Sustainability Resource Person – Who and What is This?

Tom GibbonsOrganization Development, Preference Assessments, SustainabilityLeave a Comment

Earlier this year TMS Americas introduced the role of Sustainability Resource into the mix of things we do and offer to help sustain the use of our assessment products. We now call this the Sustainability Resource Person.

So what is this you may ask? It’s really quite simple and we think an important step in helping people understand sustainability of assessment use.

Typically the Team Management Profile is used with groups and some kind of debrief of the models and profile results is facilitated by someone who has been accredited to use the TMP. In terms of the last few posts, this person would be considered the expert. In order to sustain the learning and value that happens in the debrief process, that learning needs to be applied over extended periods of time and in numerous different contexts that are meaningful to the group.

Most of the time the expert or the accredited person doing the debrief is not the person who is best positioned to enable these multiple applications within the team. Someone on the actual team is typically best positioned to make this happen.

This person is the Sustainability Resource Person.

This person helps their team or group in the following ways:

  • Helps the group weave the learning from the initial TMP debrief into the day to day work and interactions of the team.
  • Helps the team understand how to use their TMP HUB by reminding them of how to access their HUB, how to use the interactive applications, how to save and share data from these applications and how to use that data for ongoing learning and performance improvement.
  • Stays in touch with the facilitator/expert in case the team needs additional support.
  • Pushes the team to consider other ways of using the data from the TMP to add ongoing value.

At TMS Americas we actively support this person in their role and as well stay in touch with the accredited person that initially helped the team to identify who this person would be. We contact the Sustainability Resource Person directly, have a page on our web site to for them to access resources to help them play their role and as this role builds we will be scheduling things like web meetings to bring these people together to tell their sustainability stories and share ideas.

The Sustainability Resource Person does not require any special training or accreditation from TMS. The critical perspective they need to have is:

  • A desire to help their team make the best ongoing use of the models and data from the TMP.

We see this role as really supporting our accredited Network Members sustain their work with the TMP and potentially being more strategic in how they support their internal or external clients.

As we gain more experience with this role we are finding that the whole concept of sustainability is a challenging one in terms of actually making it happen in the learning and development area in organizations. Nevertheless we are fully committed to sustainability and will continue to find new ways to support this concept. Not only with our own products but within the area of learning and development in general.

We would love to talk to you about this role; so connect in with us and let’s keep the conversations going!

If you are interested in a series of blog posts on the topic of learning and development and the concept of sustainability you can find the first post in the series here.

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