GO Magazine 2015 Vol. 13, No. 2

— Table of Contents —
Great People. Great Organizations. Great Results.
Build Your Leadership Brand 9
Reviewing Performance Appraisals 14
David Robertson Redefines Innovation 26
Elevations Credit Union On Top 20
Cardinal Health
Looks Forward
The health care giant is taking giant
steps to strengthen its leaders.
Page 4
Cardinal Health’s
Lisa George
2015Vol.13,No.2

No career transition is more difficult or disorienting than
becoming a leader for the first time. Coworkers who may have been longtime
friends now report to you. Getting your own work done isn’t enough—now you
also have to focus on your team’s work and manage their performance. Problems
that once fell to someone else to solve now land on your desk.
Recognizing just how hard it all can be, my colleague Rich Wellins and I wrote a
book. It’s called Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the
Best in Others, and we filled it with practical advice, guidance, tools, and coaching
to help new leaders navigate the unfamiliar territory of their new role. While the
book is perfect for new leaders, it’s also a great resource for aspiring leaders, as
well as seasoned leaders who may want to push the reset button.
We were careful, though, not to write a “survival manual” akin to how to stay
alive if you get lost in the woods. Because, after all, becoming a leader shouldn’t
be viewed as an ordeal, but as an opportunity. Once you make the rookie mistakes
(many of which the book helps new leaders avoid), get your bearings, and begin
learning and practicing the craft of leadership, it’s fully possible to come through
the other side appreciating just how rewarding it can be to be a leader. That truth
is at the center of Your First Leadership Job.
In this issue of GO, we feature an excerpt of Your First Leadership Job that deals
with the importance of creating your leadership brand—something about which
too few leaders give much thought. Also here you will learn about how Cardinal
Health is developing leaders who develop trust and build morale, and how Eleva-
tions Credit Union’s focus on its people helped it become the first credit union to
win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
Plus you can get a new take on career paths from Evan Sinar, rethink performance
appraisals with Andrew Gill, see new manufacturing findings from the Global
Leadership Forecast, and get insights on innovation from Wharton School professor
and author David Robertson.
Happy reading!
Tacy M. Byham, Ph.D.,
CEO, DDI
Volume 13 • Number 2 • 2015
PUBLISHER
Richard S. Wellins, Ph.D.
MANAGING EDITOR
Craig Irons
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Susan Ryan
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Terri Sota
SENIOR GRAPHIC ARTIST
Mike Lawley
Editorial and Circulation:
GO
c/o Development Dimensions Intl.
1225 Washington Pike
Bridgeville, PA 15017-2838
Telephone: 412-257-0600
go@ddiworld.com
ABOUT DDI
DDI is one of the top talent manage-
ment consultancies. Forty-five years
ago, we pioneered the field; today we
remain its chief innovator.
We help companies transform the way
they hire, promote, and develop their
leaders and workforce. The outcome?
People ready to instigate, understand,
and execute business strategy, and
address challenges head-on.
Our clients are some of the most
successful companies on earth.
They’re Fortune 500s and multina-
tionals, doing business across a
vast array of industries. We serve
clients from 42 DDI-owned or
closely affiliated offices.
The principles and skills we teach
don’t just make people better em-
ployees, they are at the heart of what
makes for happier and more fulfilled
human beings—better family mem-
bers, better neighbors, better friends.
©
Development Dimensions
International, Inc., 2015.
All rights reserved.
Tacy and co-author Rich Wellins invite you to visit
www.YourFirstLeadershipJob.com for videos,
excerpts, and additional content related to the book.
Ready Set...

3© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved. — Table of Contents —
Contents
GO Volume 13 • Number 2 • 2015
FEATURES
4 Cardinal Health Nurtures Leadership Growth
Innovative development programs care for leaders
of people, projects, and processes.
9 Building Your Leadership Brand
There’s no one perfect way to be a leader, but
there are identifiable practices that define a truly
effective one.
14 Managing Performance in Real Time
The yearly performance appraisal cycle should
be only a starting point.
20 “The Best Place You Have Ever Worked”
Unified talent processes helped Elevations Credit
Union win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award.
28 When Building Career Paths, Think Milton
Bradley—Not Rand McNally
A career isn’t a map: Why organizations need to
change how they think about career paths.
DEPARTMENTS
13 Trend Tracker
New manufacturing findings from the Global
Leadership Forecast 2014 ǀ 2015 data.
18 What’s GOing On
Introducing the Service Ready support portal, Mind-
marker training reinforcement bolsters DDI courses,
exciting changes to Business Impact LeadershipSM
,
and Are You In the List? again recognizes India’s
rising HR stars.
26 Coffee on the GO with David Robertson
The innovation expert and author of a book on LEGO
discusses the human side of innovation.
31 Information You Can Use!
New DDI research and thought leadership to spark
your thinking about talent management.
4
9
14
2820
26

“Our message to employees:
Stay curious, try new things, and
stretch your thinking—we can all
make a difference in the future
of health care.”
- Lisa George, VP,
global talent management

Cardinal Health rigorously monitors the pulse of
its workforce. With the aid of its annual Voice of the
Employee (VOE) survey, the multinational health care
product and service provider routinely charts manager
effectiveness, inclusion, and employee engagement. In 2009
the survey data indicated room for improvement on trust and
morale measures and a need to continue to strengthen basic
leadership skills.
Cardinal Health executives point to the company’s history
as contributing to the VOE scores. For close to 40 years,
Cardinal Health was a holding company for a diverse port-
folio of companies. Founded as a food distributor in 1971,
the company branched into pharmaceuticals eight years
later. Acquisitions followed; Cardinal Health added more
than 50 businesses to its growing health care segment.
Then in the mid-2000s, almost a decade after divesting its
food-related interests, Cardinal Health transitioned from a
holding company to an integrated operating organization.
“The pace of change in the health care marketplace is un-
precedented and requires us to be innovative, adaptable,
and nimble. In order to do this, we have to have the best
talent focused on our customers and a culture that allows
that talent to grow and develop. We want all talent to see
Cardinal Health as the place they want to contribute and
grow their career,” says Carole Watkins, CHRO.
As a first step, the company translated its values into
actions. Cardinal Health created eight broad leadership
competencies known as the Leadership Essentials, which
embody its organizational leadership expectations for
those managing people, processes, and projects. “We in-
tegrated the Leadership Essentials into all of our HR pro-
cesses—from selection to rewards—and rolled them out
with a strength-based approach that offered all employees
opportunities to build additional capabilities around lead-
ership,” says Lisa George, vice president, global talent
management.
CONNECTING VALUES TO DEVELOPMENT
“Through a robust needs assessment process, we uncov-
ered that we also lacked development and critical skills
at the first level of management. Given that these leaders
influence the greatest number of people, we focused our
initial development efforts on our frontline supervisors
and managers,” says Julie Blust, director, learning man-
agement.
Cardinal Health desired training content not only to build
capabilities and strengthen engagement, but also to align
with its values and Leadership Essentials, and connect to
its corporate mission—“Essential to care™.”
CARDINAL HEALTH
NURTURES LEADERSHIP
GROWTH
Innovative development programs care for
leaders of people, projects, and processes

The organization’s HR team found the solution it was look-
ing for within DDI’s Interaction Management®
: Exceptional
Leaders Series (IM: ExLSM
). Courses from the series serve
as the foundation for Core Management Skills (CMS) 100, a
two-day program focused on developing fundamental skills
for effective workplace interactions. Topics covered in CMS
100 include building strategic work relationships, communi-
cation, coaching, and aligning performance for success.
Interest in the program grew rapidly by word of mouth;
leaders completing the program at one site would share their
experiences with colleagues at another. The executive team
was also busy buzzing about the new program. George Bar-
rett, Cardinal Health’s chairman and CEO, recorded a video
message that introduced CMS 100. On screen, he reinforced
the importance of leadership development by sharing per-
sonal stories of influential leaders who’d shaped his career.
MAKING IT THEIR OWN
“We were able to customize the training examples to offer
real-world scenarios—things that happen on the floor of a
distribution or manufacturing center, in a nuclear pharmacy
or call center, out in the field, or at our corporate headquar-
ters. The flexibility to add our own examples, based on where
we were facilitating the courses, worked so well. Plus, since
we began training our own trainers, the courses have a very
distinctive Cardinal Health connection,” says Julie Holbein,
director, global talent management.
Program participants were particularly pleased with the
link between the training and Cardinal Health’s perfor-
mance review process. Because individual performance
is evaluated equally based on goal accomplishment, the
company’s values, and the competencies comprising the
Leadership Essentials, the course content really resonated
with learners and advanced the goals of the organization.
“With CMS 100, we aimed to make managers more ac-
countable for the performance of their employees through
better communication and coaching. Some of our facilities
have workers that span three generations,” says Enrique
Alvelais, HR director. “One of the main breakthroughs we
made with the program was to get our supervisors to un-
derstand that they need different leadership behaviors and
styles to address the different generations. Our people with
40-plus years of seniority don’t have the same expectations
as our millennials.”
FABULOUS FEEDBACK
As the number of CMS 100 graduates grew, the HR team
asked leaders to identify the capability and training needs
that remained. “We did balanced data mining of our talent
and performance reviews, looked at gaps in succession,
and conducted a 360 assessment, talking with managers,
their direct reports, as well as their management teams to
see how they were viewing one another,” says Blust. “This
was critical to ensure the capabilities we were building
Chairman and CEO George Barrett has been a champion of the Core Management Skills program.

