Development Inventories & Surveys are about leveraging the right tool at the right time to uncover (and own!) strengths, limitations, biases, and critical needs in order to overcome team challenges in service to an aspiration and desired outcomes.

Personal inventories, team behavior questionnaires, personality profiles…all tools used in the pursuit of improvement – to better communicate, interact, perform. They are fun to complete and share in a team workshop, but often lose their luster, steam, and value when back on the job because they aren’t integrated as new habits into the ways of working.

In the same token, survey fatigue is a real thing, it happens in many organizations, and it often causes low response rates, ‘check-the-box’ feedback, and cynicism. This is the opposite of valuable, unless of course you use it as a wake-up call to stop choosing the wrong assessments, applied to the wrong business or cultural challenges, and neglecting to translate feedback into real change.

Extraordinary performance calls for courage, resilience, and grit. It entails genuine effort and commitment for improvement, growth, and feedback. It requires being honest about how the individual, team, and leader show up – culture, attitude, inclinations, traits, communication among others.

Like it or not, every organization, team, and individual has work to do, and that work requires examination with a mirror, comment box, and willingness – willingness to seek out hard truths and willingness to action those truths…and it is difficult. Lip service does not work here, it is the nemesis. The mirror, comment box, and willingness are the slayers of lip service – they are accountability…the golden ticket to cultivating trust, integrity, and a growth mind-set. Sounds like a great foundation for culture, doesn’t it?

Selecting the right tool and questions based on the specific aspiration, desired outcome, or challenge and having a gameplan to immediately translate the results and insights into new and improved habits is what enables improvement and sustained value.

If you’ve ever wanted to test what it means to be agile…here’s your chance. Habits develop through practice. Create a plan to practice applying new habits for a while in specific circumstances, with specific people, at specific times. Then ask for feedback, adjust, practice some more, and repeat.

As visible change takes place within the team and organization, add new habits, behaviors, and methods and continue the agile cycle. After a year, retake the development inventory or survey to gauge progress, identify other/new areas for growth, and start the cycle again. This is how continuous improvement occurs.

PDG leverages bespoke inventories and surveys to ensure individual, team, and leader development efforts align with strategy and desired outcomes, as well as provide a foundation to drive extraordinary team dynamics, cultural results, and organizational ethos.