Think for a moment!

• Are executives and managers in your organization truly managing their own or their subordinates’ development?
• Are your e-learning resources really lifting performance?
• Are you genuinely getting the best return on your training and development budget?
• Is your Performance Management process really triggering and sustaining effective development activity?
• Are executives and managers putting sufficient effort into ensuring that succession and career plans are realized?

If so, well done – your organization is in an elite minority. People resist change, and get busy enough to avoid doing what they don’t enjoy, and/or what they don’t do very well.

• Individuals must be empowered and provided with adequate resources to take individual accountability for managing their own development.
• Managers are accountable for ensuring that their subordinates have up to date personal development plans, that these meet the needs of the organization, and that these get implemented.
• Managers are responsible for coaching their staff. This is one strategy for ensuring that we cross skill people, transfer knowledge and skill, and bring out the best in our people.

Of course! And we should never speed on the highway, always pay our bills on time, recycle everything that we can, never think ill of others, and declare every cent received on our IRS return!

The logic underpinning most personal development strategies, processes and systems seems infallible. Unfortunately, logic is not the only force at play. A small percentage of individuals take their personal development very seriously; they will plan their development and implement it despite the organization, their manager or the HR processes. Likewise, some individuals will probably not engage in development activity no matter what is done for, around, or even to them.

The majority of executives and managers do see their personal development as a priority. However, on a day to day basis, they make snap decisions about what they are going to do; emotions and preferences play as large, if not larger, part in those decisions. Personal development is often just one priority among many; unfortunately, it is usually just one level below what gets done. Personal Development is typically long term (important but not urgent) and painful (“I have to change!?”). Phone calls, requests from the CEO, meetings, etc. are immediate demands; not necessarily genuine priorities but apparently urgent enough to take precedence.

Likewise, managers of people, find it easier to do things that they are skilled at - but often this does not include coaching. So, the urgent and tactical things they are good at get attended to. Does this mean that these managers or executives are bad? Does this mean that their managers are incompetent? Not necessarily. They are simply human!

Pilat has spent over 25 years studying Performance Management, Feedback and Personal Development. We have actively sought to find the things that really make a difference. As a direct result, we offer a new service to organizations that really want to make Personal Development a priority; Moments Of Truth. Through this service we face individuals, their managers, HR and others with a series of ‘Moments of Truth’, challenging them to face up to these, accept accountability, make decisions and take actions that will move development forward. If encouragement and support is needed then this is what is supplied, but if…well, you can guess the rest.

Moments Of Truth is a service designed to ensure that effective and continuous personal development actually takes place for selected individuals or groups within an organization. It integrates with, rather than replaces, other HR processes.

Each client organization selects the features of the service that the assigned Pilat Development Partners will implement from a range of options including:

• Review of existing Learning Technology – a detailed SWOT analysis
• A personal telephone coach for every step of the change process:
• analysis and review of personal objectives, how these align with other people’s and with the goals etc of the organization to ensure that genuine clarity and alignment of purpose exists. This may involve speaking with the subject’s manager and/or clients.
• crafting a personal development plan that takes due account of goals, current performance, competency, aspirations, perceived opportunities, etc.
• performance coaching – supporting the implementation of the development plan and/or addressing current performance issues.

A highly structured tried and tested coaching model is used to identify each individual’s stage in the development process as well as their preferred learning style, and then to provide them with appropriate drive, support, counseling, ideas, challenge, reminders, etc to move to the next stage - and ultimately to the achievement of real development.

• Organization, administration and/or facilitation of multi-rater feedback and/or other instrumentation such as personality profiles, aptitude tests, etc.
• A sophisticated database of information about each subject, integrated into a Talent Management system. This can be housed internally hosted by Pilat. Ultimately, it can be integrated with full blown Performance Management and other specialized HR decision support applications or HRIS
• Partnership with existing Training & Development staff, line management, peers, direct reports, etc. (e.g. seeking manager’s input prior to assisting with development planning, seeking explanations from peers regarding their input into a multi-rater program, seeking ideas from reports on what the subject could change to become more effective, liaising with T&D to identify learning options)
• Systematic follow-up with people other than the subjects to ensure that plans are alive and implemented
• Individual Trend Analysis to help identify cause and effect relationships (e.g. - looking at subject’s appraisal data, succession/career plans, their personal objectives, their current assessed levels of competency)
• Measurement of development activity and impact
• Identification of development blockages & lubricators (processes, events, tools, people).
• Reporting on development plans, activity and impact to HR and to managers of those in the program.