aligned to our culture, were linked to our business needs to
drive our strategy, and took into account the people side—
employees, customers, and, ultimately, patients. DDI was
of great help in our deep-dive analysis into the data.”
In response to all the collected feedback, the HR team part-
nered with the business and created a second, follow-up
course series: CMS 200. The focus this time was on en-
gaging and motivating employees, and creating an envi-
ronment of trust. Whereas CMS 100 develops foundational
leadership skills for improving manager-employee inter-
actions, CMS 200 course content offers skills for manag-
ing teams. Once again, selections from DDI’s IM: ExLSM
leadership series anchor the two-day program. To optimize
learning and allow for on-the-job application, HR asked
participants to allow 90 days between the two programs.
“We got fabulous feedback on the practicality of the tools
in our CMS programs,” says Holbein. “The fact that our
leaders received tools that they could take right out of the
classroom and use immediately was something we were
missing before.”
“After every class I facilitate, I give everyone about five
minutes to reflect on everything we talked about and
then identify two to three takeaways that they’re going to
implement back on the job,” says Jill Macinko, senior
consultant, learning delivery. “I think that has been im-
pactful, and I encourage them to share those things with
class members and their managers so they have some
supportive accountability.”
DRAMATIC INCREASES IN
MANAGER EFFECTIVENESS
In 2013 DDI surveyed CMS 100 and 200 participants and
observers (peers, direct reports, etc.) to measure behavior
change—before and after training. Across the behavior-
al objectives of the six CMS/IM: ExLSM
courses (Essen-
tials of Leadership, Coaching for Success, Coaching for
Improvement, Adaptive Leadership, Building an Envi-
ronment of Trust, and Motivating Others), the percent of
leaders who said they “often” or “almost always” display
effective leadership behaviors rose by 49 percent. Observ-
ers, meanwhile, witnessed a 30-percent improvement in
leader effectiveness on the same objectives.
Leaders also gave high marks to their post-development job
performance. On a scale of 0 to 100 (with 100 being the
highest rating), trainees rated their overall performance at
91 points (an increase of approximately 10 percent).
Looking at team-level results that were specifically attributed
to the CMS programs, leader effectiveness and communica-
tion between leaders and team members improved 62 and
63 percent, respectively. Employee efficiency, productivity,
engagement, morale, and inclusion in decision-making im-
proved between 53 and 61 percent.
“If you look at our business results since we first implement-
ed these programs, we wouldn’t have been able to accom-
plish all that we have as an organization without improving
the capabilities of our leaders,” says Barbara Hess, director,
global talent management. “Our Voice of the Employee sur-
veys show dramatic increases in manager effectiveness and
employee engagement since the outset of these programs.”
When first launched, participation in CMS 100 and 200 was
voluntary; today, it is a welcomed requirement. The pro-
grams are now being delivered outside the U.S., at sites in
Canada, Malta, Thailand, China, and Latin America.
LEADERS OF PROCESS AND PRODUCT
Delighted by the CMS feedback from frontline leaders,
Cardinal Health turned its attention to individual contribu-
tors—process and project managers without direct reports.
The result was Maximizing Interactions (MI) 100 and 200.
Courses were chosen from DDI’s Interaction Management®
:
Exceptional Performers Series (IM: ExPSM
) and include:
Communicating with Impact, High-Impact Feedback and
“Ultimately the companies that win in
the marketplace are the companies
that have the talent to win in the market-
place. We are deeply committed to
talent development inside Cardinal
Health. We believe this is the secret to
competitive advantage.”
George Barrett
Chairman and CEO, Cardinal Health

8© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved. — Table of Contents —© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved. 8
Listening, Navigating Beyond Conflict, and Influencing
Others. The two-day programs aimed not only to cas-
cade the learning and language acquired by participants’
managers (in CMS 100 and 200), but also to standardize
workplace interactions for higher levels of engagement,
self-satisfaction, and performance. “One of the things I
took away from the training was the importance of getting
to know my associates better on a more human, person-
al level,” says Robert Moore, lead associate, warehouse
operations. “I listened to their pain points, learned to dis-
agree respectfully…keeping it neutral and not making it
about me. It’s about the team, the company, and that we’re
all connected.”
“I am always looking to cut waste, be more lean,” says
Jessenia Gaitan, also a lead associate in warehouse oper-
ations. “Shortly after training I came up with a waste-cut-
ting idea, but instead of taking action and instructing my
teammates to follow along, as had been my style, I went
to them and asked for their input. We agreed to roll it out,
as a pilot, to allow us all to evaluate how it was going to
impact the team and our customers. It was gratifying to
see the team take ownership of the project, make it theirs,
collaborate on tweaking the process, and make it even
better.”
To see videos about Cardinal Health’s development initiative, and learn
more about Interaction Management®
, Manager Ready®
, and Leader3
Ready®
visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
JOURNEYS TO THE FUTURE
As its commitment to development continues to evolve, Cardinal Health is planning a series of learning journeys to deliver finely
targeted development across more levels of leadership.
“From our CMS participants, we would hear, ‘Why isn’t my leader going through this?’” says Pamela Henry, senior consultant,
learning delivery. “The learning journeys will put all leaders and their direct reports on the same page, speaking the same language.”
Four development stages comprise the two-year journeys. The customized content is tailored to meet the needs of new and long-time
employees, internal and external hires, and both people managers and highly valued individual contributors (many of whom lead
without direct authority).
To identify these needs, Cardinal Health is capitalizing on assessment.
All people-leader journeys will begin with either Manager Ready®
or Leader3 Ready®
, DDI’s online assessments for frontline and
mid-level managers, respectively. With these diagnostic tools, development needs can be identified before leaders embark on their
prescriptive, skill-building learning journeys.
Krista Juras, a sales supervisor who participated in a Manager Ready®
pilot program says: “The feedback report was so beneficial.
It identified specific skills that I need to work on—and am working on every day!”
“In the near future, everyone at every level will have expanded and targeted development opportunities,” says Blust. “There will be
required, foundational training and experiences, as well as ‘elective’ offerings that individuals can self-select based on assessment
results, development planning, feedback discussions, career aspirations, etc. It’s the most exciting part—the ability to create your
own personalized learning path which becomes more flexible as you progress in your career.”

