The objective of one of our first conversations with you is to get a more detailed understanding of your goals and expectations as a client and gain additional background information. In the framework of the assignment clarification we define which specific tasks we are going to focus on.
A thorough clarification is a necessary prerequisite for us in order to work successfully and goal-oriented according to your desires. The affected target groups are usually included in the assignment clarification through subsequent interviews.
Questions included in an assignment clarification are typically as follows:
Who wants a change? What is the reason? Exactly what changes are desired? How are you going to measure your success? Which results would you definitely like to avoid? What undesired changes and what kind of existing "risks and side effects" should be obviated? Which existing strengths, advantages, and special qualities must not be jeopardized? What attempts have already been made to solve the problem? What has been impeding a solution thus far?
A commitment defines the extent to which a person identifies with a particular organization or task. Three additional characteristics of a commitment are listed below:
"Without dreams, visions atrophy, without visions, there are no goals, without goals, one gives up before even beginning."
W. Pechtl
Defining what an enterprise is about, what it and its products stand for, and what contribution it makes to society sheds light on some important questions. Answering those questions adds tremendous meaning to the roles of management and staff and has the capacity to release tremendous energy as well as form various dynamics. Two things are crucial to maintaining a high level of credibility in this process: More important than a fancy brochure is an open and honest discussion about the desired and current status of the company and the obvious consequences that result from that discussion.
A business specific competence model consists of different competence profiles and describes what is expected of all staff belonging to a particular "job-family". It refers to the individual objectives of their position, their core tasks and the competencies that derive from these aspects.
Competency can be described as the sum of everything a person knows, does, and desires. Thus, competency describes the knowledge, abilities, skills, and attitudes that a person brings to her assignment.
The individual objective results from the operationalized goals of the enterprise within the respective responsibilities and the direction of the position with regards to that goal.
The definition of core tasks results from the following questions: What needs to be done in order to fully accomplish the individual objective? Which competencies are needed to accomplish the core tasks well?
Competence profiles make expectations known and transparent within the corporate environment. They serve as a basis for all kinds of personnel development concepts, in recruiting as well as in training, and the assessment of staff and management.
Context (Latin con-textus) describes interrelation/connection or the environment. In business, context relates to the environment in which the company operates—for example, the market situation, the industry sector, the country, the laws in force. The company itself also provides a context for its employees. Elements of this context are the personnel situation, defined and undefined internal regulations, leadership style, assessment tools, and career paths.
Core Tasks – Compare Competence Profile
Experiential learning methods are designed to provide intensive and sustainable learning during a training seminar or workshop. They frequently take the edge off critical or difficult situations. They contain the possibility to transfer real everyday work-related problems to a different environment. Learning becomes sustainable when it affects students, when they learn actively and without stress and get the chance to co-create the learning process. Compare also – Learning Processes
"The things we truly know are not the things we heard about or read about, but rather the things we lived, experienced, and felt."
C.Woodwards
Feedback Systems – Compare Target Agreement and Feedback Systems
A hypothesis is a preliminary assumption with regards to an issue. A hypothesis becomes valuable if it stimulates and contains new information or if it makes order/structure apparent. Change processes are not designed to find the one and only, "right" hypothesis but to maintain an attitude of openness to a variety of perspectives and possibilities. Hypotheses which are not merely common descriptions often contain new and surprising realizations.
Individual Objective – Compare Competence Profile
Systematic initial training for beginners and returnees, as well as after a restructuring process, provides security and is a prerequisite for satisfaction in the workplace. A tool for the systematic initial training is the initial training scheme. It defines the most important requirements:
The term intervention is derived from the Latin word »inter-venire« which means "to intervene, (to step in between), to interfere, to interrupt, to interpose, to mediate."
Interventions are specific remarks or actions on the part of the consultant that are aimed at bringing the client (the company, the department, the team, the coachee) closer to her goal. In conjunction with a change process, interventions also include all measures (training seminars, workshops, statements of the board, processes, assessment tools, etc.) that are being taken in order to reach the goal.