Tapping the Power of Contemporary Technology
Extensive use is made of contemporary technology to make this all happen:

• A comprehensive database is established to store information about each subject and her/his managers, peers, reports, and clients.
• Automated e-mail triggers are used to remind the subjects of what they need to do.
• Automated triggers are used to remind the Development Managers of what they need to do.
• Extensive and sophisticated data mining, analysis and search tools are employed to make sense of data and to find information to support the service.
• Libraries of proven development activities are sustained to generate fresh and workable development ideas.
• Metrics are produced to demonstrate to the client organization the activity and its impact.

Practical Solutions to Ensure Real Results
We ensure that development really happens
Within the parameters agreed at an initial service scoping meeting, we do everything possible to ensure that practical Personal Development becomes a priority and takes place:

• We do not disempower the subjects; we ensure they accept the responsibility that empowerment gives them
• We do not replace the manager; we support her/him to ensure that her/his staff grow.
• We do not undermine the professional roles of internal trainers, coaches etc; we complement them and ensure that demands made on them are well thought through, relevant and offer the potential for a genuine ROI
• We do not allow higher management to abdicate their responsibility; we give them valid and reliable data on what is really happening within their organization in the area of growing talent. We work with them to make appropriate decisions and act on the information.

If appropriate, we nurture and support. If needed, we apply encouragement and even escalate non compliance issues. No holds barred – we’ll tell you what is happening and what is not. You cannot afford to allow development not to happen.

How Does It Work?
Step 1 – Assessment of Current Situation
(SWOT analysis of the existing Learning Technology)
Effective personal development has to sit within a framework of other processes such as performance planning, reward and recognition, etc. For example, if other processes stifle development, budgets can be wasted and individuals become frustrated. Therefore, our first step is to make an assessment of the environment, culture, other processes, and available development resources to ensure that implementation of the service genuinely has the potential to add real value. Most importantly, we seek to uncover how serious senior management really is in committing to such a service; “Will they step up to the plate?”

Step 2 – Service Scoping Meeting
Here we determine the scope of the service; which elements it will include, the frequency of various activities, the service levels to be applied, the style of certain engagements, the range of resources that can be tapped into, who will be engaged, etc. This will enable a final budget range to be determined. Therefore, this can prove to be a somewhat iterative process.

Step 3 – Subject Selection
Effective selection of subjects is critical. For some designs, ‘all employees above level X’ may be appropriate. For other designs, subjects may need to be selected on a case by case basis. Other designs may allow self nomination or manager nomination. Clear and defensible criteria must be defined and consistently applied. Cost per head as a percentage of gross employee cost is typically one of the criteria. Most other criteria relate to role, competency, inclination, potential, etc.

Step 4 – Communication
Communication to the subjects is the least important aspect of communication. Far more important is communication to the subjects’ managers, the internal T&D staff, and anyone else that the design specifies could become directly or indirectly involved (e.g. - peers, direct reports, coaches, mentors).

Step 5 – Building the Database
No matter which options are chosen by the organization, Pilat configures a version of Development Pulse, a sophisticated database system for storing, managing, supporting and reporting on personal development. This database will hold all of the information necessary for, and resulting from, the delivery of the service. It will store the events that still need to occur and trigger the appropriate people to act; through e-mails, alerts and reports. In some cases, web interfaces may even be made available to subjects, their managers, internal coaches and organization executives to enable them to record, review, validate and update plans.

Step 6 – Launch/Delivery
Once designed and configured, the service is launched.

Step 7 – Ongoing Service Measurement
The objective of this service is to ensure that activity really takes place and that results are accrued. On-going accumulation of a range of metrics is critical: triggers generated, actions taken, follow-ups made, results achieved, etc.

Step 8 – Service Rescoping
In the same way that individual development is dependent on feedback, so is the effectiveness of this service. The initial scoping meeting will specify a range of metrics to be monitored. These will be periodically reviewed and the service adapted as appropriate.

Why Would You Want to Use "Moments of Truth?"

• You are not seeing the anticipated results from a conventional personal development process.
• You know that you don’t have the internal resources to make this happen yourselves.
• You know that achieving sustained personal development is a critical high performer retention issue.
• You need more information on who is and who is not taking advantage of the organization’s development resources.

Why not give us a call? What have you got to lose? Perhaps your very best people? Perhaps this is your Moment Of Truth.