— Table of Contents —9© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved.
Most people will experience moments when they
regret something they said, did, or failed to do. It’s part
of being human. But for a freshly minted leader, those
human moments can accumulate quickly and do real
damage if you’re not careful. This can happen for many
reasons, including underestimating just how profound
the transition is from individual contributor to leader.
You’re probably approaching the first encounters with
your new team with a sense of anxious anticipation and
armed with a mental checklist of the unique value you
have always brought to your work. As your new team
looks to you for the first time, they are understandably
worried about how that value will make things harder
for them.
The people who now report to you will form an early
judgment about your leadership capabilities that will de-
fine your reputation in ways that may not serve you well,
particularly when you’re also mastering the full scope of
your new job. Consider the simple truth that consumers
face: If their experience with a product is not good, they
won’t use it again. And they’ll most likely complain about
it to other people. The dark cloud spawned by poor word
of mouth can dampen a product’s prospects in the mar-
ketplace for a long time. So, whether you’re 30 seconds
into your leadership job or have been in place a while and
could use a reputational do-over, you’ll need to develop
and consistently operate within a broader framework of
how you think about your new role. Here we introduce
you to three attributes that will help you create a positive
leadership brand—one that cultivates trust and truly re-
flects your authentic self.
What’s in a Leadership Brand?
While there’s no one perfect way to be a leader, there are
clearly identifiable practices that set apart truly effective
leaders from average or poor ones. Research has shown
that successful leaders demonstrate three key attributes—
we call them leadership differentiators—that help them
gain confidence and skill in leading a group. Embrace
them and you will be successful out of the gate.
They are:
• Be Authentic.
• Bring Out the Best in People.
• Be Receptive to Feedback.
Clearly, these attributes are commendable for everyone,
whatever their life’s work. Good leaders eventually real-
ize their true value—some earlier and some later—during
their career. Research clearly shows that these differenti-
ators can predict future success, as well. That’s important
information for you on two other fronts. While as a leader
BUILDING YOUR
LEADERSHIP
BRANDThere’s no one perfect way to be a leader, but there are identifiable practices that define a truly effective one.
By Tacy M. Byham, Ph.D., and Richard S. Wellins, Ph.D.

you’ll be coaching others, you also might be in a position
to help select future peers and team members. Look for
these attributes in others. Furthermore, even if you are not a
leader yet, these skills will help you make your mark as an
individual contributor and distinguish yourself as a strong
candidate for advancement. And people will want to work
with you more. Which is a good thing!
Be Authentic
Being authentic means that your actions mirror what you
believe and feel, and that there is no contradiction between
what you do and what you say.
You demonstrate authenticity when you:
• Do what’s right, even in difficult situations.
• Treat people with respect.
• Promote trust among others.
• Keep promises and commitments.
• Admit mistakes.
• Give credit when it’s due.
• Disclose by sharing your thoughts, feelings, and
rationale, when appropriate.
• Display confidence but avoid arrogance.
Conversely, leaders who are inauthentic can have a debili-
tating effect on the teams they lead. These leaders tend to:
• Hoard information.
• Pit team members against each other or play favorites.
• Disregard team members who don’t agree with them.
• Ignore tensions and workplace conflict.
• Blame others for their missteps.
• Take credit.
• Radically change their behavior to sound
more leaderly.
• Pretend to know everything.
With these behaviors in mind, it should come as no sur-
prise to learn that in our many focus groups with senior
executives, the importance of authenticity in leaders re-
ceived some of the most resounding affirmations—across
cultures, industries, and professional sectors. Executives
worry about how their leaders are perceived, and so should
you. Why? Authenticity is fueled by integrity, which in turn
fosters trust—the fundamental catalyst in the most-admired
workplaces. Most-admired workplaces have happier, more
engaged, productive, and creative employees. When people
trust you, it’s not just good for your reputation—it’s good
for business, too.
Bring Out the Best in People
We’ve found that the best leaders have the innate ability to
make everyone around them better.
Management tomes and business magazines correctly tout
our current era as an age of collaboration—an optimistic
time where solutions are crowd-sourced, opportunities are
designed, and far-flung teams work together creatively at
all hours of the day from every corner of the globe. While it
is true that new technologies enable new ways of working
together, it’s also true that the type of leader who thrives
in this environment—one who resists traditional command
and control structure—has always existed. And it is precise-
ly this type of person who will thrive as a leader today.
Don’t worry if you’re not a natural at this; you can learn.
One key is to ask smart questions and listen to the answers.
It takes win-win thinking to help others be the best they
can be. Great leaders possess this outlook. They know that
their own success relies on the success of the people they
lead and that one of their chief responsibilities is to foster
their team members’ skills, abilities, interests, and efforts.
It’s never too early to establish this positive philosophy and
put it into action.
We’ve found that the best
leaders have the innate
ability to make everyone
around them better.

To bring out the best in people:
• Encourage your team to try new things.
• Cultivate and optimize others’ talents and capabilities.
• Take the time to find out what motivates your team and
assign work in line with people’s skills and interests.
• Compliment people on their efforts.
• Give people input on things that affect them.
• Trust in the strengths of others.
• Allow them to safely learn through failure, so they can
take appropriate risks.
• Unite others toward common goals.
Be Receptive to Feedback
For this last differentiator, we’ll explore how team members
and other workplace associates can reciprocate and bring
out the best in you by giving you feedback.
Leadership research bears out what USA Olympic gymnas-
tics coach Mary Lee Tracy recognizes as a distinguishing
characteristic of elite athletes: “Athletes are no different
than other people in that they will make mistakes. What
is so important and what I look for in future elite athletes
is how they respond to failure. It’s so important they don’t
continue to fail, but fail forward.”
One of the variables that over time has shown to predict
leadership success is an individual’s “receptivity to feed-
back.” Those who generally seek and use feedback from
others and view mistakes as learning opportunities tend to
be more successful in leadership roles. The fail-forward
concept should be adopted for all leaders. But it only works
if you’re willing to seek and accept the feedback of people
who are in a position to evaluate your work.
First, Ask . . .
We know from experience that what we’re asking you to do
is harder than it sounds. Most leaders find seeking feedback
to be pretty difficult. Nobody wants to show weakness, par-
ticularly in business. Part of it is personality based: Recep-
tivity to feedback is learned early in life and can be difficult
to develop as an adult if you don’t make an effort. But seek-
ing growth is not showing weakness. Leaders who are never
wrong typically suffer the ripple effects of low morale and
high turnover (which is bad for business). And they keep
making the same mistakes again and again, which can cause
real problems for an organization.
But anyone can master the practice of seeking and using
feedback. The first steps, of course, are up to you. To show
your receptivity to feedback:
• Ask for and use feedback about your leadership from
multiple sources.
• Accept and act on developmental feedback.
• Acknowledge your shortcomings.
• Display humility.
• Hold yourself to high expectations.
Then, Widen the Circle
With feedback it’s not a “less is more” but a “more is more”
opportunity. The more perspectives you gather, the more
likely you are to get the true message people are sending.
Consider asking:
• Your manager for perspective on how you’re leading
the team, how you’re communicating back up to him,
and how well you work with peers.
• Your peers to provide perspectives on your interdepart-
mental collaborations and insights from customers.
• Your direct reports, who can let you know if you’re
communicating your expectations clearly and appropri-
ately seeking their input in your decision making.
• Your customers to share their perspectives on your and
your team’s performance.
Leaders who are open to
feedback begin by thanking
the giver for sharing and then
asking questions to gather the
specifics. These are the leaders
who will succeed.
© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved. 11 — Table of Contents —

• Senior leaders are less likely to ask for feedback. Super-
visors will seek feedback for improvement 64 percent
of the time, while senior leaders seek it only 43 percent
of the time.
Consistent failure to seek feedback on your brand can have
a negative impact on your career. In a study of 462 leaders
in a Fortune 500 company, 77 leaders, average age of 50,
were asked to leave their organizations, after an average
tenure of 18 years. An analysis of 360-degree feedback
data collected two years prior to their dismissal found a
significant difference on a measurement of the extent to
which leaders made a constructive effort to change based
on feedback from others.
My Legacy, My Brand
Think about the legacy you want to build and how the dif-
ferentiators might help you build that brand reputation.
And, while business results are important, the only way to
achieve them is through people.
This article is adapted from the recently published book Your First
Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others
(John Wiley Sons, Inc., 2015). It is available through bookstores and
major online booksellers.
Tacy M. Byham, Ph.D., is CEO, and
Richard S. Wellins, Ph.D., senior
vice president at DDI.
Finally, Receive with Gratitude
Saying that you’re open to receiving feedback is one thing.
Actually welcoming it is another matter, especially if the
feedback challenges you in unexpected ways. It can feel like
very bad news. But you can train yourself to see feedback as
the gift it truly is.
Leaders who are open to feedback begin by thanking the
giver for sharing and then asking questions to gather the
specifics. And these are the leaders who will succeed.
Don’t like feedback surprises? Try asking team members
for feedback as a regular part of team or individual meet-
ings. This signals that you’re trying to build an environment
of trust and continuous improvement. And acting on feed-
back is even better; it demonstrates that you have room for
improvement, which makes you more approachable and
human.
Researchers Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman analyzed
the feedback-seeking behavior of 51,896 leaders over three
years. They discovered that:
• Leaders who seek more are viewed as stronger. Leaders
who actively sought feedback and looked for opportu-
nities to improve were viewed as 86 percent effective.
They topped the list. Leaders who fell lowest on the sur-
vey in terms of openness to feedback were rated as only
15 percent effective.
• Feedback-seeking behaviors decline with age. Most
people seek more early in their career, but the tendency
diminishes over time.

