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Hey everyone,
First off thanks to everyone for all of the great advice and feedback in my other posts. I have another one for ya...

We are currently working on establishing developmental objectives for our employees. I have taken care of all of mine except one. Instead of assigning developmental objectives I asked my directs during our weekly O3's to think of ad least two things and we will go from there. One of my directs who is more or less a member of our emergency response team (basically a fire brigade/hazardous materials team) wishes to develop their problem solving and decision making skills. I agree that this is an area where they need improvement. My company has a couple of online, self paced classes that this person can take, however I need to have some way of measuring the establishment of this new behavior. In other words I need some other metric to see a change after they have completed the classes. The first developmental objective for this employee will be to complete the two classes with a passing grade by a specified date, which is an MT goal. Any thoughts on what I can do for the second part???

Josh

WillDuke's picture
Training Badge

You need to find a proxy. It's pretty much impossible to measure "problem solving and decision making" skills. But can you think of how those skills are implemented at work? Can you find a way to measure the implementation?

Definitely give another listen to M&M's cast on Annual Goals, that has lots of good ideas, like counting smiles.

In your world, which I know very little about, I'd think you probably do lots of exercises. Can you have him lead an exercise and measure the amount of time it takes for him to make decisions? That will measure how quickly he can make decsions. Then set goals of reducing that time.

Same thing with figuring out the problems. Measure how long it takes to begin implementation of a solution. Then reduce that time.

Of course also measure the time to completion for the exercise, that should give an idea of how successful the decisions are. Again, reduce the time to show development.

That's how I would approach something like that, but you have a lot of information I don't. So you might have a much better proxy. :)