ALD Coaching - www.aldcoaching.com

24/09/2025

THE BIGGEST KEY TO CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION!
What’s one of the biggest blockers to organisational growth? Miscommunication, or lack of it.

Teams use different a language for development, performance, and priorities. The result: slower decisions, misaligned efforts, stalled progress.
That’s why a people-data platform like Harrison Assessments is a game changer. It gives your organisation a shared language and a consistent paradigm. When everyone is singing from the same song sheet harmony is possible. Conversations concerning behavioural competencies are effective, change sticks faster, and growth accelerates.

In my latest article, I explore how speaking a common language transforms leadership development, change initiatives, and culture at speed.

One of the biggest blockers to developing effective organisational culture isn’t strategy, resources, or even talent. It’s miscommunication.

21/06/2025

People talk about Employee Engagement, but few give specific steps and tools that a manager can take to effectively make it happen. This video talks about what Employee Engagment really is and gives you specific steps you can take to see rapid results for a genuine culture shift.

20/06/2025

WHY PEOPLE-DATA IS THE HIDDEN KEY TO ORGANISATIONAL GROWTH (and Why So Many Overlook It)

Most organisations are data-rich in areas like finance, marketing, and operations. Leaders track everything from website performance to sales conversions and customer acquisition costs with impressive accuracy. Yet, when it comes to their greatest asset—their people—many still make decisions based on instinct rather than insight.

🧭 Why People Data Is Often Overlooked
Despite the increasing sophistication of business analytics, behavioural data still feels like unfamiliar territory to many leaders. Here’s why:

They’re unaware it exists: Skills like adaptability, collaboration, innovation, and helpfulness are often viewed as intangible. Many don’t realise there are reliable ways to assess and quantify these attributes in individuals and teams.

They’re sceptical of assessments: Understandably, some psychometric tools are seen as generic or unhelpful. But once leaders experience a robust platform—like Harrison Assessments—they’re often surprised by how precise and relevant the results are. One client recently went from sceptic to advocate in minutes after seeing how accurately the reports described her team and herself.

They underestimate its depth: Tools like Harrison go far beyond surface-level insights. They enable deep analysis of team dynamics, leadership capacity, culture, and individual engagement. This kind of clarity helps organisations move beyond guesswork into evidence-based decision-making.

They don’t know where to begin: Without a clear roadmap, behavioural data can feel overwhelming. That’s where expert guidance makes a difference—I help organisations gather and interpret their people data within days, not weeks.

📊 What People Data Can Reveal
With the right platform, you can break down behavioural insights to:

Assess and align organisational culture

Identify department-level strengths and improvement areas

Support leadership development through targeted coaching

Address individual engagement needs and reduce turnover risk

Build effective succession plans and develop talent pipelines

For example, if a sales team is underperforming, you can pinpoint which of the 12 core sales competencies are lacking. From there, you can decide whether training, coaching, or peer-based support is the best solution—and apply it with precision.

Benchmarking against industry standards also gives you perspective on where you truly stand—not just in theory, but in actionable terms.

🔐 How People Data Future-Proofs Your Organisation
Here’s what using people data enables:

Smarter recruitment: Hire based on alignment with role requirements, cultural fit, and future needs—making management more effective and reducing costly mis-hires.

Stronger, diverse teams: Bring in people with different perspectives who still align with your mission and values.

Improved customer experience: As John Spence says, “The employee experience will never exceed the customer experience.” When you actively address employee needs, customers benefit too.

Faster change adoption: A shared framework for understanding behaviour can streamline communication, reduce resistance, and drive innovation.

Better support for remote teams: Data helps surface performance and wellbeing concerns that may not come up in casual conversation—critical for hybrid work environments.

More engaged employees: Use data to have meaningful, proactive conversations around motivation, job satisfaction, and professional development.

Stronger leadership pipeline: Identify who has the right traits for future roles and invest in developing them early.

Effective team collaboration: Equip teams with insight into each other’s working styles and communication preferences, leading to higher productivity.

Culture by design: Instead of letting culture evolve by default, use behavioural analytics to shape it intentionally—targeting innovation, communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, and more.

