A Specialist Is Not Just a Specialist
The Specialist Performance Index survey (SPIndex survey) is an online multi-source/360-degree feedback system that brings together views from a specialist’s direct manager, peers, and internal/external stakeholders.
It is uniquely designed on the basis of the Specialist Pipeline concept and it enables the organization to assess specialists on the actual job that needs to be done rather than abstract theoretical competency models.
You will find a wide variety of 360-degree tools on the market. Many tools are ordinary self-leadership survey tools or are based on the assumption that leadership 360-degree tools can be applied to specialists, but then just interpreted differently. However, as the Specialist Pipeline concept documents, this is exactly the assumption that causes most problems for an organization’s ambition to create a unique specialist career track and build an internal pipeline of qualified specialists. The SPIndex, on the other hand, is designed for the sole purpose of assessing specialists.
Impact
The SPIndex survey supports specialists in accelerating their development by:
Understanding to what extent they have successfully transitioned into their specialist roles
Maps the specialsts’ strengths and weaknesses in their current roles
Provides 360-degree feedback on how the specialists perform in their specialist roles
Indicates the potential of the specialists to step into a higher specialist level
Significantly improves the specialists’ alignment of self-perception with reality
The Survey Can Be Utilized For Multiple Purposes
To conduct specialist assessments in connection with talent selection and promotion
To facilitate individual development initiatives; this assessment contributes to more evidence-based coaching conversations
To conduct structured organizational specialist performance surveys where the organization wants to assess all specialists in the organization and conduct various analyses based on the results
In connection with the Specialist Pipeline Transition Programs, this survey report can serve as “the message from home” which will often improve the impact of the training.
Customization
Some organizations have their own unique specialist competency model that they need to be mirrored in the survey.
Organizations are also faced with different strategic directions on the people side which need to be mirrored in the survey.
The SPIndex survey is built to be easily customized to different organizations’ needs. We offer support in how to combine the existing survey with your specific needs in order to get the best of two worlds and we offer support in translating your specialist competency model into impactful questions and observable key behaviors.
You may also choose the SPIndex survey as your in-house leadership survey tool. In that connection we can easily change the graphical set-up to match your company design in terms of color codes, pictures and logo.
Scientific Background
The SPIndex survey is uniquely designed on the basis of the Specialist Pipeline concept and the decade of field observations and research that resulted in the concept.
Accordingly, you cannot just ask the same questions in a specialist assessment across different specialist levels. Some questions may be the same but most questions must vary from level to level.
Some will argue that you can ask the same questions but interpret them differently depending on the specialist level. However, the problem is not the interpretation of the results. The problem is that all the respondents are left to interpret the subtle differences themselves. This will simply not provide sufficient validity and reliability.
To secure a high level of validity and reliability, we must ensure that the questions in the survey are strictly related to the specialist’s critical success parameters and that all questions are behavior-oriented and relate to behavior that can be observed.
The SPIndex survey has a set of questions that are unique to each leadership level. Each set consists of 20 questions divided into the four key themes for the specialist level concerned. Every question has been carefully developed to capture the uniqueness of the relevant specialist level.
The validity of the questions is tested on an ongoing basis in connection with our Specialist Transition Programs. The validation base includes specialists across different cultures and industries.
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