Structured assessment of business personality
Before looking in detail at each aspect of the Surveying, Assessing and Reporting process, it is important to once again recall the rationale behind understanding more about your organisation’s personality. The goal of an organisational personality assessment is to enable an organisation to portray itself in the marketplace as a uniquely differentiated entity which brings value to the marketplace not just through its products and services, but also through the way in which the entire organisation interfaces with the marketplace. It is this latter aspect of value delivery which has, until now, remained a difficult area of investigation and understanding.
We take a structured approach to assessing and shaping an organisation’s personality, as this best enables us to gather & interpret data and assure executives that the decisions they take regarding the future market portrayal of their business have been substantiated in fact. This is an important aspect of the assessment process because, when we talk of organisational personality, we are dealing with intangibles and opinions. By its very nature, organisational personality is a subjective concept. As such, the thoughts, opinions and emotions which, in part, help to determine the profile of the organisation, can be open to interpretation. Thus, a structured and quantified approach to assessment and analysis provides a far more reliable basis upon which to reach shaping decisions than gut instinct alone.
The Balanced Business Personality monitor relies upon a number of interlinking models and constructs which enable the assessment of personality to be performed. From the outset, it is important to recognise the multi-dimensional nature of the analytical process. We gather and analyse personality data from 3 contributing user perspectives:
- Executive View: How the Executive team views the organisation’s personality today.
- Executive Aspiration: How the Executive team would wish the organisation to be portrayed in the future.
- Organisational Reality: How the employees view the organisation’s personality today.
This approach to comparing and contrasting the interpretation of opinion data provides a multi-dimensional perspective:
- A comparison of Executive View versus Executive Aspiration delivers a Board-level perspective on how the portrayal of the organisation’s personality ought to be evolving over time to achieve longer-term aspirations. This perspective provides the lynchpin linking the overall strategic goals of the organisation as a market-facing business with how the executive leadership of the business perceives the organisation today. By making this comparison, executives gain an initial insight into the extent of the work which may be involved in moving the portrayal of the business from today’s status quo towards the achievement of a market portrayal which is naturally promoted by all staff and is readily sustained.
- By contrasting Executive View and Organisational Reality, the resulting gap analysis highlights the degree to which the executive leadership and the employees have differing opinions regarding the organisation’s public persona which warrant further investigation. It almost goes without saying that executives, managers and staff members each have the potential to view the values, ethos and competences of the organisation from differing, and sometimes opposing angles. Whereas the executive strives to take an all-encompassing strategic view of a specific discipline or function, the staff member as functional specialist typically has a more short-term and functional perspective. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that opinions differ. This comparison often represents a wake-up call to management as, not only will it highlight minor discrepancies, it may also help the executive leadership to understand how the market’s perception of the organisation may be hindering the achievement of key strategic goals.
- Finally, a comparison of Executive Aspiration with Organisational Reality allows the project team to begin to consider what actions will be necessary to shape the organisation’s personality for the future. After all, by comparing the executives’ ideal future model of portrayal and market perception with how employees view the organisation as it stands today, obvious differences are highlighted and the goals of the shaping process are immediately brought into focus. This comparison therefore ensures that, where employee opinion appears to be at odds with the longer-term positioning goals of the executive group, specific actions can be deployed during the personality shaping process to bring the contradictory views into alignment.
The analytical framework described above provides the foundation for the entire process of organisational personality assessment and shaping. It describes a core set of opinion data which has been gathered from across the business and is predicated on the involvement of employees at all levels.
By taking this approach, the organisation’s leadership is able to:
a) identify and quantify any major disconnects between employee opinions and executive opinions,
b) set executive-level aspirations for the future portrayal of the organisation’s personality, and
c) approve an organisation-wide action plan to move forward the marketing portrayal of the organisation as a uniquely differentiated, service-delivering entity.
The next articles in this category will discuss the Organisational Balance construct, the Core Process construct and data gathering for Dichotomy Analysis.
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