🚀 Don’t Leave Growth to Guesswork
Organisations that adopt people-data strategies today are setting themselves apart for tomorrow. With behavioural competencies driving culture, performance, and leadership, the ability to measure and act on these insights is no longer optional—it’s essential.

Want a glimpse of what’s possible? I’d be happy to walk you through a short, no-obligation demo of the tools that are helping organisations unlock real growth.

11/06/2025

STRUGGLING TO FIND THE RIGHT HIRES? YOU'RE NOT ALONE!

A leader I worked with was consistently losing new hires - not because they weren’t capable, but because they weren’t the right fit. We introduced Harrison Assessments' 'Job Success Analysis' into his recruitment process. The result? Clearer decisions, better hires, and more confident leadership.

Now he knows exactly who he’s hiring, what trade-offs might be involved, and how to offer personalized support from day one.

If you’re tired of starting over every few months, it might be time to rethink your hiring strategy.

💬 Curious how it could work for you? Let’s talk.

01/10/2024

TURN YOUR EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT ASPIRATIONS INTO REALITY.
Do you have a systematic approach to accurately measure, consistently monitor, and deliver on your staff’s development needs? As technology continues to progress, so does the effectiveness and ease of use with Talent Management Systems (TMS). Harrison Assessments (HA) is leading the way by supporting business leaders and HR Managers to quickly customise their staff development approaches.

Too often organisations do not have the capacity to collect staff psychometric developmental data, or the means to generate customised training or coaching resources to address needs. Furthermore, they rarely have a system that keeps track of each employee’s career pathway, which assists in having the right conversations to success.

We all know that the best way to stay consistent and effective is through a systematic approach, yet many business operators are unaware of how an excellent talent management system, such as Harrison Assessments, does the heavy lifting. HA enables leaders to consistently monitor the customised development of each staff member throughout their entire employee lifecycle.

Here are seven key benefits for using Harrison Assessments:

1. Streamlined Recruitment Process: It automates and simplifies the shortlisting process by matching applicant traits with the required job-specific aspects before any interviews. By using data-driven decision-making it removes selection bias and increases best-fit candidates. No more scouring through hundreds of resumes of applicants who would never be a fit. Instead, only interview quality candidates.

2. Enhanced Employee Development: Identify skill gaps in specific roles and recommend learning opportunities, monitor progress, strategically create better-trained and more productive staff.

3. Improved Retention: Through ongoing psychometric feedback address individual engagement factors before they become a real problem. Equip managers to have the right conversations to create a supportive work environment, leading to higher employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention rates.

4. Data-Driven Decision Making: A HA TMS enables a business to administer one questionnaire, being valid for two years, from which numerous reports can be generated, when needed. This gives valuable insight in recruitment, employee engagement, development, and workforce trends. Managers can make informed decisions regarding promotions, salary adjustments, and workforce planning, leading to better outcomes.

5. Retain High Performers: Your highest performing employees are often ignored when it comes to development, because the squeaky wheels get the attention. A TMS keeps leadership focussed on each staff member ensuring equitable attention on growth needs, especially when retention of high performers is critical to organisational success.

6. Managers: Empowering your managers to rise to the challenge of leading and motivating their direct reports is always a critical element in any organisation. Specific reports on this area assist managers in seeing their gaps and setting goals that truly impact morale and productivity.

7. Department Growth: Focus and measure specific department competencies such as, boosting sales in your sales team, improve quality of new hires, grow customer satisfaction, focus on team dynamics, or any department that is struggling in an area that needs extra attention!

In summary, a Harrison Assessments Talent Management System enables companies to increase staff development effectiveness, fosters employee growth, improves retention, and offers insights that help organizations make informed strategic decisions.

If you'd like a demo, just let me know.

10/09/2024

WHY IT IS CRITICAL TO MANAGE EMPLOYEE TALENT IN YOUR BUSINESS
I recently worked with a C-Suite leader who wanted to improve employee engagement in his company. He decided to work with me by piloting an engagement process with one of his 26 branches. The branch was growing rapidly, and he was trying to get on top of managing talent, for he could see there was some growing pains occurring. Management was struggling to keep up with the demands of business growth while focusing on staffing needs.

