Accomplishment-Based Talent Development: Focus on Employees’ Valuable Contributions | Recorded Webinar

You will learn about the origin and evolution of accomplishment-based performance improvement, based on the work of Thomas F. Gilbert in his groundbreaking book, Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. The webinar will highlight how a focus on accomplishments – the valuable products of people’s behavior – differs from traditional approaches to talent management that focus on skills, knowledge, behavior, or competencies, and how an accomplishment-based approach can drive more effective and measurable strategies and tactics for improving organizational and individual performance. You’ll learn about an end-to-end accomplishment-based talent development model for hiring, on-boarding, coaching, training, and continuous development that improves our ability to define and measure performance, and connects people’s daily work to the success of the organization.

Talent acquisition and development efforts often suffer from a lack of clarity about performance expectations. When we define jobs by the work outputs they contribute to the organization, including deliverables, decisions, relationships, transactions, agreements, new ideas and prototypes, and so on, it’s easier to define at each stage what we need people to produce or achieve. We can more easily create behavioral interviewing questions and performance tests, on-board new employees based on the contributions we need them to master during their first weeks and months on the job, train them with accomplishments as objectives, coach and mentor them for continuous improvement in the value they deliver to the organization, and make decisions about compensation, promotion, and career path moves. This clarity not only can improve productivity of individuals and groups, but it can also help to optimize their engagement and job satisfaction by making every day an opportunity for development, and by connecting employees through their contributions on a clear line-of-sight to results for the whole organization.

Beyond accomplishment-based hiring, on-boarding, and training, coaching becomes a critical engine for continuous development. As described in a notable Harvard Business Review article in 2018, called HR Goes Agile, many of the organizations known for development of people rely on a regular cadence of coaching by which employees and their managers focus on continuous improvement. When that coaching is a collaborative effort enabling individuals to better achieve or produce the contributions (accomplishments) that are most important at the time – for the business, for upcoming projects, for their own career development, and so on – it becomes a tangible, ongoing process of development and recognition for delivering new and improved contributions. Such an approach offers the promise of creating an organizational culture focused on continuous performance improvement.