Organizational & Professional Development

1. Organizational & Professional Development Building the Bench Strength of Emergency Service Agencies Kyle R. Gorman, MBA, CMOD Clackamas Fire District #1

2. Questions • How many have a succession plan? • How many have a development plan? • How many have qualified leaders who are able to take on leadership positions immediately? • How many have concerns about competencies of future leaders? • Hint: Hope is not a plan…

3. Why is Bench Strength Important? • Retirements will decimate the executive leadership of fire agencies. • 50 percent of the organizational leaders will have to be replaced every decade from 2012 on. • The alternatives are to select (buy) future leaders rather than develop (make) for future leaders. • There is a natural over-focus on technical skills rather than leadership skills. • Gen-Y employees will need different motivation.

4. True or false? “If we need to develop leaders in our agency, we must get them more training.”

5. What we do for development… Lominger International, 2003

6. What Works for Development… Lominger International, 2003

7. So Then, How Should we Develop Leaders? • By developing their leadership competencies. • Thousands of studies have attacked the question from every angle—looking at flight crews, executives, managers, government officials, military officers, sales, marketing—across industries, countries, genders, ages, and economic models. • One firm, DDI, has reviewed all of the data from thousands of studies and uses the same set of roughly 70 competencies to describe all jobs in all organizations.

8. What Competencies Matter? • These 70 competencies are the same across organizations and business models and were the same about 85 percent of the time. • The competencies are the same everywhere—strategic thinking is always strategic thinking, perseverance is always perseverance, etc. • What differs is how much each competency matters in a particular job, level, function, industry or organization.

9. Competencies • Competencies are the basic building blocks to job success and organizational success. • Getting to all core competencies that drive success in a particular industry or agency is complex. • We intend to focus on the “Big Eight” competencies that are important to success, hard to develop, and hard to find.

10. The Underlying Nature of Competencies • Competencies are not created equal. • Some are harder to develop than others. • Some competencies are more important than others. • Some are harder to find than others. • Eight of the 67 competencies are hard to develop, hard to find, and more important. • These we call the “Big Eight”

11. About the Big Eight • The “Big 8” refers to the eight competencies significantly correlated with performance and promotion potential across organizational levels and with generally rated low skill levels. • These eight competencies are generally rated low in the workforce. The following table depicts the population rank order of the eight competencies. Lombardo and Echinger, For Your Improvement, 2004, Korn Ferry Companies

12. Rank Order of “Big 8” Competencies in the Workforce Lombardo and Eichinger (2003).

13. Developing Competencies: The Value of Experience • Certain types of experience develop leadership competencies. • People in all organizations learn the same from the same type of experiences. • Some individuals learn much more quickly and thoroughly from similar experiences. • Learning how to benefit from experience is developable.

14. Different Types of Experiences Benefit Employees. • Key jobs • Important other people--good bosses, bad bosses, and mentors • Hardships • Courses (and books, tapes, etc.)

15. Key Jobs are Critical to Developing Experience. • Most of the hard job skills that matter (strategy, planning) are learned on the job with fresh challenges. • The jobs that are least likely to teach are • straight upward promotions, • doing the same jobs again and again, and • job switches aimed at exposure rather than true challenges. • What do most fire agencies do?

16. Aligning Jobs to Development

17. Aligning Jobs to Development

18. Employees Benefit Differently from Experience • Those who can “learn to learn” will benefit most from experience. • Learners = “Learning agile” people • There are different ways to measure people—assessment centers, instruments, structured interviews—regardless, learners almost always win. • Trying to find people with high intelligence and high learning agility is difficult. There is a limited labor market.

19. What is Learning Agility? • The ability to learn from experience, and subsequently apply that learning to perform successfully under first-time or highly complex conditions. • Learning agility is very different from “just learning” or simply being smart. • Research demonstrates that learning agility is the best predictor of success after a promotion. • We can test for it.

20. Why Learning Agility is Important. • Promotions make use of skills that are more complex and harder to learn. • Jobs don’t stay the same over time. • Competency requirements change as you move up the ladder: • Skills become more complex • Under pressure, people stay in their comfort zone.

21. What do Learners Look Like? • Learners are willing to feel and look stupid. • They are keen observers of themselves. • Learners have more tactics at their disposal to solve and resolve problems. They tinker. • They compare things, and make sense through rules of thumb. • They have a plan and ways to measure success and failure.

22. Low Performing Learners • Operate on preconceived notions. • Prejudge what is necessary to develop future leaders. • They don’t develop others. • They confuse being a manager with being a technical expert. • They head down the path of habit. • They use position rather than personality to drive changes.

23. How to Create Learners? • Expand scope and scale. • Assign as member of project or task force • Assign to lead a project or task force • Heavy strategic demands • Line to staff switches • Change manager

24. The Secret to a Successful Career • Successful executives: • Seek and get more feedback. • Have twice the variety of challenges. • Zigzag careers. • Always develop new ways of thinking. • Obtain or refine more competencies along the way. • Are learning agile

25. What can Chief Officers do to make Improvements? • Discuss with personnel the value of experience (see the IAFC’s Officer Development Handbook). • Use your leadership team to identify experience opportunities for your organization. • Consider adding experiential opportunities for supervising, managing and administrative fire officer ranks. • Test for learning agility, emphasizing experience.

26. Questions? For more information: • Kyle R. Gorman, gormankyle@comcast.net • Lominger.com • “The Leadership Machine”, Eichinger & Lombardo

27. Additional Resources--Publications

28. Additional Resources