This is not an uncommon issue with a growing organisation where managers are being stretched. They often are forced to make a choice between the immediate operational needs and important long-term staffing needs. Unfortunately, this catches up with businesses and neglected staffing needs eventually become urgent with a culture that is difficult to succeed and thrive in. This is where strategic talent management is critically needed to avoid poor results.

The key to resolving this issue is to equip managers with the capacity to address underlying engagement issues. Such issues need to be addressed hastily, at an individual employee level, be simple, and scalable to expand with business growth. Hence, we implemented a psychometric questionnaire to quickly gather from all staff specific engagement data. The Engagement Reports organised the data into implementable actions for each manager, where they started with mutually beneficial employee conversations.

Each of the employee reports set out four key insights to create a simple way that managers could quickly start addressing employee engagement:

1. Within 18 areas of engagement (such as, wants development, appreciation, promotion, etc.) each area is given an importance score between one and ten by each employee, customising the approach.

2. Each area that the employee considers important shows how fulfilled they currently are in that area (red, amber, green). Some are highly fulfilled and there is no need to be concerned, while other areas are abysmal and need immediate attention, correlating with intent to leave.

3. A third scores is given within the areas they consider important. It reveals how much each employee believes things could improve. Sometimes people have lost hope and need encouragement about real efforts for improvement.

4. The fourth element in the report is designed to give some responsibility to the employee to improve their own engagement. It reveals how their traits either support or hinder them getting the very things that they want (eg. if they tend to be low in being collaborative, they will likely impede others showing them appreciation – this could end up being a goal for improvement).

The branch managers implemented the reports and quickly got to the root of key issues and within three months they noticed a significant change in the morale and productivity of the branch.

If you would like to get on top of your organisation, staff, or team, feel free to contact me for a discussion about how I can equip you to implement an Employee Engagement approach that will work for you.

04/09/2024

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR RECRUITING WITH HARRISON ASSESSMENTS
I was recently asked, “How does Harrison Assessments (HA) improve the accuracy and consistency of hiring best-fit staff?” So, I thought I would briefly share my response.

When hiring best-fit staff for a role, we are ultimately looking for certain elements:
1. Eligibility: Can they do the job? Do they have the experience, skills, competencies, qualifications, and minimum requirements for the type of work they are being employed to do? The importance of this area can vary from employing a first-year apprentice who needs no experience, through to a highly qualified leadership position.

2. History: The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour – that’s a fact! Do they have a glowing reference from their past employer/s? Have they a history of job hopping in holding many positions within the last couple of years? Do their referees speak highly of them, their capabilities, and their work ethic?

3. Suitability: Will they have the desire to want to naturally do the job? Points one and two above are relatively easy to explore, but ‘suitability’ is the most difficult area to get right, and it is where Harrison Assessments shine in giving accurate data toward the hiring decision. The employer can quickly see whether the natural traits of each applicant match the specific role they are applying for, while also reducing bias in their decision-making through using data.

So, how does HA measure applicant suitability?

After more than 30 years of research, the Harrison Assessments’ research team have analysed hundreds of employees across all industries, examining high and low performers. They isolated data from those who were both successful and who felt fulfilled in their roles. They took that data and created thousands of unique customisable psychometric “Job Success Formulas.” When an applicant takes HA’s 20-minute psychometric questionnaire as a part of the application process, their 175 traits are compared with the specific ‘Job Success Formula’ for the role they are applying for.

If they have a 75% or higher match it highly predicts that:
1. They will enjoy the work finding fulfilment in the role
2. They will be a high performer in the position
3. They will be retained longer than others with a lower score.

The other benefit is that HA is a Talent Management System, where you can also run other reports for the newly employed candidate assisting them in areas such as, onboarding, development, engagement, succession planning, team building, leadership growth, and more.

If you’d like to know more or want a demonstration of how HA works to improve your hiring decisions, simply reach out.

