Page 77 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

56 debis career development center
whose major task lies in the development and supply of HR methods having an increase in
value both diagnostically for the employee and economically for the organization. At the
same time, personnel management ensures a professional process. This understanding
reflects a current trend in the role of the personnel department, where the HR department
is more active during MD processes, especially when deciding to advance individuals
into high-level positions of leadership and responsibility. The challenge of debis is to
transform the purely administrative function of personnel management into more strate-
gic and steering functions that clearly require the ideas and feedback of other areas of
management.

THE DEBIS CAREER DEVELOPMENT CENTER
The following section concerns itself in more detail with the background and the current
conditions of the debis Career Development Center. First, we explicate different goals
that are pursued with this development instrument, describing concepts and guidelines,
and specifying the key steps in the process of overseeing the Development Center. The
last section details the singular elements and outstanding features of the instrument as
they relate to the role of the external adviser.

OBJECTIVES FOR THE DEBIS CAREER DEVELOPMENT CENTER

The debis Career Development Center (dCDC) is a mandatory component of manage-
ment development with debis. The following goals are pursued:

First of all, the dCDC should guarantee the first-class quality of management poten-

tials as an important factor in successfully surviving and surpassing the competition.
Consequently, for debis, the importance of the HR department in the context of overall
strategic management plans is growing.
It is of outstanding importance for debis to embed MD diagnostic tools into the

management development processes of individual divisions. It is important for de-
bis to inform—and be informed by—the decisions of the decentralized business units.
Primarily, the decentralized business units that appoint participants for the dCDC are
responsible for the final decision about a participant’s managerial potential.
The contents of these assessment tools are oriented at business-specific aspects. That

is, the tools are not theory-driven just for theory’s sake. The dCDC supports and sup-
plements available information about an employee’s managerial potential, particularly
in connection with the DaimlerChrysler evaluation instrument COMPASS (Compe-
tence Planning and Appraisal System). The dCDC is a crucial part within the personnel
decision-making processes and forms the basis for concrete MD measures. Therefore,
it constitutes an important part of the diagnostic expertise of HR assessment at debis.
During the continued application of the MD process, standards and quality will con-

stantly seek improvement in connecting MD with the dual goals of personal devel-
opment and organizational value-added change. The development orientation of the
process makes it possible to identify potentials for promotion at an earlier phase than
if the process were not in place, which allows potentials more time on managerial
development activities.