People Development: How Assessment And Coaching Can Help Raise Employee Potential

With insights from Enza Artino, Global Talent Management & Employer Branding Senior Manager at Gi Group Holding; Kasia Rudzik, Global Assessment and Talent Services Manager at Wyser

An important constant in today’s labour market is change. Over the past couple of years, the pandemic and the need to adapt workstyles and office/team structures have heavily impacted how employees acquire and then function in their roles and how team leaders guide their employees and colleagues to adapt and excel.?In this article, we look at how guidance and assessment for organizations’ workers add value in helping individuals cope with constant change. ?

Within the scope of supporting employees, specifically senior managers and project leaders, as they guide their teams in the new work normal, services like coaching have become increasingly popular. Enza Artino, Global Talent Management & Employer Branding Senior Manager at Gi Group Holding explains, "Coaching services are evolving according to both needs and trends defined by globalization and digitalization. Companies need more scalable, approachable coaching strategies along with tailor-made solutions and greater certainty as concerns ROI. A coaching culture helps businesses achieve transformation centered on employee development. Organizations then get better engagement levels: employees overcome challenges, reach their ambitious goals, and gain self-confidence. This, in turn, results in overall higher productivity."

Coaching has become more systemic, scalable and strategic for entire organizations. This holds true for all functions and departments and across all employee levels. Companies are facing a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment and need support in facing multiple challenges. Coaching services have evolved toward higher levels of specialization that address the aforementioned challenges.

The VUCA phenomenon also applies to the tools companies are using to do candidate assessment. Roles offered are evolving fast and, like the business environments companies face, skills sets for candidates have become more volatile. Businesses have shifted to hybrid hiring, which includes both virtual and in-person stages. Plus, candidates need to bring digital skills to companies: even for positions that have nothing to do with IT.

Kasia Rudzik, Global Assessment and Talent Services Manager at Wyser (part of Gi Group Holding) breaks this down, "Companies increasingly address a broader range of issues in assessment and recruitment. There is specific focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. The "human" part of the candidate search equation is more important with a greater need for soft skills assessments. During Covid lockdowns, assessment services helped us (for our clients) get a better sense of candidates' talents and potential, along with their motivations and values. This led to better matches with companies’ cultures, goals and purposes. Companies have also made stronger efforts to deliver positive experiences during candidate assessment. For example, gamification is increasingly popular for assessment programs; with new technologies delivering tools that are smarter and more user-friendly. Today’s assessment tools offer greater adaptability so recruiters can design specific evaluations, e.g., creative problem-solving or emotional intelligence (EQ)."

?Helping employees and professional talent realize their potential is not only about structured programming like coaching programs and candidate assessment. Businesses also have to invest time and energy into developing values-based personal connections that help leadership and team talent thrive.

Enza Artino continues,

"I help employees and candidates from different countries and cultures connect the job they love with the career they aim for. They enlarge their strategic vision and leadership abilities and develop their performance and skills, while boosting their resilience. This is part of Gi Group Holding’s employee value proposition. Our 'Give and Get' reciprocity-focused engagement model is an important asset for us."

?Along with investment in personal connections, organizations must still focus on assessing competence models and matching candidate placements to new skills today’s businesses require. Kasia Rudzik points out, "Beyond traditional work and managerial aptitude, there are soft skills that play a key role in most search processes: the ability to learn, flexibility, agility, resilience, leadership and curiosity. At Wyser, our focus is on middle- and upper-management positions so we are recruiting leaders for organizations. Great leaders are resilient and adapt quickly. They know how important innovation is for their companies’ future. They support creative problem-solving and are more likely to have a 'lifelong learning' attitude."

?Companies are also looking for individuals with a deep vertical skill-set complemented by a diversity of disciplines. The 'T-shaped' concept is used in the recruitment sector to describe candidates' abilities. The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of skills and expertise a candidate has related to a single field, while the horizontal bar symbolizes candidates' ability to collaborate across disciplines. Finding truly 'T-shaped' recruits can be a challenge, but they are worth looking for. They are the fundamental building block of disruptive innovation. 'T-shaped' recruits see connections between seemingly disparate ideas and are more adept at uncovering creative solutions. Enza Artino clarifies, "As opposed to being an expert in only one thing (i.e., an I-shaped recruit), candidates will want to be experts in a minimum of one discipline along with having capabilities in other areas. Building a 'T-shaped' set of skills is one of the most valuable things people can do for their future career."

?Organizational success comes from development culture

Learning strategies, tools and techniques is useless if companies do not combine them with a growth-based learning mindset. When a development culture is nurtured, employees work passionately to steer the company toward its mission. They promote longevity and success. Company leaders should view investment in creating a continuous learning work environment as a tool that benefits their organizations in the long term. This means businesses need to combine the organizational with the personal when it comes to talent and skills development. Enza Artino explains, "Many change management strategies fail because they focus only on the organizational level, while actual change happens at the individual level. Massive transformation that pushes a company to the next level is the sum of all the individual team members’ efforts to back those changes. When companies do not manage internal cultural changes well, this results in disaster. Employees' sense of belonging and productivity drops and the best talent leaves the organization." ?

This is why fostering a well-functioning development culture is critical to business. Change is not managed nor accepted overnight. Tools like coaching, discussed at the top of this article, can definitely facilitate corporate change and keep people engaged. It is important, however, to focus on how such tools deliver maximum impact. From a productivity standpoint, coaching helps employees reintegrate into the workplace culture more smoothly and get back up to speed faster. This is great for the organization. But more than that, on a personal level, coaching offers employees a good level of psychological safety; ensuring that pushes toward continued future company success also acknowledge individuals’ needs. The two must go hand in hand if you want your business to thrive.?

That said, when searching for and recruiting talent for mid- and upper-management level positions, a deeper dive into the personal element of candidate selection is equally critical. Kasia Rudzik elaborates,

"Assessment needs to remain a valued standard in the recruitment process. This provides both sides extra value given that soft skills examined are important, and quality skills matches better ensure the success of candidate placement and increase candidate retention."

Companies need to take a holistic approach to search and selection: one that is people-centered and considers both technical and soft skills. This is a powerful way to determine if there is a good match between the candidate, the role offered, and the company culture.?