TRENDTRACKER
Manufacturing Leaders
Aren’t Ready to Deliver
The rich trove of data gathered for the Global Leadership Forecast 2014 ǀ 2015
included responses from 3,143 leaders and 322 human resources executives in
manufacturing organizations across 48 countries. DDI has analyzed this data
and compiled the results into a new study report, Ready-Now Leaders: Meeting
Tomorrow’s Manufacturing Talent Challenges. The report highlights the top
talent-related barriers to revenue growth and also identifies 10 proven talent
practices to reduce costs and increase revenue.
To download the report, visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
Telling Number:
9Times more likely companies
with high leadership quality and
engagement are to outperform
their peers financially.
Source: Global Leadership
Forecast 2014 ǀ 2015
We examined how various industries have
changed in the past few years and what
leadership readiness trends have emerged
since 2011 (the date of the previous Global
Leadership Forecast). Manufacturing is
at the bottom of the list in terms of leader
readiness to take on current and future
challenges.
To better understand the gap between talent analytics
practices and recognized value to the manufacturing
plant or business unit, we focused on several forms
of leadership analytics, ranging from basic to ad-
vanced. We found that 47 percent of organizations
don’t do any form of leadership analytics well. Only
one in 20 does all forms well.
Manufacturing Isn’t Leveraging
Talent Analytics
Manufacturing Leaders
Get Last Place
© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved. 13
Percent of manufacturers that do each of the five types of analytics well.
Percent of leaders rating overall leader quality as high.

Managing Performance
inReal TimeThe yearly performance
appraisal cycle should be
only a starting point.
By Andrew Gill

the year, a mid-year progress update, and an end-of-year
review. The problem with this discussion frequency, apart
from the often-questionable accuracy and completeness
of the data discussed, is that any learning moment has
been lost or delayed beyond its point of usefulness. As a
result, any “coaching” gets lost and the leader falls back
on a discussion of the results rather than how they were
achieved or not achieved—and what could have been
done differently to ensure success.
2. Data bias. When there are only two or three per-
formance discussions a year, it becomes difficult to
prepare. This is because, with the exception of the
beginning-of-the-year planning discussion, they are
backward-looking and demand both leaders and em-
ployees to keep excellent records throughout the year
or to reconstruct performance from up to 12 months
ago. This requires significant effort on everyone’s part
and invariably leads to performance appraisal discus-
sions being based on limited or incomplete data. Even
if the data is complete, performance data that is up to a
year old is, well, old.
Much changes from week to week and month to
month, and a discussion devoted in part to recounting
what happened up to a year ago can border on irrele-
vant. Just as bad is when recent performance overshad-
ows the evaluation of a year’s worth of performance,
such as when a successful—or unsuccessful—project
at year end is given too much weight when evaluating
an individual’s performance for a 12-month period.
3. Polluting the performance discussion with com-
pensation. Then there is the all-too-common practice
of lumping together the performance appraisal and
compensation discussions. This lethal combination can
inhibit open and holistic discussion about performance,
as the employee is likely to see the size of his pay in-
crease as the only metric that matters when it comes to
judging how well (or not well) he did during the year.
Also, any opportunity for a meaningful development
discussion is overshadowed by the discussion around
compensation—the real purpose of the meeting, in the
employee’s view.
A sound performance management system is
an invaluable asset to an organization. It cascades strategic
priorities down through the ranks, spells out the whats and
hows that define effective performance, promotes account-
ability, and enables leaders and employees to track and
monitor how they are performing.
But, unfortunately, even when a performance management
system is correctly focused, properly streamlined, and
functioning as intended, most leaders and employees
are not as engaged in the process as they could be. They
don’t recognize its full value and, often, don’t like going
through it.
Instead, they grudgingly participate by dutifully spending
hours compiling and filling out their performance manage-
ment documentation and sitting through a biannual per-
formance discussion with their leader. In this discussion
they find themselves justifying their ratings, defending
their “mistakes,” and explaining away their missed targets
and goals. In the end, they get their overall performance
rating, their leader signs off, and they learn what their pay
increase (if any) will be.
For their part, leaders often lack the timely and relevant
data needed to evaluate a full year’s worth of performance
accurately. The leader hopes to get through the discus-
sion without the employee voicing concerns or objections
when the leader disagrees with a rating or highlights the
employee’s need for improvement or development.
It’s all such fun! And nobody ends up looking forward to
doing it again next year.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
It’s a shame that an important process, one that offers an
opportunity to improve employee motivation and capabil-
ity is all too often seen as a challenging, time-consuming,
“check the box” biannual obligation. Yet, that’s the current
view of the performance appraisal process in most orga-
nizations. So, how has it come to this? There are multiple
reasons:
1. Infrequent discussions. Most performance appraisal
discussions occur two to three times per year—a typical
cycle includes a planning discussion at the beginning of

other words, annual and biannual performance discussions
need to be the culmination of, not a substitute for, fre-
quent, timely feedback and performance coaching.
Does this mean leaders should have their direct reports’
performance plans handy at all times, so they can have a
performance discussion at the drop of a hat? Do leaders
need to have more frequent formal performance reviews
with employees? Do employees need to keep better per-
formance records? The answers are “No,” “No,” and “Not
at all.” But there are some quick tips and best practices
that will make performance feedback and coaching more
useful—and the formal performance appraisal discussions
less painful:
Be timely. The most valuable feedback and coaching are
provided in real time—immediately after, or even before,
an event or task. For example, feedback and coaching on
a poorly handled meeting is best provided immediately
after the fact, when the experience is fresh in the minds
of both the employee and the leader. This also allows the
employee to begin taking steps to improve as soon as pos-
sible. Better yet is to have a coaching discussion with the
employee before he leads the meeting to ensure a higher
likelihood of success.
Twice a Year vs. Every Day CONVERSATIONS!
DEVEL
OPMENT
PERFOR
MANCE
DEVELO
PMENT
PERFOR
M
ANCE
Your goals
will help us...
Need help?
Let’s
discuss what
happened...
What
did
you
learn?
What’s next?
Mid-year
What do
you want
to learn?
How are
you doing?
End-of-year
Employee:“I should have done
WHAT three months ago?!!!”
Leader:“Didn't we revise your
goals six months ago?”
4. The process overshadows the discussion. Because
an annual performance appraisal requires so much
preparation, it is easier for leaders and employees to
fall into the trap of focusing on the process and forms
rather than on the discussion. This is especially likely
when a leader has numerous direct reports. Given the
challenges with the data, it is often easier to see the
performance appraisal process as an exercise in satisfy-
ing organizational expectations than as an opportunity
to have a meaningful performance discussion—a fact
reinforced by the frequent email reminders sent by HR
to leaders and employees to complete these discussions
by the designated deadline date.
MAKING PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL BETTER
Despite all the issues described above, the annual perfor-
mance appraisal cycle isn’t going away anytime soon—
it’s too deeply entrenched in most organizations. To make
the most of their organization’s performance appraisal
process, however, leaders need to break free from the
strictures of talking to their people about their job perfor-
mance just two or three times a year and incorporate per-
formance discussions into their day-to-day interactions. In

Organizations with Effective Performance Management:
The Bottom Line on Conversations
goals six months ago?”
14xmore likely to have
high-leadership strength
(DDI, GLF 2014 | 2015)
1.8xmore likely to be in top
third of financial performers
(DDI, GLF 2014 | 2015)
increase in customer retention,
revenue, and engagement
1 to 20%
(or more)
(Brandon Hall Group, 2015)
Be specific and feed it forward. Vague feedback and
coaching open the door to misunderstanding and future
disagreement. There were some things in the meeting
you could have done better may be a good way to open a
feedback and coaching discussion, but the conversation
then needs to zero in on what specifically could have
been improved upon—and to discuss specific actions the
employee can take to improve.
Explain benefits or implications. Because the dis-
cussion needs to motivate the individual to take action,
the leader needs to “sell” the importance of the feed-
back—i.e., the potential implications if the feedback isn’t
acted upon and the potential benefits if it is. Group feed-
back sessions where an entire team reflects on a recent
task or project can be an effective approach to promote
ownership and buy-in. In these settings the leader can
build on what is shared by the group, rather than being the
first to speak and leading the discussion.
Be interactive. Balancing telling and asking offers
multiple benefits. For one, it allows the leader to uncover
information about the situation she may not be aware of:
I had only been given the data to share with the group
right before the meeting. It also provides an opportunity
for the employee receiving the feedback and coaching to
self-reflect and identify where he could improve. How
do you feel you could have handled that meeting more
effectively? makes it more probable that the employee
will accept the need to develop in that area.
PERFORMANCE DISCUSSIONS
SHOULD NEVER END!
To be more effective when discussing employee perfor-
mance, leaders need to stop relying solely on the annual
performance discussion and mid-year check-in. Instead,
they need to initiate multiple and ongoing conversations
with their people about their performance—and provide
timely feedback and coaching that continues to move the
employee forward in growth and development.
These ongoing conversations are immediately relevant and
useful and, as such, they can feel supportive and personal.
Plus, a benefit of these conversations is that, when the
dreaded annual performance appraisal meeting comes
around, there are no surprises and the conversation can
focus on the future rather than rehashing the past.
To learn more about DDI’s solutions for driving effective performance
management, visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
Andrew Gill is vice president, consulting services, for DDI.

