DDI’s Talent Management Intelligence

Succession Management: Treatment for Your Succession Depression

This is the third in a series of blogs from DDI associates presenting at the 26th annual SIOP Conference.

By Matt Paese, Ph.D.

Ever feel like you’re being asked to do the impossible? Join the club. Take 2 minutes and look around to count the number of programs, initiatives, institutions, and other entities, public or private, that are being required to achieve ever-expanding goals while simultaneously facing dramatic reductions in resources. In 2 minutes you’ll likely come up with plenty of examples  down the street in your neighborhood, and down the hall in your office. Also likely is the depression that will set in between minutes 3 and 4.

If one of those “down the hall in your office” examples is your Succession Management system, your misery is in good company.  Next month we’ll be releasing DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast, a global survey of over 14,000 leaders who have shared their knowledge and experience about leadership issues across the waterfront. In the study, Succession Management stands out as a major crisis area.  Bench strength is dismally low, and Succession Management system effectiveness is inadequate. This just scratches the surface, but it’s abundantly clear that many organizations are desperate to find better ways to improve their bench strength and prepare more leaders to take on greater responsibility.

But crises often reveal that necessity is, in fact, the mother of invention, and this week I’ll be part of a  session that will illustrate just that.  Tomorrow at the Society for I/O Psychology’s annual conference in Chicago, I’ll be joining four talented and highly experienced professionals on  a panel looking into contemporary challenges and solutions in Succession Management. More specifically, we’ll be talking about our collective experiences and telling stories of how we’ve seen organizations  increase the health of their Succession Management systems, within the constraints of fewer resources and heightened demands.

My co-panelists will be:

• Laura Heft and Lisa Roberts from Organization Development at Edward Jones
• Scott Mannis, SVP HR from Kellwood Company
• Vicki Tardino, from Organization Effectiveness and Talent Management at Maritz

This group brings a wealth of experience and a tremendous sense of practicality to a field that needs it badly.  We’ll be discussing Succession Management from 4 angles, and telling stories of how organizations have been successful at:

• Aligning to the business situation your organization is currently facing
• Establishing consistency in the execution of the system (even when the world around you won’t stay consistent)
• Building transparency and effective communication into the system
• Creating accountabilities that result in actual, measurable progress in building bench strength

I’m privileged to be joining these talented professionals, and I know our session will yield many useful insights. If you’re in Chicago for SIOP, join us on Friday afternoon.  If you won’t be there, watch here for a summary of key insights after our session. 

Skip the expensive therapy sessions.  Cure your Succession Depression with some powerful stories of success by a panel of people who have made it happen.

Matt Paese, Ph.D., is the Vice President of Executive Solutions for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

You can hear Matt at the SIOP Conference at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, April 15, 2011 on "Improve Succession Management "Health": Diagnosis and Practical Remedies."

With Tests, Measuring Better Beats Looking Better…But Why Choose?

This is the second of a series of blogs from DDI associates presenting at the 26th annual SIOP Conference.

By Evan Sinar, Ph.D.

Employment tests have been used to drive objective, efficient and accurate hiring decisions for decades.  Testing’s relationship with technology is newer and still evolving, however. Technology is changing the way tests are administered while the use of online testing greatly increases the reach and convenience of these tools for companies and their candidates. 

These are important benefits, but it’s not enough: technology can and should do more for employment testing and can dramatically advance testing in two major ways – Looking Better and Measuring Better. Looking Better means test appearance – does technology enable items that are more realistic? More interactive? Measuring Better means test effectiveness – does technology generate more information about an applicant’s skills? Can the test better predict what they’ll excel in and struggle in if hired? 

Obviously, both of these are worthwhile goals – but they can conflict. Better measurement can involve more established or time-consuming item types that don’t incorporate interactivity, graphics, or other technological advancements. On the other hand, exclusively focusing on “looks” can pair, for example, a highly-realistic video with a low-value radio button to indicate a response – neglecting measurement for the sake of appearances. 

To avoid these problems, measurement-focused test design is the key – my recommendation is to start with the measurement targets in mind before building or buying a test. As one example of how to think about this topic, there’s a great site (http://atc21s.org) describing a partnership between a number of companies and educational institutions to define “21^st Century Skills” bridging education and the workplace, and what it takes to measure them using technology-enhanced tests and assessments.

Defining the measurement targets may also mean finding the gaps in existing tests and designing new technology-based measures to fill them. 

None of this precludes tests Looking Better – in fact, designing items around known and focused measurement targets is one of the best ways to get creative when designing interactive items with high visual appeal. But tests that effectively use technology for appearances only will be perpetually limited and will squander their potential. (Although it’s tempting to put appearances first and fill in the measurement later, avoid this direction.)

Technology can provide enormous advantages for Measuring Better – make absolutely sure it’s used this way first; once this is done and done well, Looking Better comes surprisingly naturally.   

Evan Sinar, Ph.D., is the Team Leader of the Assessment Technology Group for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

You can hear Evan at the SIOP Conference at 2 p.m. on Thursday, April 14, 2011 on "Advancing the Research Behind Technological Innovations in Assessment."

"The Plural of Anecdote is Data"

This is the first of a series of blogs from DDI associates presenting at the 26th annual SIOP Conference.

By Jazmine Boatman, Ph.D.

As a data-driven person, I was drawn to this quote when my husband first said it one day.  After some late-night googling, I found out that no one knows exactly where this quote came from, who said it, or what context it was meant to be interpreted—but people find it compelling enough to take a stand despite that.  If you type the quote into Google, it gets 9,000 hits.  But if you type in its inverse “The plural of anecdote is NOT data”, it gets 213,000 hits.  This provides insight about how people fundamentally feel about anecdotal information.  

Yet when it comes to leadership development, that’s all most organizations collect.  Bounds of research (Kirkpatrick, Bersin, Patel, the list goes on and on) shows that organizations are really only scratching the surface in terms of gathering data about their programs.  In terms of Kirkpatrick’s four famous levels of measurement, the majority is gathering anecdotal reaction data about their programs, but fewer organizations are measuring if leaders actually learned new things in their programs.  Even fewer are measuring if the programs led to improvements in leadership behaviors, and the percent that are measuring the business results of their programs can be as low as single digits.  These more substantive measurements, however, are the ones that answer the more critical questions about leadership development.

If there was little room for improvement in the area of leadership development maybe this wouldn’t be problematic.  But DDI’s latest Global Leadership Forecast surveying over 12,000 leaders around the world discovered that only 1 in 3 leaders rate their organization’s development programs as effective. With so few leaders getting the development they need: Is the plural of anecdote data?  Is gathering multiple pieces of anecdotal evidence going to give organizations the data they need to make their programs more effective and successful? 

In this case, I have to admit that I fall in the “The plural of anecdote is NOT data.”  As a psychologist, I define the purpose of data not simply to gather information and put it on a shelf; but I think the true value of data lies in its ability to answer critical questions.  Even a large stack of anecdotal information won’t answer the question: What do organizations need to do to improve leadership development efforts?  And that is the question that matters; that is the data that needs to be collected.  I hope that our discussion at SIOP gives organizations ideas about how to start collecting the data they need to start making something as critical as leadership development more effective in their organizations.

Jazmine Boatman, Ph.D., is the Manager for DDI's Center for Applied Behavioral Research.

You can hear Jazmine at the SIOP Conference at noon on Saturday, April 16, 2011 on "Anecdotal Schmanectodal: Applying Metrics to Leadership Development."