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Development Profiling
An Individual Assessment and Feedback Tool
What follows is a discussion of Development Profiling, an assessment tool for identifying a person's job-related strengths and areas of needed improvement. It is not like a traditional assessment because there is no single "judge", no comparison to other workers, no "curve", no ratings to be inflated by friendships. And it's not another 360-degree feedback process, though it uses multiple inputs which could come from peers, subordinates and/or superiors.
The focus of Development Profiling is on the behaviors, skills, and characteristics of a particular person that are important to performance in that person's job. If you need to know this kind of information, but for a group of workers instead of single individuals, check out Training Needs Assessment.
Above all, the process is reliable. Not because we say it is, but because we report the split-half reliability of every assessment and it's printed on the reports for any statistician to check. It is also valid for decision-making, if the dimensions have been selected properly and the evaluators are the ones who really know the person's on-the-job conduct.
What You Get With Development Profiling:
- An Ideal Profile that defines the behaviors, skills, and characteristics that are important to high performance in the job. This "high performance ideal" is not some "generic" ideal cooked up by a consultant or the latest management fad. The ideal profile is defined internally by the organization, and looks different for as many different jobs as there are in the organization.
- An Actual Profile of an individual's strengths and areas of improvement in the behaviors, skills, and characteristics they bring to their work.
- A developmental Gap Analysis that results when the actual profile is matched to the ideal profile for the current job to identify the "gaps" needing attention. These are the data for feedback and improvement discussions about current job performance.
- An assessment of Promotion Potential that results when the actual profile is matched to the ideal profile for a different position, to determine the person's potential for successful transfer or promotion.
- All profile data are based on the consensus of from 5 to 15 peers, coworkers or clients who can be self-selected or selected by the organization.
- A profile process that offers protection against errors in the results due to bias, intentional manipulation, or misunderstandings
- A profile process that is cost-effective and time-efficient, designed and conducted by in-house personnel requiring little or no consultant help.
- A process that adapts to the size of the situation - it works well with just a handful of key people or your whole organization.
 This development profiling process is deployable in traditional paper and pencil forms or hosted online on our secure server.
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What Are Some Mistakes that are commonly made when Assessing and Giving Feedback to Professionals?
Avoiding Anything Subjective - Assessing professionals and knowledge workers is inherently subjective. Any attempt to avoid subjectivity and only use objective data like profits, percentage improvements, or cost reductions will generate a lot of numbers, but not much good information about your professionals' strengths and weaknesses.
Spending Too Much Money - Just because there is subjectivity in professional assessment does not mean you have to rely on expensive external professionals to assess your people. Excellent programs can be built and run solely by your in-house professionals at a reasonable cost.
Not Defining the Ideal - The "ideal employee" is not simply someone who is strong in all skill areas. An ideal profile defines the skills that are important to high performance in a certain job. This is the step where you define the ideal against which you will compare your employees' skills. It is a process usually overlooked.
Defining Only One "Ideal" - A single ideal contradicts everything already known from experience about professional workers — the ideal VP of Sales looks very different from the ideal VP of Research & Development.
Using a Generic or Externally Defined Ideal - A generic Ideal Profile ignores what is known about the cultures of strategy focused organizations — skills, behaviors and characteristics aquire their value in the context of strategy. Ideal Profiles should be developed internally, by people who know the immediate demands and requirements of the strategy.
Trusting Only a Single Evaluator - Organizations persist in believing that only bosses make good evaluators. (We also once persisted in believing only men made good bosses.) Development profiling requires the participation of multiple evaluators, who hold different positions relative to the person being assessed. These viewpoints can come from senior executives, peers, internal and external clients, and even subordinates.
Not Controlling Bias and Dishonesty - "Popularity Contest"! That's what your assessment program will be called if it does not have good controls on 1) conscious and unconscious bias, and 2) dishonesty. It would also be nice to know who put thought and time into the process, and who just hastily completed the forms while waiting to board an airplane. You must carefully select your measurement process if you want to be able to do this.
Focusing on Only Part of Effective Job Performance - Effective strategy implementation involves behaviors (which can be observed), skills (which can be acquired through learning events), and personal characteristics (the relatively permanent qualities acquired early in life). Feedback profiling must assess all of these.
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Show me what Development Profiling looks like.
If you are interested, you can contact us and tell us about your needs and situation. You can also click here to learn more about how we work together on a project like this.
How do I get more information?
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