The reasons for a large group event can be manifold: You would like to reach many participants at once; you would like to make sure that each person concerned acquires the same amount of information at the same time; you are interested in creating a group or team experience; you feel it is important to make certain features of the corporate culture transparent to everybody.
Particularly in the framework of change processes the large group event is an important element in the course of a process. However, there are risks involved: How do you direct a very large group? What happens if the event does not unfold according to plan? How do you make sure a dialogue and exchange take place? How do you prevent the event from getting out of hand?
In our view, the success of such an event depends on very thorough preparation and an experienced facilitator of large groups, as well as compliance to the following*:
*Martin Leith, Center for Large Group Intervention
Learning is always a process and requires a certain amount of time.
We believe that a learning process includes all methods that enable the organization and individuals to learn. After the completion of a learning process the learning person should be in a position to think, speak, or act in a way they were not capable of prior to the learning process. If one comprehends learning as a process in which the learning individual adjusts to his environment, it becomes understandable that training alone does not normally suffice to create sustainable change. Additional supportive measures which can ensure a transfer of knowledge and motivate employees to actually put the new behaviour into action are required (e.g. feedback systems and incentives). Compare also – Experiential Learning Methods
The classical management tools are information, target agreements, delegation, control, feedback, and staff development.
The personnel development unit can make uniform, formalized methods or tools available to management that will support them in their leadership tasks. Some of those methods are, for instance, uniform assessment criteria, competence profiles (on which formalized feedback or assessment interviews are based), target agreements and benefit schemes, career paths, and/or a process and criteria for coaching (e.g. the manager monitors the staff member during a sales pitch and gives her feedback afterwards – we call this "side by side").
"One image can express more than 1,000 words," or as Niklas Luhmann writes, "The metaphor is the key to coping with complexity."
A metaphor is a story or image the consultant uses to support a process.
Metaphors are efficacious since they neither refer to the listener directly, nor do they address or describe his respective problems directly. It is up to the listener to either identify with the characters, problems, events, developments, and solutions of the story or to distance herself from them. That is why telling a story does not cause any resistance within the listener. Stories and images are models. They offer interpretations without pinning the listener down to them. She can draw her own conclusions. The realizations that result from a metaphor are results of the listener’s own search and not preconceived notions that are forced upon him.
What we also associate with images or descriptions are emotions, memories, or individual images that by far exceed what is being said or read. In the framework of working with groups and other forms of communication these elements are stronger than words, are more easily remembered, and affect our level of emotionally-driven actions and attitudes.
"You cannot simply prescribe motivation. You need to offer people tools, so they can make the best of themselves."
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple
Motivators are factors that promote satisfaction in the workplace. Herzberg (survey by Herzberg from the 1960’s, as quoted in Harvard Business Manager, April 2003) defines the following general motivators:
A study of 2005 by the Corporate Leadership Council of 2005* verified that the following factors had an effect on the motivation and commitment of employees:
*Corporate Executive Board, 2005, Managing for High Performance and Retention
After organizational consultant Harrison Owen had observed that participants of conferences often seemed more exhilarated by conversations they had during breaks than by the conference itself, he began to examine the break process and developed an open type of conference with the "coffee break" as its central element.
The so called open space enables up to 750 people at a time to deal with complex issues and simultaneously maintain a maximum level of self-organization. In the classical open space conference the participants themselves determine what items they would like on the agenda. Each person takes full responsibility for where and when they will participate during the conference. The only guideline of an open space conference is a general topic that is up for discussion over a three-day period. The participants need to feel that the topic is important and that they can only solve it as a group. It, furthermore, needs to be broad enough to provide room for ideas and creativity. Appropriate topics would be, for instance, the future of the company, the improvement of service quality, or cooperation between departments.
Patterns are repetitive forms of behaviour, repetitive procedures, or other conspicuous kinds of repetition that seem to imply a system inherent regularity.
A pragmatic definition of the term potential would be "something that is present but is not yet being used." It, thus, denotes the (concrete) possibility of "being able to do something" that, in the business context, is not yet being demanded or executed. By expanding responsibilities, this potential can unfold. In order to shape, develop, and utilize potential purposefully, it needs to be assessed.
