Identify Great People for Your Nonprofit Organization

2005 Spring Issue

Recent announcements and activities at both the IRS and the Senate Finance Committee are focused on accountability and governance issues in not-for-profit organizations. This increased scrutiny and focus on accountability have caused organizations to change and more closely monitor their business practices and processes. These changes have also caused organizations to put more emphasis on identifying and selecting key personnel in an organization. It’s critical that businesses choose the right people to successfully navigate each phase of its business cycle. As such, assessment services can offer cost-effective solutions to help identify and develop people who are critical to an organization’s success.

Why Assessment?
Whether an organization is in survival mode or in transition to its next group of leaders, assessment is an invaluable method to address your personnel needs during any business stage. Psychological assessment provides tools with which to assess skills and abilities, personality, interests, and work styles to assure a good fit, not only with a particular position but also within an organization’s culture. Assessment results can generate information helpful in managing newly hired staff members, managers, and executives; identify potential warning signs to consider prior to making a hiring decision; identify strengths of current staff members, managers and executives; and provide helpful suggestions to improve performance and assure that each staff member performs to the best of his or her ability.

Survival: Deciding Who To Keep
In a continually shifting economy, organizations may face challenging periods that require retrenchment, both in terms of costs and personnel. Tough economic times elicit tough decisions, and although no organization desires a reduction in its workforce, sometimes there’s simply no other option. So what do you do? How do you decide who to keep?

Assessment services can be helpful in identifying the key leadership abilities, work styles and problem-solving skills needed to position companies to survive tough periods. Such times may require leaders to adapt and embrace the new business models necessary to endure not only immediate economic challenges, but also to help the organization emerge as a healthier entity. Objective assessment tools can identify an individual’s key strengths, as well as offer suggestions for their development. Such information can make difficult personnel decisions easier to manage.

Maintenance: Avoiding Bad Hires
“Fit” becomes a critical issue in evaluating prospective new staff members. Key issues surround fit between a candidate’s skills, personality, and work style and the organization’s culture. Research demonstrates that senior managers are most likely to fail due to poor “fit” with the company’s culture and the management team that they join.

Assessment services can provide helpful information that assists in avoiding a “bad hire,” which is estimated to cost companies between 30% and 150% of an ejected person’s salary. In short, assessment services can provide warning signals to guard against bad cultural fits while simultaneously providing suggestions to position compatible candidates for success.

Growth: Hiring the Best People
The key to fueling the successful growth strategy of any organization is selecting the right people – people who are instrumental in helping an organization progress. The first step in this process is creating a leadership success template that’s directly linked to the business strategy. This template identifies key skills and leadership qualities critical for the organization to succeed. Identifying, selecting, and developing a core group of leaders who are aligned in their efforts have proven to be key differentiators between organizations that effectively navigate changing economic and other environmental conditions and those that don’t. Assessment information can assist organizations to identify those people who possess the identified key skills and leadership qualities.

Best In Class: Developing Future Leaders
Best-in-class organizations recognize that their people represent a critical, competitive advantage in achieving desired organizational goals. “Growing your own leaders” has been identified as a key business imperative for best-in-class organizations, and doing so effectively requires an investment in people that becomes equally as important as investing in equipment or technology.

Assessment for promotion and professional development can be helpful in providing objective third-party information and accelerating the continued growth and development of future leaders. Assessment information can be valuable in creating professional development plans for high potential managers and newly promoted executives.

Transition: Succession Planning
As people are an organization’s number-one asset, planning for their development is critical. At a minimum, organizations should begin succession planning for critical positions at least three to five years in advance. Successful organizations adopt a talent management mindset, whereby career path discussions aren’t limited to once-a-year- events, but rather are ongoing conversations linked to an organization’s long term business strategy.

Psychological assessments can provide valuable data that serves as a foundation for internal discussions related to succession planning. This data can identify an individual’s readiness for promotion by identifying their strengths and suggesting additional training for future development. Integrating assessment information into decision making and career development planning can increase an organization’s confidence in its personnel succession planning strategies.

Assessment Solutions
In our increasingly competitive, regulatory economy, psychological assessment can provide valuable solutions to solve key personnel challenges that emerge throughout all stages of a nonprofit’s life cycle. The primary goal is to assist organizations in capitalizing on and maximizing one of their most important assets: their people. For more information on how we can help identify great people for your nonprofit organization, please contact Anita Gray in Plante & Moran’s Assessment Services practice. We also invite you to visit our website at http://assess.plantemoran.com.