Introducing the Service Ready
Support Portal for End-Users
DDI’s new technology support portal, Service Ready, provides our
end-users with the ability to resolve technical product support issues—
online or on a mobile device. The portal enables candidates, participants,
and administrators to solve learning or assessment technology challenges
quickly and efficiently, and also provide input on DDI product development.
With Service Ready, end-users can:
+ Submit and track support tickets for technical issues 24/7.
+ Search for self-help information (in English only) on our systems and
products, 24/7 from anywhere in the world.
+ Stay up-to-date on important technology information, such as new
releases and technical specifications.
+ Provide feedback to DDI service teams and make suggestions for
new products or improvements to existing ones.
+ See alerts if there are DDI product or system outages.
To access the Service Ready portal, visit https://ddi.service-now.com/serviceready.
WHAT’S GOING ON
Are You In the List?
Recognizes India’s
Rising HR Stars
For the fourth year in a row, DDI is part-
nering with People Matters, India’s lead-
ing knowledge and media platform in the
HR space, to recognize India’s emerging
future HR leaders. The initiative Are
You In the List? is the largest to identify
dynamic HR leaders between the ages of
26 and 35 from organizations within India.
Since its inception in 2012, Are You In
the List? has drawn more than 4,500
applicants, including more than 2,000
in 2014.
Applicants go through a rigorous eight-
month journey that includes a cognitive
ability test, leadership assessment via
DDI’s Manager Ready®
, video inter-
views, and a business analysis case
study. Each applicant is evaluated
against a comprehensive Success
Profile, based in part on DDI’s
exhaustive research base.
From the process, “HR’s 25 Most Want-
ed” are identified, honored at an awards
ceremony, and profiled on the People
Matters web site.
For more information on Are You In
the List? including how to apply, visit
www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
New Lineup of DDI Events Taking Shape!
DDI is planning an exciting new lineup of webinars on the leadership and assessment
topics that matter most to you and your organization! See the current schedule of webinars and
sign up for those that meet your needs at www.ddiworld.com/events. And check back often—
more topics and dates are added regularly!events
DDI

Business Impact Leadership®
More Exciting + Engaging!
DDI has updated the Business Impact Leadership®
(BIL) development
series to create a more engaging, transformative experience for your
mid-level leaders! While each course objective remains the same, with
the updates there are numerous improvements, including:
+ A New Course—Leading with a Global Perspective—for developing
culturally-competent leaders with the best of DDI’s proven method-
ology and TMC/Berlitz’s leading-edge cultural self-insight tools. This
new course replaces Operating with a Global Perspective.
+ Updated Research and statistics within all of the course materials,
to ensure each course’s continued relevance in today’s business
environment.
+ Fine-Tuned Content drawn from feedback from our top facilitators,
including improved timing for activities, clearer instructions, and
better transitions between units.
+ A New Contemporary Design has been applied to all participant
and facilitator materials, providing the executive impact essential
for mid-level leaders.
Learn more about Business Impact LeadershipSM
, visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
DDI Courses Now Feature Mindmarker Training Reinforcement
DDI courses now are even more powerful and “sticky” thanks to a new partnership with Mindmarker, the leader
in training reinforcement. Mindmarker has developed and deployed training reinforcement for DDI’s leadership
development courses.
Many DDI courses now include custom-built Mindmarker Training Reinforcement, which is delivered to participants
through the Mindmarker app (iOS, Android, Windows, web application). Making Mindmarker Training Reinforcement
available post-training serves to increase knowledge retention and drive application toward mastery.
“This innovative, easy-to-use application automatically pushes key pieces of our content to learners, and the back-
end dashboard puts valuable information at the fingertips of our HR partners,” says Barry Stern, DDI senior vice
president, development solutions. “It’s like a mini-learning journey in a box for individuals—clearly, the right tool at
the right time.”
The Mindmarker Training Reinforcement app joins DDI’s robust toolbox for reinforcing and sustaining learning. To see an overview of all of the
available resources, visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
DDI’s UK office is moving
to the heart of London.
If you find yourself in the neighborhood,
we would love to give you a tour of our
new office. Stop by and say hello!
THE CONNECTION
198 HIGH HOLBORN, LONDON WC1V 7BD
OUR NEW NEIGHBORHOOD

Annette Matthies, chief human resources officer
of Elevations Credit Union, has been talking for several
minutes when she politely punctuates her lengthy response
to a question with a statement of self-awareness.
“I’ll take a moment and breathe. I’m really passionate
about this part of our business, in case you couldn’t tell.”
The part of the business that has sparked Matthies’ pas-
sion is the range of improved talent initiatives the Boul-
der, Colorado-based credit union has put in place in re-
cent years, including succession management, leadership
development, talent acquisition, and new-hire orientation
(see “How to … Help New Employees Start Strong” on
page 24). This spate of initiatives helped the 388-employ-
ee organization become the first-ever credit union to win
the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
in 2014, the U.S.’s highest level of recognition for perfor-
mance excellence.
It’s not the Baldrige Award, however, that sets Elevations
apart when it comes to talent, although the systemization,
application of best practices, replicable processes, bench-
marking, and metrics that led to the honor are what make
Elevations an organization from which others can learn.
What is most admirable is embodied by Elevations’ em-
ployee value proposition: “The best place you have ever
worked.”
INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP
Elevations Credit Union began in 1953 with a single branch
located on the campus of the University of Colorado in
Boulder. Today, the credit union has more than 110,000
members, assets in excess of $1.5 billion, and 11 branches
serving seven counties in and around metropolitan Denver.
While the organization experienced steady growth during
its first half century, it wasn’t until Gerry Agnes came on
board as president and CEO in 2008 that Elevations began
taking its talent focus to a new level. The impetus was Ag-
nes’ goal of winning the Baldrige award.
The Baldrige program, established by the U.S. Congress
in 1987, recognizes manufacturers, service organizations,
and small businesses for their achievements in quality and
business performance. The program also aims to raise
awareness about the importance of quality and perfor-
mance excellence in gaining a competitive edge.
For Elevations, pursuit of the Baldrige award provided an
organizational focal point, but, even more important, the
effort to attain the accolade served to bring structure and
discipline to its objectives around better serving the cred-
it union’s 110,000-plus members. These member-centric
objectives are part of Elevations’ five-year strategic plan,
which the organization has tied directly to the architecture
of its talent systems.
“THE BEST PLACE YOU
HAVE EVER WORKED”
Unified talent processes helped Elevations Credit Union win
the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

