OHD Organizational Hiring & Design ~ Thursdays May 7 - July 23

This course is for both employees and managers. The first seven classes describe an optimal hiring process using next-generation assessment tools. The next five classes cover the strategic options and tactical considerations when adding new employees. The program describes how we recognize and process the various creative attributes that allow us to build the best teams. Setting priorities is a top-down process, which we teach to management. Honoring the talent and skill is a bottom-up process that arises from management feedback to employees. Unifying these perspectives is necessary to build the next generation of organization. One of the first dilemmas we address is the difference between a company’s perspective of an employee and the employee’s perspective of the organization. Having a clearly defined purpose, both personally and organizationally, can unify the two perspectives.

The company’s objective is to hire the best people possible. When an employee assesses a job description with a corporate purpose, it supports them in seeing if there is creative alignment and a functional fit. Hopefully, the organization has models of people who have performed this work in an exceptional way that can be re-created. Knowledge and experience can also be defined and quantified. What is critical are functional skills where the team has pre-existing success patterns. This leads us into how the team will integrate new individuals. Some differences can be addressed during training, whereas others reflect conflicts that are not fixable. This is why we need to understand the cultural fit of each employee to the team and company. Our models of creativity, communication, decision-making, pacing, defenses, pretenses and team-building can be used as pre-set hiring templates.

We provide overall assessments of each team and a company profile that focuses on the seven creative styles, the implementation balance and degree of masculine, feminine and combined expressions. These assessments, when updated with information from each new hire, describe the direction, capacity and adaptability of each team and company. The goal is to recognize the inherent potential of each team to determine how to maximize productivity without inducing additional stress. This means we need to know the degree of creative actualization of each individual so they can be properly placed within the organization. When teammates are aligned in their work, natural compatibility emerges. This allows the integration of their creative gifts into the team.

This occurs only when top management establishes set hiring strategies, follows neutral assessment practices and can recognize where a company is in its development process. We identify four levels of organizational success: 1) Authoritarian, survival mode; 2) Good Ideas, competitive mode; 3) Growth, cooperation mode, and; 4) Balanced Well-Being, co-creative mode. While management and some employees may be operating in higher levels than their company as a whole, this benefits the firm when a few know how to guide development. Organizational motivations and perks change at each level of success. By using creative assessments, we can do extremely targeted skills-building based on team and company needs. Employees can also choose to engage personal Authentic Life Expression courses. This summary of organizational hiring and design prepares us to understand our human differences and how we each have a unique contribution to make.

Recommended Prerequisite: None; Creative Uniqueness is recommended.

1. Creative Alignment — Employee and Organizational Perspectives
2. Knowledge & Experience — Validating Core Capabilities
3. Functional Skills — Decision-Making, Communication, Pacing
4. Teambuilding Capabilities — Three Assessment Frameworks
5. Natural Compatibility — How We Get Along With Our Teammates
6. Integration of Creative Gifts — Overall Assessment Items
7. Employee Alignment & Integrity — Validation
8. Hiring Strategies — Priorities & Problems
9. Assessment Practices — Structure & Goals
10. Organization Motivation — Four Levels Of Success
11. Skills Building — Targeted Development
12. Organizational Culture — Identifying How We Operate