Wheel of Life Reincarnated to Assess a Team's Competencies
Posted on September 07, 2009 by Deirdre Danahar, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Do you want a way to creatively assess training and technical assistance needs? Interested in novel uses of the Wheel of Life? Read on...
Consulting with State Substance Abuse Prevention Systems I employ many of the skills and resources I use in my Coaching practice, including the Wheel of Life. In human services and public health very often the individual is the key to change or intervention or is the intervention itself. Consequently there is a synergy between these aspects of my work inspiring creativity in my approach to each as well as novel uses of “best practices” and tools. A prime example of this is reincarnating the Wheel of Life as a “Wheel of Competencies” for a training and technical assistance (T/TA) project supporting the development of internal T/TA system for a State. Specifically I modified the Wheel to use as an assessment tool for a group of individuals who would act as Facilitators charged with providing T/TA at the community level for a planning process the State was preparing to implement.
A Facilitator is a type of change agent, a specific person, carrying out a special process to help adopters (individuals, teams, organizations and systems), apply knowledge, innovations etc., in the adopter’s given practice context. Facilitators serve as a catalyst for change; helping adopters understand what will have to change and how to make this change in order to achieve desired outcomes. Essential characteristics, skills and tasks of successful Facilitators have been indentified across a wide body of literature in diverse fields.
The most essential skills required to facilitate the State’s planning process became the Wheel of Competency segments. These included:
- Relationship Building Skills
- Negotiation Skills
- Consultation Skills
- Sensitivity to Community Change
- Ability to Positively Change Mind Sets
- Ability to Work with Diverse Communities
Using the Wheel of Competency, each individual assessed both the areas they felt would need more time attention, as well as, where less would be needed. Looking across the collective Wheels I assessed where the group would need more training, TA and coaching as a whole. Proving rich information for myself and the other training program leaders to customize it for the group in a practical, meaningful and efficient manner.
Additionally a peer-to-peer mentoring network based on the Wheel of Competency content developed. Individuals elected to act as a mentor to their peers in the particular competencies where they felt most adept and comfortable. Essentially creating a low-cost, self-sustaining learning community, enhancing the individual and collective abilities of the group, throughout the T/TA project as and beyond, as well as enhancing the State’s workforce development efforts. People connected with each other, supported each other, and helped to develop a dynamic federally recognized model of State T/TA system.
The experience proved to me yet again the flexibility and vitality of a tool such as Wheel of ________. The same approach of reincarnating the Wheel could be used with the particularities of the planning process, where in the specific requirements of the process are used in the segments or for an innovation being adopted by an organization or for other specific innovations. The possibilities are limited by the bounds of our creativity.
