About Individual Assessment for Development (IAD)
Case study: IAD at British Telecommunications
Financial Times profile of IAD 
Financial Times ProfileThe following article was published in the Financial Times, January 29th 2004.
by Richard Donkin
If the people who work for companies are more important than the fixed assets, it follows that ensuring the right people are doing the right work is growing ever more significant to corporate success.
This principle matters on two levels: that of the company and that of the individual. We all want to feel that we are doing worthwhile work, and that we are getting the training, education and on-the-job challenges we need in order to assure ourselves that what we do is making a difference.
The problem for many people is that they rarely get the chance to show what they can do. The pushy ones ensure they get plenty of opportunities, whether or not they excel. But leaving the organisation of the workplace to a raw Darwinian struggle may not be a good idea. If you end up with a pride of alpha males fighting it out for supremacy you are not creating the best conditions for long-term success.
Survival of the fittest, as Darwin understood, is not necessarily about the healthiest specimens but about those who are most fitted to succeed. In today's workplace it is probably about those best equipped to adapt in a fast-changing corporate world and nowhere is the speed of change more evident than in the telecommunications sector. So when British Telecommunications wanted to change the way the more senior managers in its main business division looked after their sales and marketing, it adopted a psychometrically based system for use in management development. The programme was created by Psychometric Research and Development, the St Albans-based test development company chaired by Steve Blinkhorn, one of the UK's leading authorities on psychometric testing. BT wanted to make sure that the senior sales and marketing managers in its main business division were thinking like mini-chief executives, understanding, for example, the true value of a sale beyond the sale price.
"Some of these people are dealing in sales worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Delivery of a sale is likely to include recruitment and training of new people as well as the supply of equipment. There are many factors involved and people need to understand the way these will impact on profitability," says Mr Blinkhorn.
To identify the development needs of these BT managers, PRD adapted a psychometric tool it had used with various government agencies. Managers taking part in the programme are asked to complete an online CV and two psychometric questionnaires. Their responses are then subjected to computer analysis based on pattern recognitition algorithms. This analysis throws up individual issues that can be investigated in half-day workshops consisting of a series of intensive interviews for each manager.
The first questionnaire looks at capabilities. The second investigates tolerances; how people react to difficult situations at work. These questions may, for example, look at how someone handles a difficult team member or how the manager would feel about taking the rap for some else's incompetence.
"We're looking here at how people handle some of the more stressful situations that occur at work," says Mr Blinkhorn.
The subsequent workshop is split into three sessions, each revolving around a presentation from the participant. The first covers the individual's career, the second relates to a recent task the manager found particularly stretching and the third centres on a management policy that is known to be controversial. Participants are given assurances that no specific details from their discussions, such as objections to company policies or named individuals, will surface in any report.
Interviews are carried out by one of BT's divisional managers and two experienced psychologists from PRD. The manager is there as a kind of 'prisoners friend', says Mr Blinkhorn, and the job of the psychologists, feeding off each other, is to probe various issues that, he says, are unlikely to emerge in a normal interview. But he stresses that the interviewing is not aggressive. "We are not trying to catch people out. We want to understand their needs. These interviews delve very deep and people tend to open up very quickly. One of the managers came out saying he had had the best three hours of his life.
"This should be seen as a positive experience. We are trying to find out how to make rocket boosters for people's careers. Some of the people undergoing this programme will be considered for new posts. Others may see what they need to do to improve their career opportunities."
The questionnaires are so rigorous that they can help the psychologists to identify the kind of self-promotional spin that sometimes works its way into a CV. "If people make outlandish or exaggerated claims, we are likely to spot them," says Mr Blinkhorn. "You might expect successful people to exaggerate quite a lot on their CVs but we have found that this is not necessarily the case. In fact we saw some highly talented individuals who were quite modest in the claims they made for themselves."
The online CV is designed to capture the variety of experience and qualifications people have gained in their careers. Employees can update this CV at any time. Company human resources specialists can then search the CV database if the company is conducting an internal search for some elusive nugget of expertise.
Although the programme does not have a generic name, people at BT tend to refer to it by the acronym Kest (knowledge, experience, skills and tolerance - the four human dimensions it investigates).
David Beard, an internal consultant in human resources at BT, working on management and executive development, says the company has been so encouraged by the insights it has gained that it is planning to roll out the programme across the whole of the main business division and into its field services. Other parts of BT are also showing interest after favourable feedback from managers who have undertaken the programme.
Another advantage is that managers need spare only half a day for a workshop. Normally such a rigorous assessment can take two days. Mr Blinkhorn says the programme has the potential to be developed into a proprietary product but at present he continues to focus on the BT work.
Having sampled many psychometric tests in the marketplace, I was struck by what seemed two pioneering features; the intensive use of psychologists in interviewing and the use of pattern recognition concentrating on job-specific issues. The question as to whether someone is up to the job may at last have a credible answer.
Find out more about PRD's assessment for development work with BT.
Further references to Steve Blinkhorn and PRD, by Richard Donkin Click Here.