Our organizational consulting practice offers a variety of services that will ensure that your organizational structure and management processes support your mission and long-term continuity.

Services Include

Strategic Talent Planning

The goal of talent planning is to ensure that the organization’s structure, talent plan, and talent processes are congruent with the overall strategic plan. This work is especially critical for organizations experiencing changes such as rapid growth, retirement of a key leader, or other company modifications. Specific services include:

• Talent needs analysis – This involves assessing current leadership resources as well as projected needs in key leadership areas i.e. People Leadership, Thought Leadership, Operational Leadership and Client Leadership (see below).  This will help to identify:
  • The group’s unique mix of leadership needs (while all organizations need leadership in all four areas, individual groups differ in their requirements.
  • Concentrations of leadership that represent key man risk i.e. all Thought Leadership coming from a single individual
  • Gaps where current leadership resources are inadequate i.e. too large spans of control
  • Gaps where there will be inadequate leadership resources based on projected needs or growth
• Organization design
• Identification and development of high potentials

We have talent planning tools and resources that can be immediately leveraged or customized.

 Competency Modeling

Organizations use competency models to:

• Communicate to their employees, clients, investors, and shareholders their performance expectations.
• To identify the skills and abilities needed to meet performance expectations.  Skills can include areas such as technical skills, decision making, relationship skills, and individual attributes.
• Act as a central foundation for all management processes, including selection, performance management, goal setting and planning, and development.
• Help preserve their unique culture and market advantage.

We have developed competency models for organizations that cut across functions and businesses (one single company wide leadership model) and we have developed models for specific functions (for example Investment Banking, Sales, Finance, Risk etc.)..

Design and Optimization of Talent Processes

We have done extensive work designing or improving core talent processes, such as:

• Performance management – This includes simple as well as highly-structured 360/multi rater quantitative processes.
• Hiring – We can help with full range of hiring practices including job analysis, screening, testing, interviewing, decision making, and on-boarding.
• Development planning – This includes empowering individuals to take control of their development as well as equipping managers to effectively coach their employees.

Selection Research

We offer a wide variety of services all designed to improve selection of key employee groups including:

• Job analysis – Studies to identify individual knowledge, skills, abilities, or traits (KSAs) that distinguish high performers
• Selecting test battery – Identifying or designing tests to measure targeted KSAs
• Validity studies – Quantitative studies to determine if tests predict job performance. This involves correlating test and job performance data.

We have conducted selection studies on a wide variety of executive, management, professional, sales, and client service roles. We have experience with a variety of types of test measures such as cognitive, personality, biodata, and more.

Group Assessment

We provide assessments to identify and address a targeted group’s weaknesses are impeding effectiveness.   Often issues are related to group dynamics, processes, level of staffing or structure. In some cases issues may also stem from individual leadership behavior and can be addressed within the context of coaching.

Group assessment often includes:

• Collecting data on various dimensions of group effectiveness (i.e. clarity of strategy, communication, decision making, talent acquisition & development, conflict resolution, collaboration etc.).  Data collection involves interviews with group employees at different levels as well as a sampling of key stakeholders outside of the group (i.e. service providers, clients, senior management etc.).  Typically group statistics and measures are also reviewed (i.e. staffing levels, measures of workload, performance measures, effectiveness measures, survey data etc.).
• Summarizing and communicating themes to senior group management. In addition to reviewing assessment results, plans for communicating results to the team as well as intervention options are discussed.
• Working with broader group leadership to communicate and explain themes, develop solutions and associated action plans.  Often this takes the form of a half day to 1.5 day session.
• Check ins with stakeholders to determine progress against plans.

Group assessment results often focuses on areas such as:

• Strength and adequacy of leadership (using the 4 dimensional model Thought Leadership, People Leadership, Operational Leadership, and Client Leadership)
• Workload and gearing ratios
• Communication and information flow
• Decision making
• Collaboration within group and with other groups
• Morale and culture
• Talent development, acquisition, retention and succession planning
• Performance management

Illustrative Examples: Organizational Effectiveness

ADS Talent Consulting redesigned the talent planning process and material for a consumer and commercial bank. While impetus for the project was a regulator request, the bank quickly determined that they lacked continuity and depth in key functions. We focused on creating plans to address identified talent gaps.

ADS Talent Consulting created a competency model for a relationship management function at a private bank to facilitate a greater focus on proactive business development. These competencies were then integrated into the performance management and selection processes.

ADS Talent Consulting conducted a group assessment on a Risk function.  Results indicated that the group was under resourced relative to increases in workload over the past 24 months.  Additionally, the group’s management had not focused on talent recruitment or retention.  So while workload went up, talent levels went down, creating a huge spike in per employee workload.  Steps were taken to bring in short term resources to help while the group focused more resources on talent acquisition.