Developing Success Profiles

Objectives

People Solutions has a long-standing relationship with the organisation in providing talent management services. The organisation, and the industry as a whole, was facing a shortage of talent, particularly for leadership roles. The organisation had identified the need to redefine these roles by evaluating the essential requirements of the leadership positions. To do this, the organisation needed to engage an external provider to facilitate this process, challenge traditional ways of thinking, and as an end result to produce Success Profiles for each of the key leadership roles.

Situation

The organisation was seeking a partner to assist in the development of 3 Success Profiles for the following roles within Aged Care; Facility Manager, Clinical Nurse Manager and Support Services Manager. These would be used for succession planning, identifying skills gaps and development plans for existing incumbents in performing their current job, and recruitment requirements for future needs.

Challenge

To align with the organisation’s future strategy and to meet the current and future challenges and opportunities for the industry as a whole, the organisation identified a need to redefine key roles within their Aged Care Homes division. The traditional succession of these roles is through the clinical pathways, which as the organisation and industry grow, was beginning to lead to talent shortages. The organisation wanted to reassess these roles to determine the key success factors, assist in identifying alternative pathways to these leadership roles, and achieve alignment in the organisation about what success looked like.

Solution

People Solutions first spent time understanding the roles, current position description, organizational structure related to the roles, and the strategic direction of the organisation and how this role aligns to this strategy.

We then did one-on-one interviews with all the current Facility Managers, as well as the Clinical Nurse Manager and Service Manager role to understand what they identified as success in their role.

We had a structured interview asking questions about the knowledge, skills and experience required for the role, as well as the motivational fit for the role. To determine the key behaviours for the role we asked interviewees critical incident questions, such as “example of where they have witnessed or been involved in a situation where someone in the role was meeting/above/below expectations, and what they did and the outcomes”. The information from these interviews was collated and analysed to develop a success profile for each role, including key competencies with behaviours.

A focus group was conducted with senior leaders within the business who had an understanding of this role or were the leaders of these roles. This was similar to the interviews but involved a card sort instead of the critical incident questions. This group was then presented with the summary of the incumbents and a discussion on the similarities and differences, and what should/shouldn’t be included going forward.

From this, a draft success profile was created, sent to all the leaders for critic, and then finalised.

Result

The process of developing the success profile was valuable for the leaders involved. It provided insight into the current Facility Managers expectations of the roles, and the alignment/misalignment with the organisation’s perception of the roles now and for the future. This process facilitated robust debate around current versus future expectations of these key roles, with opportunities to challenge traditional thinking.

The three success profiles provided a clear criterion for development and recruitment for these key roles. We also mapped psychometric assessment to these to assist when using these tools.

From this process, we were engaged to complete the same for Residential business area and two leadership roles within this division of the organisation.