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People Development

Systematic Management and People Development go hand in hand - progress on Systematic Management is dependent on the growth in skills and attitudes of your people (at all levels) - particularly in regard to self reliance and responsibility - and the development of your people to grasp and realise their potential, and form a powerful and creative engine for performance transformation is the goal of systematic management. This is further developed in the People section of the website, which also offers a number of principles to support this, and some tools to help make it happen.

Some of these tools are reflected in the People Development panel and are described in more detail below.

Empowerment is a process for ensuring that an individual or group is able (in the widest possible sense: understanding, skills, authority, resources etc.) to undertake an assigned area of responsibility. The empowerment index is a simple spider diagram type tool for mapping the actual state of empowerment (on a number of dimensions) against the desired state, so that improvements can be planned. It can be downloaded as part of a slide deck (199 KB) with other slides which support discussion on different aspects of empowerment. Further food for thought can be found in a brief discussion paper on the topic, or in the 'empowerment' principle under the People aspect of Systematic Management.

The Development Process covers the skills, attitudes and understanding aspects of empowerment, and is explained in further detail in a slide deck (196 KB), which includes a full size version of the planning table and a step-by-step build of the process. Underlying principles on Build Capability and the HR Process can be accessed by clicking the relevant links.

Coaching is probably the most powerful and the most common (but perversely the most underutilised in terms of its potential) form of people development. But coaching can be much more systematic and effective, and this is explained in a slide deck (256 KB) which, in conjunction with 'The Helping Hand' video can be used to help develop a more methodical approach. Tesseract does not offer individual coaching services, but we can recommend 3D Coaching, or from a group perspective Whatever Next.

The three tools outlined above, are all about what a manager can do for his/her people (albeit that some of those may well be other managers). But if, as a manager, there is no-one above you doing this for you, what can you do for yourself? The site contains a number of Self Analysis resources to help you in this - from the self-appraisal model (illustrated above) to a simpler quick model and a number of other tools which help you to evaluate the quality of different aspects of your systematic management approach - see Materials to Support Review in the Resources section.

Probably the most common reservation that we hear regarding all of the above is that it takes time - nobody seems to question the need, or to doubt the efficacy of the approaches put forward - but most people seem to have a problem with the time it demands from an already busy working day. Smarter Working is a way of beginning to think this isue through both in the form of a set of slides and exercises to stimulate discussion, and in the form of a board game (really!) with the same purpose in mind.

Pages 290-302 of Managing by Design can be found in Chapter 18 which can be read as a pdf file (137 KB) by clicking the link above. Pages 56-76 can be found in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.

Blank templates of this panel can be found in the Big Picture Storyboard file - these can be used to capture your own experiences and progress in this area (by annotating them either in PowerPoint, or as a printed panel), and then to physically cut and paste them onto the Big Picture to create your own storyboard of implementing systematic management in your organisation.

To explore another secion of the big picture, please click on the relevant area of the image below: