Question

Strategy Exercise: Read the following vignette and develop some suggestions for the company based on the material you read in this chapter.

Twisted is a small company with big dreams. The shopping mall-oriented hot pretzel company has successfully grown its revenues by a rate of 10 percent annually over the last 10 years. Twisted wants to sustain its growth rate in the years ahead. The company has traditionally hired new store managers from outside of the company. However, in the last few years, it has had a difficult time recruiting enough of these people. The CEO feels that there are probably a large number of employees who might make good managers. However, the company has no good internal assessment systems in place to identify them. The CEO asks your group to help the firm identify internal managerial talent so it can continue to pursue its growth strategy. What methods would you suggest for doing so?

Answer 1

I would suggest using the method of multisource assessment method or assessment center methods for the company to identify internal managerial talent.

Multisource assessment method would help the company to identify the better talents by using different rating sources including self, supervisor, peers, external customers, internal customers and subordinates. As the company is a small one there would be better interaction between the employees and most of them would be familiar with each other which help to rate better. Self assessing helps to understand employee perception about own skills and the areas where training and development is required. Peers would know better about the task performing capabilities and interpersonal behaviors. Managers should be good in interpersonal characteristics to ensure growth of the organization. The firm can ask the peers to nominate the employees who would best suit the managerial positions. The subordinate feedbacks would help to identify the supervisors with good leadership and interpersonal behaviors if sufficient anonymity is provided for the feedback. Internal customers are the employees from the same organization who uses the product or services and the external customer is from outside the organization. Feedback from both segments would help to incorporate the customer perspective while selecting the managers.

I suggest assessment center method also because it will help the firm to measure the skills, knowledge, abilities and competencies of the managerial candidates by putting them through a series of stimulations and exercises that they may have to face while performing the job responsibilities as a manager. It would help to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates and the chances of their success in the managerial positions. Though it is costly method, it may not be difficult for the company because the total number of candidates would be less compared to large firms and the result would help the company to pursue its growth strategy by identifying the candidates with high probability of success.