BENCHMARKING AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

 

 

 

What is Benchmarking and what does it have to do with Personal Responsibility?    “If the Job could talk, what would it say?”     It would explain precisely what was necessary to achieve superior performance.

 

We could ask it to tell us about the:

• Knowledge a person needs
• Personal attributes such as degree of Personal Responsibility required to drive success
• Rewards for superior performance
• Hard skills vital for the job
• Behaviors necessary to perform at peak levels

 

But we all know that jobs can’t talk.  Therefore, we must get the truth from another source – subject matter experts.  Before we can learn the true meaning of superior performance for any particular job, the experts must remove their natural biases.

 

Bias is an unfair preference or dislike of something.  Bias can create a blind spot – blocking out a single thing – or act like a set of blinders – making only one thing visible. Unfortunately, biases get in the way of truly understanding job requirements.

 

We know that once subject matter experts do slice through their bias, they are able to hear the job talk.  Once that happens, they can identify the key accountabilities or competencies for the job.

The Benchmarking process leads to an understanding of the knowledge, intrinsic motivators, personal attributes, behaviors and hard skills required of each key accountability for the job in question.  It identifies several critical competencies, or personal skills, such as Personal Accountability.  Why is this important?  Because we know that for many positions, and especially for those involving sales and management/leadership positions, a person is more likely to be successful if they have a relatively strong natural ability to hold themselves accountable for results.

 

Measuring accountability is but one of 65 different skills assessed.  After a benchmarking process, businesses can compare all current and new staff members to the results, and provide a developmental plan for each.  Developmental plans that are job related are much better than those based on one person’s opinion.

 

Should you have additional questions about the Benchmarking process, or any of the other tools/products we boast, please call Anita Lehmann Velasquez (780)701-8177 or email at alehmannvelasquez@wright-group.ca .