Last week I promised to provide you with a simple, amazing tool that would help identify goals for each of your people and a whole lot more.

It’s the GSA (Great Skills Assessment) that uses a spreadsheet to monitors both hard and soft skills. If you already do something similar this post may open your eyes to additional uses.

The best reviews help people grow, not by beating them over the head but by laying out an achievable plan for improving areas in which they are weak.

An accurate GSA that’s frequently updated makes it easy to identify what will enhance a person’s value to the company in meeting its corporate goals as well as progressing on a desired career path.

Its value increases by merging individual assessments into one for the whole organization that you can use when planning projects.

And it’s invaluable when it’s time to fill an opening; a complete GSA is the best guarantee that you won’t end up with all your group’s skills in one area and gaping holes in others.

There are many ways to approach assessment creation and usage depending on your MAP and attitude towards inclusiveness and openness, but here is how my clients do it.

1. Looking at the template you’ll notice that the first three sections are public while the fourth is marked private. Start by sending the public part of the assessment template to each of your people and ask them to list their skills and rate them on a scale of one to five. Ask them to include not just the skills that they use at work, but all their skills, such as those they use at home or in volunteer work. You may be pleasantly surprised at the unknown depth and variety of abilities you find in your organization.

2. Post the results on your department intranet and ask everybody to add to each other’s profile—this includes you. Many times people have skills and abilities they ignore because previous bosses didn’t value them, but peers are apt to notice and comment and you may value stuff of which they aren’t aware.

3. Once everyone is finished (for the moment, you should encourage people to keep their profiles updated) you want to discuss specific results separately with each person, especially those that diverge from your own knowledge or opinions. Be patient; by the end of the conversation the two of you should be in agreement on both skills and ratings.

4. The private section of the soft skills is completed by you and should remain private. Use it as a guide when you’re coaching, assigning roles, helping the person prepare for their next career move, etc.—and to evaluate your own managerial success. If the public skills improve and goals are met, but you don’t see improvement in the private areas then look in the mirror since those skills are typically a direct reflection of management.

Combining the goal-setting procedure described last week with the GSA makes it easy to identify, define and agree on each person’s goals, both short and long-term.

Success today means constantly reinventing yourself and your organization—I call it continual course correction and the GSA makes it much easier.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 5:30 am and is filed under About Leadership, Communication, Culture, Ducks In A Row, Personal Development, management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: achieving-goals, goals, reviews, setting goals
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