This is what we call a potential analysis: With a team of managers and representatives from the human resources department and the personnel development we define criteria for assessing the potential of staff, e.g. for future leadership tasks. A superior initially forms assumptions about the potential of one of her staff members according to his everyday work routine. These assumptions are later evaluated through means of a standardized process.
The interview process aims at examining a particular issue from different perspectives. In addition to management, staff, colleagues, and possibly customers are interviewed with regards to a particular situation or circumstance. The results of the interviews are then categorized and, through means of hypotheses, serve as a starting point for the design of a process or event.
Our methodology is usually based on half-standardized interviews, which means we use a list of questions as a basis for the interviews. The interview itself contains features of a regular conversation. Wherever it seems applicable, we ask additional questions. If we do not understand what the interviewee means, or if the meaning of an answer is ambiguous, we explore the subject again. That is the great advantage of half-standardized interviews in comparison to fully standardized questionnaires: The thoughts somebody has when answering standardized questions remain unrecorded in the analysis. Interviews, however, illuminate the reasons for a subjective point of view and allow a more detailed explanation as to how somebody experiences a given situation or problem.
Strategic Personnel Development
Strategic personnel development consists of coherent processes that contribute to the development of the entire company with regards to its strategic orientation.
Strategic personnel development ensures that the correct amount of appropriate qualifications are available and in the right place for the business models of tomorrow.
This tool enables us to analyse single projects and to discover concrete suggestions for optimization. The SWOT-Analysis contains the possibility to visualize one’s own potential as well as the external general conditions for a decision-making process.
The SWOT-Analysis refers to
Thus, the SWOT-Analysis is a model that compares the internal factors (S-W) of a business or organization against the external circumstances (O-T) in order to deduce a strategy.
Internal factors are capabilities and resources such as the qualification of staff, product quality, financial resources, market position, existing supplier networks, and the company’s image. External factors are determined by changes in the market, on which the company has no influence: legal frameworks and ecological requirements, new technologies and products, and volatile consumption patterns.
Target Agreement and Feedback Systems
"As soon as the mind is set on a goal, possibilities abound."
J.W. Goethe
A target agreement transforms the strategic objectives of the entire company into objectives of each single organizational unit and, ultimately, of each employee. The name target agreement arises from the fact that in a conversation both the supervisor and staff member discuss the target and come to an agreement. The target agreement consists of two elements, the target and the measures that are necessary to take in order to meet it. Surveys have proven that targets that are most motivating and beneficial to enhancing satisfaction in the workplace are targets that are not only challenging and achievable but also those that contain enough flexibility to give staff members room for their own decisions.
Every regular feedback process that has been implemented within a company is called a feedback system. The most known is surely the 360° feedback process, during which a manager receives feedback from all sides (360°)—his superior, colleagues, staff, and customers. This is usually done via a structured and anonymous online process. The quality of such a process highly depends on the description of the criteria that determine how feedback is given and the higher-ranking process in which the feedback procedure is embedded. The feedback received often raises more questions than answers and, thus, requires a framework within which it can operate so these questions can be clarified. Further feedback systems are satisfaction surveys and open or half-open facilitated feedback circles.
A team rally is an effective method of team development. Two teams with different tasks are sent through open country. Both teams depend on each other for reaching their destination, since only team A knows team B’s directions and vice versa. Thus, the two teams not only need to find strategies and solutions for themselves but also need to support each other.
Each team receives an array of tasks. We usually use a mixture of work related questions (e.g. What does a particular aspect of the company’s vision mean for our department? How can we improve our customer orientation?) and team dynamic tasks (e.g. forming a square out of a rope while blindfolded). Moving through the country together, as well as the experiential education features of the event itself, facilitates communication, enables the participants to shift their approach, and promotes a formal and informal exchange between the participants.
We then reflect on the resulting communication and self-organization processes from different angles:
Common agreements and measures for the overall process are then created and implemented.