organizations. We then work in close partnership with you to tailor these, adding and subtracting as needed, to develop the set of competencies that most accurately address the business challenges you face.


Step 2 - 360° Assessment: based on the competencies developed in Step 1 we then quickly create a behaviorly oriented assessment instrument that will provide leaders with both quantitative and qualitative feedback on their performance relative to each of these competencies.


Step 3 - Feedback & Coaching: leaders request feedback from peers, direct reports, their manager, customers and complete a self assessment on the competencies identified. Feedback is gathered via a state-of-the-art web-based assessment tool. Each feedback recipient then engages in a 1:1 feedback and coaching session with a Potentia consultant who has extensive experience coaching senior executives. The session focuses on assisting the participant in interpreting the feedback results and then creating a development plan to improve their leadership effectiveness.


Step 4 - Team Development & Planning: when participants are all members of a leadership team there is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the organizational impact of this process by conducting a team offsite in conjunction with the process. The offsite team typically has four purposes:

1. To review collective themes that emerge, identify organizational strengths and make action plans to address institutional weaknesses.
2. To provide team members the opportunity to share highlights of their feedback and action plan.
3. To develop the team by means of face-to-face feedback about strengths, development needs, and action plans.
4. To identify follow-up activities to sustain individual, team and organizational performance.

Process Outcomes

The process yields benefits to individuals, the team and the organization:

• Building Stronger Leaders - through personal feedback regarding strengths and weaknesses plus coaching to identify developmental needs and action plans.
• Aligned Leadership Teams - identify team strengths and weaknesses in order to align personal development plans with team needs and create plans for developing the organization as a whole.
• Development Planning - develop employees for their current jobs, as well as, create individually tailored career development plans.
• Succession Planning - identify the development needs of high potential employees and address them in a systematic fashion.
• Training Needs Assessment - focus training and development on “high value” initiatives which address the strengthening of key organizational competencies.
• Performance Management - use competencies to drive individual employee performance planning.
• Recruiting - identify competency requirements for key jobs and target recruiting activities at candidates demonstrating desired competencies.

For further information about Potentia’s approach to Competency Modeling and 360° Feedback, or to talk to someone about implementing this process in your organization, please contact us.