Inform Yourself

It is well known than small and medium sized business owners fill many roles within their organizations. This being true, we can also agree that some roles fit them better than others. This holds true for many employees within the small or medium sized organization as well. Far too often people are selected to fill a role simply because they have the available time to handle the role regardless of the skills required for the role.

Does this really help the organization achieve its objective?

Is the business getting maximum return on this asset in this role?

Most times, the answer to above questions is NO! Fitting an available resource in to a role based on availability, actually is undermining the organization. It may undermine the organization in productivity, customer service, quality, culture, and ultimately financial performance.

Business Week Magazine recently published an article on this exact subject. The article presented a number of cases where the business owner filled roles simply out of availability or because friends or family were ready and willing to help. In each instance, each owner discovered that this simple act was actually preventing them from achieving their goals!

Defining the qualities and characteristics of each role within an organization, measuring and quantifying your assets qualities and characteristics, and placing them into roles based on the assessment results is called Workforce Alignment. How well an organization scores on its Workforce Alignment is a key indicator of not just success, but if an organization is positioned for high performance. If the Workforce Alignment score is solid, high performance can be achieved more naturally and with a lower total cost to the organization.

At Imagine Yourself, we recommend that an organization use a good cross-section of assessments to help ensure the best matches. it is important to quantity the characteristics of each asset, as well as HOW they will act, WHAT they will do, WHY they do what they do to ensure that each role is filled with the best matching asset. By utilizing this method, the business owner also learns the key areas of development for each asset as it relates to the role for which they have been selected.

What process do you use to match your assets with the roles defined in your organization?

What is your organizations Workforce Alignment score?