We provide four services that can help you to optimize your organizational structure;
We've described how we asses leadership skills on our HR page. On the present page, we explain how we identify and describe leadership skills, compare employee skills with job demands, and contribute to hiring and promotion criteria. We also describe our research partnerships—opportunities for clients to obtain Dr. Dawson's services at a ridiculously low rate (if your needs align with DTS's research objectives).
The process of identifying and describing essential leadership skills is multifaceted. We include three sources of information:
In the tabs below, we expand on how we use these information sources.
Much of the leadership literature has a "bandwagon" feel to it. It seems that many leadership writers are either establishing the latest fad or capitalizing on it. Even the academic leadership literature often seems faddish, with researchers dismissing older research findings in favor of findings that support the latest "hot" theory.
Despite these problems, there is a vast leadership literature full of promising new ideas and robust insights that have withstood the test of time. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we seek out the highest quality research and writing and use it, along with the expertise of your managers, to ground our work.
We regard all of our organizational research activities as partnerships. We do not see ourselves as omnipotent experts, who know everything of importance about running an organization. But don't get us wrong, we're not all that humble; we have some very specialized and useful skills. It's just that we can't do what we do without your knowledge and expertise. That's why we begin every research project by getting to know you and your employees. We tend to do a lot of interviewing.
We do this because we need to understand, in detail, the structure of your organization, your vision for the organization, and your understanding of issues that may be holding your organization back. And we need to know how each of these things is understood and gets translated into action at every level.
What we learn about your organization, combined with what we know about successful organizations, makes it possible for us to describe two states for your company—the real and the ideal.
As we're sure you've already noted, an aspect of our work involves interviewing employees. Part of the reason for doing these interviews is to understand the task demands of different levels of management in your organization. This provides the information we need to describe the ideal complexity structure of your institution.
The next step is to see how well the task demands of management positions line up with the skills of managers in those positions. To find out, we examine the skills, attitudes, and preferences of your managers with customized online assessments. This provides us with the information we need to describe the real complexity structure of your organization.
Every assessment we do serves two functions. First, we put it to work for our clients, as described above, then we strip it of personal information and add it to our research database. We already have thousands of cases in this database, which we are using to study (1) how manager's skills develop over time and (2) what factors seem to foster or stall ongoing development. Everything we learn becomes part of the knowledge base we bring to bear upon our academic and business activities.
After we have completed our analysis of employee interviews and assessments, we design maps of the real and ideal complexity structures of your organization. Superimposing the Real Map over the Ideal Map instantly reveals areas of strength and weakness in your organization's structure. Click here to see an example of a simple Organization Map.
Our service doesn't end there. Because we have studied how manager's skills develop, we can make specific recommendations for manager training that will bring managers up to the level of their jobs' task demands. In fact, we can generate assessment reports that tell each manager what he or she needs to learn next to advance to the next level.
While you're optimizing your organization by improving the fit between the task demands of jobs and manager's skills, we can help you reduce false positive hiring decisions by providing cognitive developmental assessments for your screening process.
See the HR page for more information about our assessments.
If you have questions about your organization that happen to coincide with questions we're particularly interested in addressing, we may be interested in working with you at a reduced rate. We love researching new questions of broad significance, and especially like doing work that allows us to build on our knowledge base. If you think you have a particularly appealing question or issue, contact us.
If you are interested any of our services, would like to follow up on a special offer, or would like more information, please call 413-303-1484 between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM EST or contact us us anytime.
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