New Skills for New Roles
Issue: BellSouth Advertising and Publishing Company had undergone a major process improvement effort, resulting in new roles and skills for many of its key employees. These roles and skills needed to be clarified and documented and a process put in place to train for new skills.
Solution: The Odyssey Group conducted competency modeling sessions for all major functional groups. Training in coaching skills helped managers adapt to the demands of their re-engineered roles and development planning programs prepared everyone for the development they needed to sustain and improve performance in the new environment.
Results: Competency models were developed for seven distinct roles in the organization, identifying the skills that supported these roles, and the levels at which these competencies should be performed. This information was rolled out to staff in a series of workshop sessions in which each person received 360 feedback on their current performance, learned new skills associated with the changing roles, and created a plan for closing skill gaps indicated in their individual assessments. To ensure continuity in this effort, The Odyssey Group led a train-the-trainer session to build internal capacity for leading these programs.