“It starts first with employee engagement. If our employees
are engaged and giving everything they’ve got every sin-
gle day, and they are happy in their jobs and fulfilled, that
translates into more and stronger member loyalty,” explains
Matthies. “We then have members that want to continue to
do business with us, because it’s an enjoyable experience.
They feel like we are trusted advisors. And the more mem-
ber loyalty we have, that translates directly into financial
sustainability, and we have an organization that can then
take care of our employees. So, it’s really an interdependent
relationship.”
To optimize this interdependent relationship, Elevations
sought to bolster its existing talent processes. The first step
was adopting a competency framework around which to in-
tegrate all of these processes and establish consistency and
a common leadership language across all levels. The com-
petencies also served to operationalize and reinforce the or-
ganizations strategic and cultural priorities.
“When we looked at DDI’s competencies, there were sev-
eral things we liked about the model, especially how the
competencies have very clear definitions,” says Matthies.
Matthies and her team worked with the Elevations’ execu-
tive team to begin proactive succession planning, using the
competencies as a basis. This process entailed consulting
the five-year strategic plan, and determining what the org
chart would need to look like and where there were talent
gaps to be addressed.
“In the Baldrige application, they asked us questions about
succession planning and developing our future leaders,
and doing it in a very systematic way so that it’s repeat-
able and that every time that we repeat it, we could then
look at what we did and improve upon it and measure it,”
says Matthies.
Toward addressing its talent gaps, Elevations launched a
four-level pipeline leadership training initiative. The four
programs in the initiative, which incorporate courses from
DDI’s Interaction Management®
and Business Impact
Leadership®
leadership development systems, include
a pre-leadership track called Base Camp Leadership to
prepare high-potential individual contributors for future
opportunities in management and leadership. Participants
in this program can choose to take elective courses that
align with their career goals.
A program for new managers, Foothills Leadership, pro-
vides the skills and knowledge to be a successful leader at
Elevations. All participants in this program are required to
complete a curriculum covering topics such as communica-
tion, coaching, and developing others. Part of the program
also includes being trained in DDI’s behavioral interview-
ing system, Targeted Selection®
.
The program for incumbent managers, Tree Line Leader-
ship, enhances the core skills leaders already possess. The
program requires each participant to attend a course called
Building a Career Development Plan and is tailored to meet
the individual needs of each leader based on his or her ca-
reer goals and leadership style. Upon completing 100 hours
of coursework, leaders in the program complete a 360 as-
sessment to measure the progress they’ve made throughout
their leadership journey.
Seasoned senior leaders take part in a program called Sum-
mit Leadership, in which they continue to refresh and add
new ideas and approaches to their leadership tool kits. As
with Tree Line Leadership, this program is tailored to ad-
dress each manager’s career goals and leadership style, and
requires participants to collaborate with senior leaders or
executive coaches to review and refresh their development
plans. Once they’ve taken that step, they complete an ad-
ditional 100 hours of coursework, drawing on a variety of
courses and learning methodologies, and then complete a
360 assessment to measure their progress.
“Once we started on the Baldrige journey, we had a stronger
leadership focus and the reason for that is the framework
Baldrige provides,” says Matthies, referring to the Criteria
for Performance Excellence that Elevations closely adhered
to in preparing to apply for the award. “We know that em-
ployees will more likely leave their managers than their
company, so the relationship with those leaders is really im-
portant. You need to have strong leaders.”
TAKING HIRING HIGHER
The adoption of the competency framework also offered
Elevations an opportunity to create a better hiring process
by implementing DDI’s competency-based Targeted Selec-
tion®
behavioral interviewing system. Targeted Selection®
enabled Elevations to standardize its interviewing process
across all jobs and locations. The system also provided

interviewers with job-relevant questions that more accurate-
ly assess for motivational fit and an interviewing experience
that makes a positive impression on candidates. Impressing
candidates throughout the selection process is important to
Elevations, because even those who aren’t hired are still
coveted as credit union members.
“When we started looking at Targeted Selection, we saw
that it would be a really nice complement,” says Matthies.
“It would enable us to ensure that the talent we’re bringing
into the organization is not only a good culture fit, but also a
match with the competencies required for the job. And then,
because we are using the same competencies for hiring that
we are for development, it also ties nicely into the develop-
ment that we’re doing on the succession planning side, and
also for career development for all employees.”
What’s more, Elevations found that the more standardized
interviewing process allowed it to more efficiently gath-
er the information needed to make high-quality hiring
decisions.
“Before, because of multiple branch locations, a candidate
would need to interview with different managers and it
was a time-consuming process,” says Kim Felton, senior
vice president, retail banking. “When we went to Targeted
Selection, with its standardized questions and data inte-
gration sessions where interviewers discuss the data they
gathered from the candidates, we found that we gathered
a lot more information and it really did work. We were
excited about that.”
Since implementing Targeted Selection, Elevations has
seen marked improvement in employee turnover. Its an-
nual turnover rate in 2010 was 26 percent. By 2014 it had
dropped to 19 percent—a figure five percentage points
below the 24-percent benchmark the organization aims to
match or exceed.
“We have built an incredible team, having people in place
that like our culture and environment and that can succeed
here,” says Felton. “I think we have found the people that
really want to be here and have excelled.”
HOW TO WIN A BALDRIGE
Agnes believed it would take Elevations several years and
multiple attempts to win the Baldrige. Instead, Elevations
won the award in 2014, upon its first time applying at the
national level—an outcome that was a pleasant surprise to all.
“We thought it would take 10, 15, 20 years to achieve,” says
Matthies, who believes the honor came Elevations’ way
because the entire organization was focused on the goal and
involved in the effort to make it happen.
The expectation that winning the award would be a long-
term goal stemmed from all that is entailed in becoming
Baldrige worthy.
“It’s basically performance management as an organiza-
tion,” says Pete Reicks, senior vice president of enterprise
performance, pointing out that Elevations, in accordance
with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, sys-
temized areas such as strategic planning and operations,
in addition to its talent systems. “The Baldrige standards
dictate that performance has to be trended over time and,
where possible, matched to external benchmarks so we
know how we’re doing relative to both in-market and in-in-
dustry benchmarks, as well as out-of-industry, world-class
benchmarks. The standards are very rigorous. You can’t just
tell a story. You have to have numbers that align with your
story, and those numbers need to be not just how you’ve
performed over time, but how you’ve performed compared
with best-in-class role models.”
“Part of the Baldrige framework, I believe, is to really make
sure those processes are repeatable and measurable and that
you can improve on them over time,” says Matthies, allud-
ing to Elevations’ “huge effort” since 2009 to document
processes and put them in place.
“ALL IN” EVERY DAY
By adopting the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excel-
lence, Elevations made significant progress in several areas.
It expanded its membership by 35 percent, grew assets 53
percent and deposits 51 percent, and increased consumer
loan production 189 percent. Elevations also became the top
credit union provider of mortgages in Colorado.
“We know that employees will more
likely leave their managers than their
company. You need to have strong
leaders.”

— Table of Contents —24
On the talent side, Elevations has also seen a 17-per-
cent rise in employee engagement, a result that
helped the credit union rank as finalist in the Soci-
ety for Human Resource Management’s 2015 Best
Companies to Work for in Colorado competition.
While the higher engagement levels can be tied to
its stronger leaders, Elevations’ organizational cul-
ture, which is rooted in its core values, and its em-
phasis on career planning have also contributed to
these higher levels.
“If you were to walk around Elevations, you would
hear story after story of people who have started in
entry-level roles and have grown in the organiza-
tion,” says Ellie Fordyce, assistant vice president,
human resources. “I am one of them. I started as
a teller, and now I help lead the department. But
there are dozens of people who have found a ca-
reer here because of all the tools that we’ve given
our employees.”
The opportunities for upward mobility, the avail-
able tools, and the commitment to process-driven
continuous improvement have combined to make
Elevations not only an award-winning workplace,
but a special one.
“Our goal is for this to be the best place that every-
one has ever worked,” says Matthies. “Looking at
our employee engagement surveys, for the vast ma-
jority of our employees, it is. But we’re still trying
to get better every single day and really just truly
making this an enjoyable place where you feel like
you have opportunities to learn and grow every year
and to have your strengths utilized.”
“I, for one, can honestly say this is the best place
I’ve ever worked. I’m pretty proud of that, and I’m
going to fight pretty hard to make sure it stays that
way,” says Reicks. “So, I am ‘all in’ every day.”
To learn more about DDI’s competency library, Interaction
Management®
, Business Impact Leadership®
, and Targeted
Selection®
visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine.
HOW TO. . . HELP NEW
EMPLOYEES START STRONG
Making what chief human resources officer Annette
Matthies describes as “a major investment” in its
workforce, Elevations puts all of its new hires through
a comprehensive four-week new-employee orientation
program at its Wilderness Peaks Support Center facility,
where most of the credit union’s back office operations are
located. This program has proved to be so valuable that
Elevations extended it to existing employees in order to
give them the same experience and information. Here’s
just some of what’s included in the month-long experience.
• Meeting senior leaders. Elevations runs the new-
employee orientation program every month, and on
the first day of each session, members of Elevations’
executive team attend to introduce themselves and
even assist in delivering the training. Matthies points
out that while it’s not unheard of for senior leaders to
meet and greet new employees at orientation sessions,
the fact that Elevations’ executives do it every month is
“a huge commitment.”
• Learning through simulation. The facility where the
orientation program is conducted features a simulated
teller window where new hires can practice customer
interactions and learn Elevations’ approach to selling
services to meet member needs. This opportunity is im-
portant because not all new hires come from a financial
services background. “We are looking for people that
have specific competencies and not necessarily bank
experience,” says Ellie Fordyce, assistant vice presi-
dent, human resources.
• Volunteering in the community. The new employees
are introduced to Elevations’ dedication to the com-
munity by taking part in a half day of volunteer work.
“We take the entire training class on what we call our
volunteer time off, and have that scheduled as part of
the new-employee orientation, just so they can expe-
rience it because it’s so much of who we are as an
organization,” says Kim Felton, senior vice president,
retail banking. The experience is about more than
team-building; time off to volunteer is a benefit offered
to all Elevations employees.
© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved. — Table of Contents —

