Our clients contact us asking for guidance when they wish to implement leadership development programs. There are usually two needs they have identified: Helping senior management become more effective at leading the organization and becoming more strategic, and Helping front line supervisors become more adept at managing their teams and learning basic management skills to become more effective. Regardless of what the need is, we want to learn some information from the client to help guide them to select the best topics and also ensure there is a system in place to reinforce the learning and integrate it into the culture. Some of the things we ask the client are: What are your goals? More concretely, what do you envision the results to look like? You should have some idea of what you want to achieve. We recommend you take the time to write your goals down and what they will look like. How do you know what training gaps there are? How have they manifested themselves in how people manage or lead? What has the effect been on employees? Identifying the difference between long-standing issues and recent critical events will ensure you are addressing root causes and not merely symptoms. How open is the team to learning? Are they willing to change their approach, even if it is difficult? Work may be needed to ensure people are primed to learn. Do the actions of the leadership team model the behaviors you want to see in the supervisors? Do they walk the walk? Without alignment between what leadership says and how they behave the program will fail. What systems are in place to hold people accountable and make changes? Is there a robust performance management and coaching system in place? Training is used to set expectations. There has to be a system in place to measure and communicate results. Training and development programs can be expensive to implement. Determining your goals and defining the outcomes before you embark on working with a partner or sending people to training is critical to ensure you get the best return on investment. Making sure the means to measure behavior change is also needed to determine success or failure. Also remember that training...
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OA was privileged to present its workshop Employee Compensation Basics at the Northern Ohio Chapter of IPMA-HR Spring Conference. The International Public Management Association for Human Resources [IPMA-HR] is the leading public sector human resource organization in the world. Their mission is to enhance public sector performance by providing human resource leadership, advocacy, professional development, and a community of HR professionals for the sharing of resources and ideas. The conference was held at the Akron-Summit County Public Library Main Branch on May 15, 2019. This annual conference brings together public sector Human Resources professionals to learn current trends and best practices in an environment that fosters collaboration and networking. We appreciate the opportunity to be part of the program and to be a sponsor. We are looking forward to next year’s conference. If you would like to know more about our workshops, or have other Human Resources consulting needs, contact us and check out our blog for more helpful...
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Organizational Architecture has been privileged to work with The ALICE Training Institute since 2017 as their Human Resources partner. As we have gotten to know and work with them, we wanted to help get their message out to our other clients who may want to learn more about their training programs and how they can help your employees and customers stay safe. While any of our clients could benefit from this training, organizations that are open and accessible to the public in the course of their business may want to make this training a priority. Organizations such as: Public libraries Community and senior centers Banks and financial institutions Municipal facilities Schools Retail establishments Office buildings Manufacturing facilities The mission of ALICE Training Institute is to SAVE MORE LIVES. Their program empowers individuals to participate in their own survival using proactive options-based strategies in the face of violence. These life lessons are critical to helping ensure people have an effective response to active shooter situations. Most organizations could benefit from their training. If you would like to learn more, contact us and we can connect you with their Program Management team to get your training...
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Most organizations reach a point where they need to get really specific about what traits make leaders successful in their organization. Sometimes organizations get lucky and promote the right people from staff positions into supervisory roles and these people are successful leaders. But many times, the wrong person gets promoted, and this is because they focus more on the person’s success in their current role and less on what the expected behaviors are for leaders and whether this person has demonstrated their ability to exercise them. This month’s success story shares our recent work with a company that came to that conclusion. Aim Transportation Solutions is the largest, privately owned truck leasing company in North America. Aim Leasing Company was founded in 1982 as an affiliate of McNicholas Transportation who was, at that time, the largest steel hauler east of the Mississippi. Their initial goal was to purchase and maintain equipment for companies that didn’t have internal logistics capabilities. Since then, they have achieved steady growth and are now considered the largest, privately owned truck leasing company in North America. Like many growing business, identifying and promoting the right people into the critical middle management role was something Aim struggled with. Their people are truly passionate about solving their customers’ problems, but this passion does not necessarily mean that these employees would be good leaders. What Aim wanted to do was develop tools and processes to identify potential leaders in a consistent manner, in order to increase newly-promoted supervisors’ success, and continue to enhance their ability to solve customers’ problems. Vice President of Human Resources Patty Durkin said: We knew that by implementing a process to identify potential leaders in a consistent fashion would greatly enhance our succession planning efforts. We are a growing company in a very dynamic industry…we need to make sure we have the right people in the right place and trained the right way for our customers. This is especially true for anyone with the great responsibility for leading people. We connected with OA based on their experience helping companies implement leadership development programs. They have a solid methodology for identifying leadership competencies, defining them, and helping organizations integrate them into their succession planning...
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It’s no secret that harassment in the workplace is on everyone’s mind. Many organizations have been proactive in developing policies and procedures, updating employee handbooks, and making sure information is posted for employees to learn what their rights in the workplace are. However, many organizations fail to address one of the most critical links in the chain to prevent and address harassment…training supervisors on harassment prevention. Supervisors are the people who will most likely hear about possible harassment first…and they need to know what to do to protect employees, your organization, and themselves. Our comprehensive workshop on harassment prevention, Diversity, Inclusion, and Sensitivity Training, provides all the information supervisors need to spot and help address harassment allegations. We cover: Diversity Inclusion Bias Sensitivity and awareness Harassment prevention Our program is tailored to your organization and utilizes the work you have already done…in addition to our content we leverage your handbook, policies, and internal practices to reinforce all these elements in a seamless fashion. The workshops are informative, engaging, and fun. Learn more about our harassment prevention tools here and all of our training workshops on our website. If you need assistance with other HR projects and want to learn more about our human resources consulting, contact us and check out our blog for more...
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The beginning of the new year is well behind us and we are in the thick of the first quarter. By now, your finance team has done most of the work determining your financial results for 2017, and many companies are getting ready to launch their annual performance review process. While there has been an ongoing debate about whether to do annual reviews, or replace it with a continuous feedback approach, many organizations still follow the annual review process. There are many reasons for this: the organization already has the tools in place, managers understand the current process, and employees have come to expect it. We’re not saying the traditional process is perfect…but it can nonetheless add value if done correctly. Here are some tips to make the process go smoothly and more importantly, have meaning. Focus the review period: instead of requiring reviews be done on the employee’s anniversary, schedule the reviews to occur at one time of the year. This has many benefits: it makes financial planning for increases easier, ensures better compliance because the organization is focused on doing them, and avoids that feeling managers have that they are ‘always doing reviews’. Make it simple: if you’re a manager with ten reviews to conduct, you don’t need a process that will take hours and hours to complete. Don’t overwhelm them with dozens of factors to rate. And speaking of ratings, limit the number of ratings that can be given so that the distinctions in performance are meaningfully shown. We recommend three- or five-point rating scales. Add some constraints: some managers can barely write two sentences about someone, others can write a novel. Don’t make them use a format that requires them to write essays. And if you are using ratings, you should use a tool like MS Excel so that you can not only control the inputs but make the tabulation of the ratings easier. Collect, review, and use the data: after all the effort of conducting reviews, don’t let them disappear into a personnel file never to be seen again. Take the time to aggregate and review the ratings, both overall and by rated dimension. This can give you insight into your bench strength and...
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