Assessing Five Critical Capabilities Organizations Need to Survive

    

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Assessing Your People

Part one of our two part blog series, Starting the New Year off with Assessments of your Business and your People, focused on specific tools to assess the state of your your business.  Part two is focused on tools to assess your people.

2016 will present new and unique challenges to businesses and leaders like never before.  Based on our research, dialogues with clients, and observations conducting business acumen training programs, here are five critical capabilities organizations will need to survive.  How do you assess the people within your organization relative to these capabilities? 

Please Take Our Survey

In addition to this thoughts we are presenting in this blog post, that we hope will prompt contemplation and discussion, we have also developed a survey that measures your perception of these factors within your organization.  We would very much appreciate if you would take a few short minutes to complete the survey by clicking here, or on the image below. If you don’t mind, please feel free to forward it to others within your company so that we can develop deeper insight into these issues. By completing the survey, you will become eligible to win a Nike Fuel Band and we will send you the results in a PDF file.  We will also publish some of the highlights of the  survey outcomes in our blog posts  next week.

Complete our Survey

Ability to Assess the Business

In part one of this blog, we provided a few ideas and tools on how to assess your business.  In part two, we ask you to think about the people who are running the business.  Do they have the skills and tools to properly assess the business?  Can they conduct an Industry Structure Analysis? Understand the data from a Price / Quality Matrix?  Know what to do with Voice of Customer Data?  Assess a Product Portfolio?

Current State of their Leadership Intelligence

According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), organizations spent over $100 billion a year on training employees.  A significant amount (over 65%) is spent on leadership development.  The question to consider here is do you think the people in your organization really have basic leadership intelligence?  Do leaders understand the process and necessity of leadership?  Do they have leadership fundamentals such as the ability to provide coaching and feedback, setting and aligning direction, working with conflict, and emotional intelligence?

Ability to Drive Shareholder Value

In 2016 and beyond, driving shareholder value is one of the most important metrics of success in business. Do the leaders and contributors within you organization have a deep understanding of the drivers of shareholder value? Do they understand the concepts of free cash flow, discounted free cash flow, dividend yield, economic profit, cost of capital charge, or how analysts evaluate an organization? Do they know how to calculate Total Shareholder Return (TSR)?

Social Tools Aptitude

The processes of networking, collaborating, leading, and selling have changed forever.  Social selling and networking have become mainstream, yet many organizations are woefully behind embracing technologies and tools of social success like PeopleLinx.  Do the leaders and contributors within your organization have social aptitude?  Are they developing blogs, unique points of view?  Are they creating awareness for your company and a personal brand for themselves within the minds of key decision makers and potential future employees?  Are they building networks with peers, customers, thought leaders, suppliers, and other partners that could lead to critical success?

Ability to Lead Cross-Generations

A snapshot of leadership in 2016 is startling.  Many organizations have multiple generations of leaders ranging in age from the early 70’s to the early 20’s.  Six decades of different styles and approaches has led to a leadership chasm and in some instances leadership chaos.  Leaders are faced with challenges such as traditional employees who come to a workplace and work 40 hours a week at the same time they are dealing with a workforce that demands to work at home and on their own schedule as long as the work gets done.  Think long and hard about your organization; do your leaders have the skills and tools to lead in the complexity of cross generations?

Don’t Forget to Complete our Survey!

Please click here to complete our survey. Your contribution is very important to us.

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Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.