Where do your leaders need most support?

A common thread often found in organisations is where managers and leaders have been promoted after demonstrating skill and success in operational roles. Unfortunately, many then appear to struggle to get to grips with the new role, and seem to lack some of the necessary skills and competencies required to make the step to becoming a successful leader for their teams.

The behaviours and resulting ramifications can often be seen and felt in the day to day workplace. Despite this, it can be difficult to pinpoint where to focus to help these people to develop more effective behaviours and strategies to improve these skills and bring better success in their role.

What could that focus look like?

This is a group overview of 40 managers, who have been objectively measured against 10 Leadership competencies.

If you were to look at the 9 areas of leadership competency in the graph below… which areas in particular would you say need some focus?

If you just look at the red areas then ‘Impact and Influence‘, ‘Leading People‘ and ‘Communication‘, in the first instance, perhaps? And then maybe ‘Achievement Orientation‘ and ‘Resilience and Perseverance‘. There doesn’t really seem to be any issues with ‘Problem Solving‘ skills or ‘Learning Agility‘. There’s a lot that could be improved across the amber areas as well to bring those skills up.

What could that look like and feel like in this organisation?

Perhaps a group of managers who are great at resolving issues, fighting fires, and taking learnings from experiences, success and mistakes and applying it to new situations.

However, perhaps some of them may not be so great at taking the lead in achieving the company’s mission and objectives, influencing and engaging their teams to contribute towards the company’s goals or communicating effectively with their teams to let them know what is expected of them.

Maybe a group of managers where some may have been promoted because they are good at their job – but haven’t yet been able to develop the leadership skills they need in their more strategic and influencing role.

And so if you look at the individual list view of those 40 managers below, who would you say could really benefit from some development and support to be able to better succeed in their role? 

Clearly, everyone can always benefit from development and support. In this case, it would probably be helpful to get a better understanding of what is going on with Tuan Nyugen. And it would be worth looking at what additional development would be helpful for Adela Olga, Annalisa Elba, Shelby May and Minerva Dixon to improve their leadership skills.

It’s also quite easy to see who could make up a cohort for some skills development around ‘Impact and Influence‘ (last column), or Communications skills (2nd to last column).

And maybe it is apparent which managers could be considered for a benchmarking success exercise to support succession planning and recruitment plans. leaders skills and competencies

Visualise your Group Data

This is just a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across these 10 Leadership competencies. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:

• Culture of your organisation
• Individual’s alignment with your organisation’s core values
• Individual and collective engagement factors and fulfilment levels of those engagement factors
• Collaboration and Team competencies
• Team Dynamics
• Emotional Intelligence competencies
• Remote Working competencies

How helpful would this data be for informing your people development plans, culture and engagement programmes and succession plans?

You can find out more about Organisational Analytics here. leaders skills and competencies

If you would like to discuss how Organisational Analytics can help support your business objectives and people plans please contact Pat Hutchinson: pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244

Is Your Company Brave Enough to Face the Truth?

Pat Hutchinson

Most people use data the way drunks use a lamppost: for support rather than for illumination.

– Alexis Fink, General Manager, Talent Intelligence and Analytics, Intel

There are any number of ‘talent analytics’ software offerings on the market right now.  Most offer to make the analysis of trends in already existing data such as staff turnover or absenteeism, easier to assess.  Some organisations use them to great effect, others not so much.  There are however, very few organisations offering talent analytics based on what makes people effective in the workplace.

Advanced analytics are designed to support development interventions which will generate an engaged, progressive culture that is vital to the success of any organisation.  Such a culture will not only increase productivity, it will reduce absenteeism and staff turnover.   Interventions are often seen by the C Suite as a ‘nice to have’ in the light of lack of solid evidence.  HR specialists continue to make their case for interventions but often can’t compete with their operational colleagues who can provide data and statistics to back their arguments for specific actions and therefore investment.

So what could research based on what makes people successful in the workplace do for organisations?

Employee Engagement Expectations

Engagement is a two-way process and surveys should form the foundation of progressive conversations between employer and employee especially if the aim of the survey is to keep talented employees.  This is just not possible if surveys are anonymous.  All an anonymous survey can highlight is that someone, somewhere in the organisation is not happy about something.

With advanced analytics, you can ask the right questions, and analyse real engagement factors and expectations – such as development, authority, communication, remuneration expectation – across individual, group, and organisation levels. This ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains their best talent.

Who will be Your Next Leaders?

Expensive assessment centres are universally used for identifying upcoming leaders.  They can take anything from half a day to 5 days and sometimes more to make a selection.  The cost of taking people out of the organisation, and employing specialists to run such centres as well as venue costs, hotel bills (during non-Covid times) all make this a very expensive but still relatively subjective exercise. Current norms are preventing us in many cases from running traditional Assessment Centres but that doesn’t mean you can’t still identify top talent and potential leaders accurately and effectively.

Companies who use predictive behavioural analytics to develop a framework for remote and automated online assessment can continue to screen for potential talent across areas including role-specific job success eligibility and behavioural success factors, leadership competencies, emotional Intelligence (EQ), engagement and retention factors, cultural fit aligned to organisational values, remote working compatibility and more. This means even if you can’t run a face-to-face assessment centre you can still get in-depth analysis to support the search for and identification of talent for your organisation.

If you would like to know more about how to provide analytics upon which to make strategic decisions about the development of your teams and staff contact us at info@quadrant1.com and/or visit our website at www.quadrant1.com

Remote Working Analytics

Remote Working Analytics

With improvements in workplace technology and the effects of lockdown restrictions, the number of people working remotely in the UK increased dramatically from 4.6 million in 2019 to over 20 million in 2021. This figure has settled in the last year; 30% of the UK workforce was working remotely at least once a week in 2022.

Whether remote work is new to your organisation or you’ve been doing it successfully for years, your employees have likely experienced both the benefits and the challenges of getting things done away from the office.

Harrison Assessments Remote Workforce Analytics allows you to measure and understand employees’ capacity to work remotely and how leaders need to adjust their management style to help employees succeed in a remote environment.

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Remote Work Analysis

Measure, understand and coach your employees’ ability to effectively work remotely. Includes two behavioural competencies for Remote Productivity and Remote Communication and can be combined with Behavioural Success Analysis and Engagement & Retention Analysis.

If you would like to know more please contact me at pat@quadrant1.com

Sources: ONS UK