Job Challenge Profile, Facilitator Guide

Cynthia D. McCauley, Patricia J. Ohlott, Marian N. Ruderman

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781604919417
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The Facilitator's Guide details the essential workshop procedures (including setup, administration, and follow-up) and provides you with debrief presentation slides. You don't neeed to be a training professional to use this tool in your organization. Your participants will be able to quickly score and interpret the inventory using the practical Participant Workbook. With the aid of this action guide, they will determine what and how much they are learning, what parts of their jobs hold key challenges, and what strategies they might adopt to derive maximal learning from these experiences.

Application of the Job Challenge Profile in Management Development

When to Use the Job Challenge Profile

The JCP was designed to help managers frame job assignments as learning opportunities. There are a number of human resource management situations in which having this framework is critical:

• Creating Developmental Plans. Organizations often create formal mechanisms through which managers receive feedback about their strengths and weaknesses. Managers can receive this feedback as part of a performance appraisal process, by using a 360-degree feedback instrument, during a feedback-intensive development program, or as part of a one-on-one coaching relationship. Whatever mechanism is used, a necessary step is identifying developmental goals and creating plans for working toward those goals. Job assignments should be a central feature of those plans. Some questions to ask include: “What types of job challenges will provide the opportunity and motivation to develop the skills and abilities targeted in the developmental plan?” “To what degree are those developmental components present in the manager’s current job?” and “How can the job be changed or reframed to gain access to needed components?” The JCP can help answer these questions.

• Developing High Potential Managers. Organizations also are prone to identify individuals early in their careers as having “high potential” for becoming effective senior managers and executives. They often give these individuals extra developmental attention through special programs, assignments, and coaches. It is important to expose these high potential individuals to the framework of job assignments as learning opportunities. These individuals usually have a high ability to learn and, if encouraged to seek assignments that will contribute to their learning and growth, will be motivated to do so. Armed with a way of understanding how job assignments can contribute to their becoming more effective managers, they will be better equipped to take charge of their own development. The JCP is thus a useful tool to use as part of a formal development program for high potential managers.

• Supporting Learning During Developmental Assignments. If a manager has intentionally been placed in a developmental assignment, the JCP can be used six to nine months into the assignment to assess the degree to which he or she is experiencing developmental components in the job and to reflect on the learning potential of these components. At this point, the manager has learned what the job is all about and what is going to be particularly challenging in the job; it is an ideal time to develop strategies for maximizing the learning from the assignment.

• Encouraging a Continuous Learning Mind-Set. Understanding job assignments as learning opportunities is part of having a continuous learning mind-set—a mind-set that organizations are increasingly trying to foster. Many organizations are facing rapid changes in their business and social environments and thus see a need for employees who can learn quickly, develop new ways of working, and respond flexibly to external demands. Seeing the ever-changing demands in one’s job and workplace as potential learning opportunities is a key part of being a continuous learner. The JCP can help reinforce this mind-set.

How to Use the Job Challenge Profile

The Job Challenge Profile may be used with groups who are attending a formal development program or with individuals who are working one-on-one with a coach or facilitator. The following pages provide a step-by-step process for administering, scoring, and facilitating insights from the JCP. It is written for the facilitator who is working with a group, but the steps would be the same for one-on-one processing of the questionnaire and results.

The Job Challenge Profile Participant Workbook has been written to support self-study, that is, a manager could take the questionnaire and progress through the workbook at his or her own pace or use the workbook during a training session.

Step 1. Introduction

(15 minutes)

Introduce participants to the Job Challenge Profile and why they are being asked to complete it (for example, as part of the planning process for individual development, as part of a company-wide effort to educate managers on how to make better use of job assignments, or to reflect on the learning potential of their new jobs). Note that the questionnaire:

• Asks managers to rate the degree to which various job characteristics and responsibilities are descriptive of their current jobs;

• Is designed to capture their perceptions of their jobs as they experience them (that is, there are no right or wrong answers);

• Was developed from research on job challenges and what managers learn from them; and

• Will take about ten minutes to complete.

Be clear about who they will be sharing their responses with. For example, will the individual be the only one who sees his or her scores or will they be asked to share their scores with the facilitator or with others in the program?

Step 2: Administration of the Questionnaire

(15 minutes)

Distribute the Job Challenge Profile Participant Workbook, and ask participants to turn to page 5 to complete the Job Challenge Profile. We recommend that individuals complete the questionnaire during the session in which they will be scoring and debriefing their results. The questionnaire only takes about ten minutes to complete, so the content will be fresh in everyone’s minds, and you will not have to be concerned about whether they will remember to bring their completed questionnaire to the session.

On the other hand, if your time is tight or you want individuals to start thinking about the content of the session before they arrive, it is certainly okay to ask participants to complete the questionnaire before the session.

Step 3: Debrief Presentation and Exercise on Learning

(30 minutes) from Job Assignments

Before asking them to score their questionnaires, provide the participants with background and some context on learning from job assignments. Slides to support the debrief, which is given below, are provided in Appendix A, and can be found at www.ccl.org/cclpressresources. Allow thirty minutes for this step.

Display Slide 1: Where do people learn the skills and abilities needed to be effective managers and leaders?

Let’s look at how researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership went about trying to answer this question. They asked successful managers to reflect on the following: “When you think about your career as a manager, certain events or episodes probably stand out in your mind—things that led to a lasting change in your approach to management. Identify at least three ‘key events’ in your career—things that made a difference in the way you manage now. For each event, describe what happened and what you learned from it.” If you had been interviewed for this study, how would you have responded? What three key events would you have chosen?

Give participants time to reflect on these questions and make notes to themselves or ask participants to interview one another. H...