31/12/2021

More organisations are using Talent Analytics (TA) to assist in several ways. It addresses individual employee needs, such as, their onboarding experience, engagement, remote needs, and their specific training needs. TA also enables a team/s to understand their dynamics and how to set progressive growth goals. Finally, TA is excellent for understanding organistional culture, and how leadership can strategically address cultural transformation.

16/12/2021

1. LEADERS NEED TO DEVELOP THEIR TEAM CULTURE
WHY?
1. Culture is like a living breathing entity, it drives behaviour toward functional or dysfunctional relationships leading to varied performance levels.

2. If you don't set the culture for your team, it will limit your success.
WHAT IS TEAM CULTURE?
Simply put, culture is the collective team habits created through the interchange between values, myths, symbols, norms, rituals, beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, conversations, and behaviours, often culminating in ‘uncritical thinking’ statements, such as, “This is the way we do things around here.”
HOW DO WE MAKE CULTURE WORK FOR YOU?
Involve the existing team in the process with collaborative discussions:
1. Conduct an analysis on what needs to change. Today, there are excellent psychometric organisational analytic tools available that quickly get to the heart of team developmental and cultural needs (contact me if you want to know more).

2. Be sure you have full senior leadership support for any cultural shifts you intend to make and that all stakeholders the team serves are a key focus for any changes.

3. Fully model all ‘change initiatives’ in line with your team’s articulated values, vision, mission, strategy, reward systems, structure, policies, procedures, and allocation of resources. Any conflict between these elements and it will be picked up quickly and, whether consciously or subconsciously, resisted.

4. Develop ground rules together so there is ownership and accountability (this will be discussed in a future post).
In Conclusion, as a team leader you ignore team culture at your peril. Instead make it your friend so that it serves your team and its purposes.

29/09/2021

5 KEYS TO HELPING MANAGERS WITH EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT (Series) – KEY #3

KEY #3. Create a development opportunity within your employee engagement strategy:

First, to create development opportunities in your EE strategy, ensure you overcome the typical hinderances. Employees tend to have unexpressed workplace expectations that need discovering. There may be several reasons for this. They may lack assertiveness in being able to share their own needs. With every employee and manager relationship, you have a power differential, which often intimidates employees from sharing their felt needs.

Leaders need to overcome these types of hurdles by regularly modelling vulnerability, communicating their desire to support reasonable staff expectations, and ensuring the workplace doesn’t hinder psychological safety. By using intentional and informal approaches managers will assist in overcoming these typical roadblocks to discovering development opportunities. These managerial approaches will always improve the flow of information, organisational culture, and a sense of being valued, adding to higher engagement.

One of the goals with Employee Engagement (EE) is to capture the unique expectations of each employee and find ways to deliver on those expectations. As strange as it may sound, some employees are not fully aware of their own growth areas, especially if they are blinded by their own workplace expectations. For example, employees sometimes have high expectations for ‘advancement,’ but don’t realise they are avoiding workplace ‘challenges’ related to advancement, hindering their likelihood of receiving it.

This is where a more formal approach in using a valid assessment will open the door for development opportunities, because the data is derived directly from each employee having completed a questionnaire, and the manager can bring effectively presented information into the conversation. Thus, using the example of advancement, the manager can offer advancement in return for the employee stepping up to specific areas of greater challenge that can be monitored.

12/06/2021

WHAT DO YOU FOCUS ON FOR YOUR TEAM’S DEVELOPMENT?

Do you ever feel disappointed that your team is not performing at the level you know they could?
Having led several teams over the years, I’ve felt the frustration of not quite getting to the level needed. Since then, I have spent the last 15 years working with teams and want to share some helpful tips I’ve discovered.

I recently conducted an executive leadership team training and coaching session, where we looked at developing core components and dynamics of the team. Our goal was more about team development rather than team building, where you may choose to do fun activities together, growing deeper connections through experience, which definitely have their place.

These days I tend to use assessments to quickly get to the heart of key issues, nevertheless, I shared a framework to help the team explore areas of growth, and then we dug deep into team dynamics using coaching where the agenda was in the hands of the team.

