This may sound too idealistic, but at the end of the day I think it comes down to TRUST, especially on the Sr. Mgt. team. My feeling is that for feedback to be really effective people need to trust the person giving the feedback and that whatever it is that I am hearing is offered to help, not to hurt.

The minipulation usually comes from those who are only giving lip service to being part of the team when in truth they have their own agenda, and while I can’t prove it, my belief is that this could comes about as the result of that individual’s personality, but more likely because the members of the team see what behavior is rewarded and behave accordingly. Not something that should surprise anyone.

This is indeed an interesting discussion and certainly one that has been on going in the corporate executive development universe for as long as I can remember which is rapidly approaching 46+ years in the business word

While my area of expertise is not MD/OD ( I am a generalist) in my
experience I would agree with Phillip that there is indeed a difference between management assessment programs, team and personal development and organizational change efforts.

It has also been my observation that irrespective of the objective to which any of the foregoing a program’s efforts are directed, they often fail because the organization does not have the “will” to sustain the effort – particularly follow-up and when it comes to assessments, the use of the term immediately puts people on the defensive.

these programs have been around a long time, and unfortunately the perception that most executives have is that they are subjected to them as a means to an end, with the end being that the instrument is going to be used as tool to take them out of the business.

In short, what was intended to be viewed as developmental has often been misused and in many organizations that reputation is nearly impossible to overcome.

Great discusion and Mark is right on target. I pesonaly love the 360 and have used them may times in my career however in most cases found the Individual not very open to the results and in some cases even worse, did not respond positive when anounced. I also found that most of them had challanges with creating an action plan based on the result however a few of my team members surpriseed me very positive and turned out to become much more effective.

Check out the podcast from Tino. To quickly explain, the D is for Dominance, I for Influence, S for steadiness, and C for conscientiousness. Just from the name of the each behavorial style you can quickly see how each of the styles will impact how these individuals interact, manage, or sell to others. You can also instruct this person for to determine which of the four behaviors the person you are interacting with fits. Do a seach on DiSC and many of the sites will allow to do a free DiSC on yourself. While you can work with people just from the report itself, I would strongly recommend that anyone is planning to use DiSC have some training in intrepreting the results.

Tino Go wrote:

I’ve found DiSC to be very useful also. There is a great podcast series on DiSC (and many other useful topics) at http://www.manager-tools.com/purchase-the-disc-profile . The web page I’ve cited has a number of free podcasts (as well as links for the purchase of the test).

Myers-Briggs provides interesting insight into a personality type, but can be hard to translate into management actions or routines.

I have used DiSC with a fair amount of success. This measures behaviors more than personality traits. Not only does the individual learn a great deal about his behaviors, he/she also taught how to better interact with others my determined their basic behavioral traits.

I have not had any problems getting executives to take this. It only takes about 15 minutes on the internet and the results are totally non threatening.

DiSC and Myers-Briggs are used equally in organizations per some surveys I have read. And the “360″ evaluations are even more popular.

I too have been exposed to any number of assessment products over the years. I have yet to find one that I thought was particularly reliable in terms of prediciting success in a leadership role. Probably because no one as yet has been able to really define what leadership is.

What I have found, however, is that the use of assessment tools in terms of teambuillding has been very helpful. Primarily, I think, because once all team members have taken the same instrument and it has been shared with each other by an experienced facilitator it can be a powerful force in improving how team members communicate with each other. Among other things, it helps to create a common vocabulary amongst the team so that people are less likely to become defensive because everyone knows and undersrtands that the characteristics that surface through the common experience are present to one degree or another in us all.