— Table of Contents —25© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved.
Talent Ready for Business
It’s a gap that can be catastrophic
to your organization.
Your mid-level leaders play a critical role in achieving your strategic
goals. Yet there is no assessment that provides a clear picture of
their readiness to execute and lead. How long do you think you
can hang on if you fail to close that gap?
That’s why we’ve developed Leader3 Ready®
, a virtual assessment
designed for mid-level leaders.
What if you could gain:
1. Deeper insights to make crucial hiring and promotion decisions?
2. A development catalyst to ensure leaders are successful in their
current roles while accelerating their development?
3. Greater reach into your mid-level leader population resulting in
more leaders ready faster?
With the right assessment, you’ll have actionable data to inform the
real-time talent and business decisions you need to make today.
Learn how you can close the gap and jumpstart your mid-level
leaders now with Leader3 Ready®
.
Leader3 Ready®
. It’s about time. Visit www.ddiworld.com/L3-TD.
The difference between hoping and knowing your next generation of leaders is ready.

COFFEE
ON THE
GO WITH
DAVID
ROBERTSON
The innovation expert and author
of a book on LEGO discusses the
human side of innovation.
LEGO construction bricks are ubiquitous toys played with
by children—and also many adults—the world over. LEGO
was also, of course, the inspiration for the wildly success-
ful 2014 film The LEGO Movie. But in the early 2000s,
LEGO’s story was far different; the Denmark-based com-
pany was in trouble, with its sales in free fall. How LEGO
employed innovation to turn itself around is the subject
of the book Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules
of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by
David Robertson, a highly regarded expert on innovation
and product development. A professor at the Wharton
School of the University of Pennsylvania, Robertson
researches innovation management and consults to U.S.
and European companies on reaping the returns from
their innovation investments.
Robertson spoke with GO about the challenge of defining
innovation, LEGO’s lessons for other companies, and the
role HR must play in driving innovation.
GO: How would you define innovation?
ROBERTSON: I think the definition of innovation is chang-
ing. It used to be about developing the next product, the
next car, the next widget, the next whatever. And I think
we’ve evolved that pretty significantly, and we’re now re-
alizing innovation can be lots of different things. It’s not
just products but also services and channels to market,
business models, ways of pricing things, internal process-
es, etc. When Ford invented the assembly line, that was
innovation. When Dell changed the way you configure and
assemble and deliver personal computers, that was also
innovation. The problem is that we’re caught up in this
trade-off, this dichotomy, this balance between incremen-
tal and radical innovation.
GO: By radical innovation, do you mean what’s often
referred to as disruptive innovation?
ROBERTSON: Yes, disruptive, little versus big. I think this
is a dangerous way to think about it because what many
companies are doing—LEGO is one of the best at this—
is actually getting all the benefits of big innovation from
well-integrated little innovations. In other words, by doing
lots of little things and putting them together really well,
they get all the competitive advantage of a big innovation
without the risk. I feel LEGO’s story has lessons for every
company. That’s the reason I wrote Brick by Brick.

GO: Is innovation something that morphs over time,
or is it more of an absolute that gets interpreted and
executed differently as we move forward?
ROBERTSON: I think it’s something that every company
has to define for itself. You have to think both where and
where not you are going to innovate. I had a wonderful con-
versation with the head of marketing for a Triple A baseball
team, a very innovative company that cannot innovate at all
around the core product. I mean, baseball is baseball. But
they’re doing amazing things about the experience around
baseball. They’re doing all kinds of things: giveaway nights,
rebranded uniforms and logos, new mascot, even video
games in the restrooms. Their challenge is unique, right?
When a minor league baseball team becomes successful,
the corporate parent is going to reach in, take their good
players, yank them out, and make the product bad again.
They have the worst corporate parent, one who demands
profitability yet works to sabotage the product. Like many
companies, this organization is making lots of small, fair-
ly safe innovations, but creating a compelling proposition
that’s hard to match.
GO: Why do you think so many companies struggle
with innovation?
ROBERTSON: I think companies struggle because they’re
always structured and organized around the last big in-
novation. Organizational structure and process are lag-
ging indicators of innovation success. They show us that
we did a big innovation successfully many years before
and now the way we hire people, the way we train them,
the processes we use, the rewards systems we set up—
everything we do is around that last big innovation, which
makes the next one difficult because we’ve become very
good at the old way of doing things. And then when com-
panies find an opportunity to do something really new and
different, they have trouble fitting it into that structure and
those processes.
GO: What’s the human side of innovation? How
should organizations align talent with doing some-
thing new?
ROBERTSON: The human side of it is that everybody
should be thinking about innovation in the company. Too
often I’ve seen companies where innovation is for the en-
gineers and RD, but if you think about innovation more
broadly than that, if you think about innovation as some-
thing more than just products, then you have to involve
many more people from inside the company and start part-
nering with other companies outside the company.
As an example, there are lots of different people at Apple
who are always thinking about not only the next little de-
vice, but also with whom they should partner to bring in
more interesting content and how they can innovatively
market it. When Apple came out with the iPod, it was a
nice little device but a fairly incremental improvement over
what already existed. iTunes, on the other hand, where
you can buy one song at a time and not have to buy the
whole CD, and the way they then expanded it to be not
just music but movies, books, and apps—there’s the true
innovation. Apple partnered with a lot of people—record
companies, book publishers, movie studios, app devel-
opment companies—to create an entire Apple ecosystem
that makes owning the iPod, then the iPhone and iPad,
much more valuable.
GO: What’s your sense of ways in which HR is innovat-
ing, and how can it become more innovative?
ROBERTSON: I think HR is really critical as we change
innovation from something that just engineers do to some-
thing that lots of people do. HR must create all kinds of
new roles, new processes, and rewards systems. HR’s job
is, in part, to help with this kind of organizational design,
to be that thought partner with the management team, to
think about people structure—who’s going to be in the key
roles, how to think about succession planning, careers,
annual reviews, and so forth. If you don’t get that right, you
kill everything in terms of innovation. You doom yourself to
the same stuff that you’ve been doing in the past, and your
competition is going to surpass you. If HR isn’t on board
and really helping to restructure, rethink, and redo the way
the organization works—then all this falls apart.
David Robertson’s book, Brick by Brick: How LEGO
Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the
Global Toy Industry is available through bookstores
and major online booksellers.

