A.I.M. For Development Setting Personal Development Objectives that Work

By Hugh Murray...Submitted by Nancy Friedman

The key to self development is motivation. You can make people do a lot of things, but self-development isn’t one of them. People will develop if they want to and they won’t if they don’t. Any approach to encouraging self-development that does not start with this reality will fail.

It is widely agreed today that people should be encouraged to take responsibility for their own development and that managers play a key role in making this happen. But that is really as far as it goes. Most managers are then left to flounder around, trying to help identify personal development plans, in a process that could be described as bureaucratic form-filling.

A.I.M. is a new approach to setting development objectives that actually work – that actually lead to self-development and therefore an improvement in performance.

A for Aspiration

Any manager seeking to help an individual develop, must start with a discussion of the individual’s aspirations. What does he or she want to achieve? Only when this is clear will it be possible to identify areas for development that the individual will want to address. The problem is that most people don’t have a clear idea about what they want to achieve. Questions are the most powerful tools you have to help people to think. Statements invite challenge. Questions invite thought.

"Tell me what you want to achieve in this job" rarely works. Occasionally, this will produce a useful answer but most of us simply don’t think like this and you’re likely to meet either stunned silence or the overly simple: "money!" A better question would be: "What aspects of your current job do you particularly enjoy?" Most people can answer this and the reply may give you a clue to their longer-term aspirations. You can guide people into a discussion of their aspirations by asking them how they might do more of what they like, or less of what they don’t. However you do it, you need to help people get clear in their own minds just what it is that they want to achieve. Only then can you move forward to identify self-development that they will want to do.

I for Interests

Development must be in the interests of the organization and compatible with your corporate goals. If there is no motivation, there will be no development. If the organization does not benefit however, there will be no point. So why not start by identifying development that is in the organization’s interests and then look for ways of motivating someone to develop in that way? The answer is because it does not work. People feel they are being manipulated if you try to fit their aspirations into the organization’s goals.

People respond better if you focus on them—on what they want to achieve—and then look for advantages to the organization later. You will end up with a greatly motivated individual if you begin with him or her. Motivation is more important than any other single aspect of development. So start with what motivates the individual and then apply the organization's interests to select which developments to support.

M for Measurement

How will you know if a development objective has be attained if the outcome is not measured? Development is about improving performance so measure development by measuring performance. For example, measure leadership by observing the effect of the leadership on the team. If leadership has improved the team, performance will have improved.

For a self-development objective to be effective, the measurement of success must be clear. There can be no room for argument about whether the objective has been achieved or not. Choose an observable effect of the improved performance and then agree to a clear measure of that effect.

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Nancy Friedman is president of Telephone Doctor®, an international customer service training company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, specializing in customer service and telephone skills. She is a KEYNOTE speaker at association conferences and corporate gatherings and is the author of four best selling books. Call 314-291-1012 for more information or visit the website at www.telephonedoctor.com.

Published in Networking Today, May, 2007

Secrets of Successful Interviewing

By Hugh Murray & David Friedman

Hiring errors rank amongst the costliest of common business mistakes. A recent study showed the direct costs associated with a poor hiring decision of a mid-level manager approached $40,000. What strategy is in place at your organization to lower this risk and maximize your chances of hiring the right person the first time?

What is behavior-based interviewing?
Behavior-based interviewing is a technique where questions are asked about past behaviors. It is effective because past behavior is the best indicator of how a person will behave in the future.

Behavior-based interviewing is different from biographical interviewing. Biographical interviewing involves asking questions about the past and is what most interviewers usually do. You will need to ask questions like "I see you worked in the engineering department for three years. What exactly did you do there?" before you can ask behavioral questions.

A behavioral question goes deeper. It focuses on one specific incident, sometimes called a critical incident, and probes to find out how the individual behaved during that incident. An example of behavioral question is: "Can you tell me about a time during your work on the T54 when you realized that you were not going to complete a drawing on time? ("Yes."). What did you do?"

Behavior-based interviewing is also different from hypothetical interviewing. An example of a hypothetical question would be: "What would you do if…?" This can be useful for understanding someone’s thought process but not a reliable indicator of what someone will actually do.

Behavior-based interviewing is also called competency-based interviewing or critical-incident interviewing.

What is behavior and why does it matter?
When psychologists talk about behavior, they refer to all the responses that a person has to a stimulus, which includes everything that goes on in and from a person in a particular situation. Examples include what they think, what they feel, and what they do.

At work, we are interested in the way people do their jobs. This is observable behavior. All sorts of things might be going on beneath the surface but the part we can see is the way they do their jobs.

When we recruit somebody, we want to know how he will approach his job and the best indicator of this is his past behavior and that’s why the behavior-based interviewer is interested in it.

Behavior is remarkably consistent. If a person is scared of heights atop the Sears Tower, he is likely to be scared on the 82nd floor of the Empire State building. We do not have to understand everything that is going on inside to make predictions about how someone will behave in a given situation.

We all have natural characteristics, which tend to assert themselves again and again. We can adjust these and in some cases, such as overcoming a fear. We can change our behavior, but past behavior remains the best, though not a perfect indicator of how we will behave in future.

The advantages of behavior-based interviewing
The advantages of behavior-based interviewing can be summed up as:

· Effective: Behavior-based questions find out how people have actually behaved in the past. This gives you a much better indication of how they will behave in the future.

· Objective: By comparing the way someone has actually behaved in work situations, the interviewer is unaffected by subjective feelings that the interview may have.

· Transparent: The candidate can’t tell the interviewers "what they want to hear" because he or she will be describing actual events. The candidate would have to quickly construct a complicated lie to do this, and that story would certainly not hold up as questions proceeded.

· Legal: The competencies sought are openly described and all candidates are given an equal chance to demonstrate that they have those competencies. Provided every candidate is asked for evidence of the same competencies, and provided those competencies are genuinely necessary to the performance of the job, organizations will avoid discrimination by asking behavior-based questions.

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David Friedman is Vice President of Telephone Doctor Customer Service Training, a twenty year old provider of products and services which improve the way organizations communicate with their customers. Visit our website at www.telephonedoctor.com for more information.

Published in Networking Today, November, 2006