The Power of Feedback

In the business world life comes at you like a bullet...fast and unforgiving. We live in an impatient world, with fierce competition and fleeting opportunities. It used to be that the big ate the small. Now the fast eat the slow. Slow kills. Thus, growth and development are not options. If your people are not better tomorrow than they were yesterday you are losing ground. Organizations must accelerate or they will die. But organizations cannot go fast if their employees go slow. You must hire the best talent available and bring people up to speed as quickly as possible. 
 
The Psychological Study is the starting point. It helps management make informed hiring decisions. A detailed rationale for using the Psychological Study can be found in "What You See Ain't Always What You Get" (R. A. Loffreda, available on request.) A second, equally powerful, use is to provide the new hire with developmental feedback. It is the cornerstone of an effective Assimilation Phase. It is part of the assimilation process. 
 
Staring from day one the new hire is in a training mode. He/She is finding their way around, learning who's who and what's what. They begin to learn "how things get done around here." Some very important things should be happening during this time. And they should be happening in a productive, planned way. Simply leaving them on their own to "pick up on tribal knowledge" is not the best way to assimilate people in to the organization. There may be several facets to Assimilation Counseling. Developmental feedback of assessment results needs to be one of them. 

Providing developmental feedback accelerates growth because insight is essential to growth. It helps people understand their skills and abilities and also helps them get in touch with their developmental needs and aggressively do something about them. Very few people, even successful ones, understand their talents and potentials to the level at which they exist. Developmental feedback is a catalytic mechanism; it produces a desired result in a predictable way. It accelerates the "gearing-up" process. Until a new hire learns the ropes, those who depend on his/her contribution in order to get the job done need to "gear-down" their own productivity; they have to wait until the new person gets up to speed. Developmental feedback and action planning significantly shortens this cycle. 
 
Bottom line, new people joining an organization create a drag effect. The solution is a professionally developed and administered assessment/feedback system that shortens the learning curve, accelerates growth and gets everyone on the up slope as quickly as possible.