- October 30, 2021
- Posted by: andreag
- Category: High PerformanceInternal ImprovementLeadershipSystems-Process-Improvement
As a leader, you are making decisions that impact your customers, your employees, and the organization’s future. Basing those decisions on fact is essential. Identifying problems and finding the right solutions is critical. Choosing the right strategies is key. What tools are out there that dig out the facts, identify the real problems, and point toward the best strategies?
Professional Growth Systems is excited to announce the next generation of our Discovery Assessment. We have taken nearly forty years of experience working with individuals, teams, and organizations and applied it to the development of the quick, effective Discovery Assessment. This short survey tool provides leaders a general overview of their business or organization, providing insights to guide them in identifying both key strengths and improvement opportunities. It points to what’s present and what’s missing. Best of all, the Discovery Assessment is low cost, which makes it the perfect tool for any leader interested in knowing more about their organization’s potential, the opportunities, and the keys for unlocking both.
The front end of the PGS Discovery tool is a simple, confidential survey of around 40 yes/no, multiple choice, and Likert scale questions that people from any level of the organization can complete in 10-15 minutes online. Our experience suggests that if we interview leadership alone, they frequently miss important observations readily provided by ‘boots on the ground’ employees. The challenge grows bigger for CEO’s in that, although they simply cannot see all viewpoints of the organization, oftentimes they think they can. Thus, CEO’s may be driving blind or impaired. The Discovery Assessment helps to greatly clear that vision.
Once you and employees throughout your organization have completed the survey, PGS compiles the answers using a rubric that weighs responses to each question positively or negatively against multiple aspects of organizational health. These factors and the scoring are based on decades of experience we have had unearthing causal factors for high and low performance with hundreds of organizations. Each category of organizational health is given a score and the whole assessment is put together as a simple report. The Discovery Assessment helps leaders identify what is working, what is not and why. It clearly shows where leadership and staff are aligned, where there are differences in perspective or opinions, and where there are opportunities for improvement.
The 9 aspects of organizational health the Discovery Assessment analyze are:
| Executive Function | How strong is leadership in establishing future direction and managing execution? |
| Structure and Policy | Do the defined roles, authorities and procedural rules support efficient and effective operations? |
| Organizational Environment | What does it feel like to work here, i.e. how is the culture? |
| Strategy | Do we have a sound pathway for maintaining and growing market share or stakeholder support? |
| Continuous Improvement | Do we maintain ongoing efforts to identify and achieve improvement in quality, cost, and service? |
| Participation | Are employees involved in setting direction, identifying and solving problems, and making improvements? |
| Quality of Supervision | Are managers adding value to the organization by improving employee performance? |
| Engagement | How committed are employees/members to the purpose, vision, values, and goals of the organization? |
| Teamwork & Cooperation | To what extent do individuals and departments see others as internal customers whose needs must be met, and whose input is valuable? |
If your organization feels like it isn’t quite living up to its potential, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Our research suggests the average leader of an organization with fewer than 500 employees believes their organization is presently living up to just over half (50-70%) of their potential. Instead of worrying, reach out to us to start a PGS Discovery Assessment. We’ll provide you with a link that you send to your leadership team and staff. For a small investment of you and your employees’ time to take the survey, you can access decades of experience in organizational management and leadership.