Milton Bradley, as many of us fondly remember,
makes timeless and beloved board games like Life, Candy
Land, Chutes and Ladders, and of course, Monopoly. Rand
McNally makes maps and (since the GPS revolution) direc-
tional guidance systems. Substantially less beloved, though
very useful.
These products don’t have much to do with careers, but
they do have a lot to do with paths, and in our Global Lead-
ership Forecast 2014|2015, which drew on data from more
than 13,000 leaders from 48 countries, we isolated under-
standing one’s career path as the single strongest influence
on three key leader outcomes. As shown to the left, a clear
path—along with having opportunities to give open feed-
back to senior leaders about the organization’s strategy and
culture—was one of only two leadership experiences to be
a top driver of all three outcomes. These outcomes include
Employee Development Focus (active pursuit of opportu-
nities to develop one’s employees), Engagement (leaders’
own involvement in the job), and Retention (leaders’ intent
to remain at the organization long-term).
When Building
Career Paths, Think
Milton Bradley
—Not Rand McNally
By Evan Sinar, Ph.D.
Leadership experiences that drive positive organizational outcomes.
28© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved.
A career isn’t a map: Why organizations need to change how they think about career pa
ths.

they put programs in place to hone in on this topic
so that managers know how to keep leaders moving
and to spot and take advantage when new paths
unexpectedly open up.
3. Having deeply rooted coaching and mentoring
networks in place. These include one’s own man-
ager of course, but also other internal and external
mentors who have “played the game” and who can
objectively advise on options for what’s next—es-
pecially what to do when rolls of the dice don’t go
a leader’s way or a move leads to a disappointing
dead-end.
4. Developing managers to lead across generations.
Millennial leaders value having an awareness of a
range of possible paths that may lie ahead—NOT
a single route from point A to point B as on a map.
Managers need the know-how to tap into this mo-
tivator, as well as those that are important to other
generational groups, and to flex their coaching styles
accordingly.
5. Deploying a broad range of developmental
assignments. Special projects and rotational
assignments provide concrete yet temporary opportu-
nities for career exploration, and, when designed well,
these “detours” are almost always win-win. They
allow promising leaders to move on—perhaps even
using a newly discovered shortcut. For those that
aren’t, they can easily take a couple of steps back
and try something else.
These five talent practices differentiate organizations
leading the way with high-caliber career pathing for their
leaders, from those falling behind and absorbing the
dangerous consequences impacting leader engagement,
retention, and passion for development. Each practice
also has a clear “Now What” implication for other compa-
nies facing similar challenges, as outlined above.
This is an important part of the story, but we also wanted
to dive even deeper—and explore what the many, very
vocal, leaders who are struggling with career clarity need
from their organizations.
THE LEADER’S VIEW OF CAREER PATHING
We looked further behind the numbers to hear from the
most frustrated set of the 13,000+ leaders included in
STRONGEST INFLUENCES ON
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT FOCUS,
RETENTION, AND ENGAGEMENT
As we looked more closely at this data, we wanted
to know: If career pathing is so essential, under what
conditions does it flourish? The deeper we dug, the more
the data kept directing us to concepts alive and well in
games like the ones mentioned above—but nearly gone
from road atlases or mobile navigation apps.
Certainly, a career isn’t a “game,” but it’s even less
so a fixed map, where distance and time to reach
a pre-determined destination can be projected
down to the meter and minute. Because of this,
we can learn much more from the way Milton
Bradley designs timeless board games than we
can from how Rand McNally plots (and constantly
updates) highways, cities, and landmarks.
THE FIVE KEYS TO CAREER
PATHING SUCCESS
In our data analysis, we saw related themes pop up over
and over again in each of two ways we took the Global
Leadership Forecast research further.
First, for leaders who DO clearly understand their career
trajectory, how do organizations “set up the board” to get
them there? Our research found five keys to career path-
ing success for these organizations—in each case, those
taking these steps have leaders with significantly higher
levels of career path clarity:
1. Clearly defining the competencies leaders need
to be successful. This one is simple: Without know-
ing what the best player of a game does differently
from the rest (and how much is due purely to luck),
it’s impossible for leaders to come up with a strate-
gy for getting and applying these skills. Importantly,
competencies—as opposed to knowledge or techni-
cal skills—extend beyond individual jobs, to avoid a
myopic focus on a single “best fit” career track.
2. Training managers to identify and develop
future talent. Creating and reinforcing career plans
for ambitious leaders is a distinct and extremely chal-
lenging skill for managers, especially when ambiguity
is the reality. Companies that do this well don’t make
leaders figure out the rules on their own; instead,

the research—to ascertain what they needed to regain
confidence in their organization’s career-pathing efforts.
Leaders disappointed with their career guidance were
very vocal about what must change—generating plenty of
useful, constructive feedback for organizations.
What do these disgruntled leaders want their organizations
to hear about career pathing do’s and don’ts? Four words
captured the spirit of their suggestions:
Expectations—Give the basics about what’s realistic for
me to consider and prepare for; should I only be thinking
of moves straight up a ladder, or do many people move
sideways? Are moves regularly spaced or are there
times when I’m likely to plateau for a while before moving
again? Do I have skill gaps that I absolutely must close
before I can pursue a particular path?
Aspirations—Ask me, don’t assume, where I want to be
several steps from now. My manager should know and
help me work towards these goals, of course, but should
also support me in finding other mentors within the com-
pany too; I’ll tell them things I wouldn’t tell my manager.
Transparency—I won’t commit long-term unless I know
where we’re headed and how I fit in. Tell me what you can
or risk me assuming that there’s a mismatch between my
personal goals and the company’s overall strategy…and
quitting before you can prove me wrong.
Exposure—Connect me to senior leaders for their advice
and perspective on how I can grow within the company
to help it succeed—this may mean moving ahead on my
current path or moving to another track where my skills
will add value, and I may make faster long-term progress.
On the surface, many of these sentiments lead back to a
“roadmap” model where leaders expect organizations to
be definitive about what’s next and when. But that view-
point isn’t giving leaders nearly enough credit. Lead-
ers—particularly those getting open information about the
organization’s status and their own strengths and weak-
nesses—fully recognize that risk, uncertainty, and even
randomness play key roles in what paths open up, and
how long they stay open.
Which brings us back to the board game analogy: Lead-
ers moving down a path won’t always know exactly where
that path leads, or how long it will take to get there. For
HR or their managers to promise them otherwise would
be unrealistic and demotivating. But what HR and manag-
ers can offer is attentiveness, connectivity to the business,
and most importantly, openness: about formal and infor-
mal rules, about chance versus skill, about next steps in a
career sometimes being sideways or even backward, and
about balancing a single, long-term goal with awareness
that there are many ways to get from here to there.
Ultimately, the dice go in the leader’s hand—but before
they roll, it’s the job of HR and managers to set up a
board that leaders will find explanatory, reinforcing, and
engaging—no matter what numbers come up.
Evan Sinar, Ph.D., is DDI’s chief scientist and director
of the Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research
(CABER).
30© Development Dimensions International, Inc., 2015. All rights reserved.
FOLLOW @DDIworld THOUGHT LEADERSHIP DELIVERED DAILY

Global Leadership
Forecast 2014|2015
Multinational Sub-Report
As part of the Global Leadership
Forecast 2014|2015 study, this
sub-report highlights findings on
the current state of leadership and
leadership practices in multinational
companies (MNCs). The findings are
based on responses from 2,972 lead-
ers and 383 human resource execu-
tives in multinational organizations.
Performance Management:
Coaching for Development
Needed
The business imperative for perfor-
mance management is undeniable,
yet organizations everywhere seem
disenchanted with the effectiveness
of their approach and processes.
In Brandon Hall Group’s latest Perfor-
mance Management Study, co-spon-
sored by DDI, 71 percent of organi-
zations say their current approach
to managing performance needs
improvement, even reinvention.
Optimized Competency
Management
Look inside this guidebook to
learn how to ensure alignment
and consistency by:
+ Setting a clear line of sight
from strategy to capabilities
and contributions of individuals.
+ Accelerating the adoption of
competencies, and embracing
the value of competencies as
a business success enabler.

3 Must Do’s For
Developing Leaders
This recorded webinar will explore
how organizations are incorporating
the three must-do’s when developing
leaders: using competency models
to align programs that drive strategy
and culture, prioritizing implemen-
tation details that deliver the most
impact, and putting into place lead
and lag measures to sustain and
prove results.
DDI Plant Leadership Series
The DDI Plant Leadership five-part
series presents findings from the
MPI Manufacturing Study. This study,
conducted by the Manufacturing
Performance Institute (part of the MPI
Group), was based on responses from
319 manufacturing plants, encom-
passing a range of industries and
sizes.
Intact Insurance
Read how Intact Insurance launched
development programs for leaders at
multiple levels, resulting in a four-
percent improvement in employee
engagement.
Information
You CanUse!
Visit www.ddiworld.com/GOmagazine

New
Book![ AVAILABLE NOW ] www.YourFirstLeadershipJob.com
1225 Washington Pike
Bridgeville, PA 15017-2838
Excerpt Page 9

GO Magazine 2015 Vol. 13, No. 2

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (16)

More from DDI | Development Dimensions International

More from DDI | Development Dimensions International (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

GO Magazine 2015 Vol. 13, No. 2