I thought I would share some of the framework with you, which assists teams in understanding what to focus on for development:

1. We looked at how well the team managed the relationships with the different stakeholder groups outside the team, such as, clients, board members, middle management, and other staff.

2. We addressed external deliverables that needed to be carried out by the team to fulfil their mission.

3. We discussed the tasks that need to be addressed inside the team, with clarifying team mission, values, objectives, priorities, team member roles, and accountability for effective operations.

4. Finally, we spent most of our time coaching through team dynamics with the interdependent relationships inside the team, communication channels, clarifying ground rules for how to show up for each other, especially in team meetings, etc..

Step four is foundational, because if the team members don't manage their internal relational dynamics well not much can be achieved at a high level. Also, if this is done early in the formation of a team it has the added benefit of assisting the team to better navigate through the storming stage, when it comes.

I enjoyed equipping the team with fun tools to implement for breaking emotionally charged interactions, where they could better self-manage these dynamics.

Part of the core learning for the exec team was improved self-monitoring and self-regulation approaches for higher quality interactions with one another and collective process development for improved team performance.

Not only did we have a good time, but I received some profoundly positive feedback on the day and for days afterward on how helpful it was.

So, in developing your team - or teams you work with - what have you found works well - I’d love to know?

If you'd like any help in this area, let's talk.

19/05/2021

WHAT'S WRONG WITH EMPATHETIC LEADERS? (Balanced Leadership Series)

It is always a pleasant surprise when you are supervised by a leader who shows compassion, care and connects with you on an emotional level. A manager that shows warmth and empathy and who can express it, is someone that you tend to want to give discretionary effort for. They don’t make you feel like a commodity to be used up or feel like something to be exploited - a cog in a machine - to simply produce specific organisational outcomes. Instead, you feel like a valued human being who is appreciated for who they are, and for what they can contribute. So, what could ever go wrong with a manager being exceptional in their ability to express warmth and empathy to their employees?

It is all about balance. It is not about lowering a manager’s warmth and empathy levels, because they are critical success factors for good managers. However, it is about raising a manager’s ability to hold people accountable to critical standards of conduct, key performance levels, organisational values, and desired cultural norms. In my consulting and coaching practice, I often find that managers with high levels of empathy find it difficult to enforce critical workplace standards. Yet these two seemingly contradictory areas need to be complementary of one another within a manager to produce excellent morale and workplace results.

Imagine you are supervising a team of 8 people and half of them are exceptionally talented, highly engaged, and extremely productive. The other half are mediocre in their efforts with poor behaviours that detract from performance. If you choose to attempt to manage the mediocre employees using only your warm and empathetic approach, thinking you are going to win them over toward a more productive approach, all you will do is keep the peace at the expense of the current low performance.

In fact, this approach will make things worse. Eventually the highly productive employees will feel unfairly treated and say to themselves, something like, “I feel like I’m doing all the work around here, it’s not fair,” or “If they can get away with doing little, then why should I bust myself to put in the current effort?” The warm empathetic approach will eventually drag the performance levels of the high performers down too decreasing the results of the whole team. But wait, there is more damage that goes with this purely empathetic approach. It relates to the emotional state of the manager.

When a manager is being overly permissive on poor performance, because they believe their warm approach will win people over, eventually they realise they are being taken advantage of. The stress of this realisation causes an emotional reaction (not a logical one), which comes from seemingly nowhere (yet it has been brewing). Typically, this is when the manager puts their foot down with a harsh response, which usually shocks the poor performers, “Where did that come from.” Hence, not only does this produce unnecessary stress in the manager, but it feeds into unhelpful managerial behaviours which can cause direct reports to walk on eggshells, not knowing what is coming next. It brings further confusion to employees as to what is acceptable and what is not.

It is considerably difficult for a leader to get an objective read on their own tendencies in how they balance between being empathetic and holding people appropriately accountable. So, if this is an area you’d like to measure in your managerial tendencies, feel free to reach out. I can send you a link to complete an online Harrison Assessments Questionnaire to objectively measure and debrief with you this area for your own professional development.