Step 4 – Completing a Self-Assessment
Having constructed your personalized OD competence profile from the 11 foundational OD competences, you are ready to move to self-assessment—the process in which you realistically and soberly consider the question: ‘How competent am I relative to those competences and their elements that I have identified as being important in my professional journey?
The purpose of Step 4 is to help you identify your strengths, as well as any gaps you currently have, relative to the personal profile you have constructed. By this step you will be able to:
- identify possible actions to strengthen and expand your strong areas
- close any gaps you discover relative to your professional goals
- identify possible new areas of development that you may previously not thought about
A straightforward way to begin this process is to use the same forms you completed, looking at competence elements.
In those forms, you considered the elements of the competences that you judged to be important for your professional journey, using a Likert scale to describe each of the elements connected to the competences. Now, using the same completed form, you are invited to indicate what is your current state of competence, assessing yourself relative to each of the elements attached to the competences you selected as important to you.
Finish step 3 in order to be able to self-assess yourself in competence elements
This form is dynamically generated based on your work in step 3.
Upon completing your competence form it is useful to step back again and look at all that you have done so far, letting it ‘sink in’ a bit. Do you see any patterns emerging? Does what you see resonate with your overall view of yourself? Sometimes honest self-assessment data can rather disrupt our sense of who we are. This is to be expected. But you also need to feel that the data fits who you are, fits your OD goals and aspirations.
By now you know that to derive genuine benefit from this process, this step should not to be treated as a tick-box exercise, but rather a serious dialogue—first of all with yourself, but also with trusted others. It can be immensely helpful to engage in conversation with a peer you can trust or a development coach who can guide your thinking and reflection. The journey belongs to you. And remember that one’s professional OD journey is always a work in progress. The app is here for you to use over time, revisiting and revising as often as is useful to you.
Download this step as PDF
Once you have saved your step 4 work, you can download this step to review offline or print. After downloading you can still make changes and download again.
