Creating a Culture of Competence

A business book about leadership, leadership development, and how to improve performance. Competency, and its role in achieving peak performance, remains one of the hot issues in business today. This is importance for individual leaders, but has the most impact when the entire organization is unified to create a Culture of Competence. This book provides a bold, prescriptive approach to achieving organizational success through improved individual and group job performance and satisfaction. Dr. Zwell clearly defines the core qualities that lead to peak performance, then illustrates, step-by-step, how companies can identify and develop individual leadership, managerial, and employee competencies for maximum personal and organizational benefit.

Based on years of personal experience and research, Creating a Culture of Competence expertly combines behavioral theory with solid business practice to create positive organizational change. You'll discover how to:

•Use vision and competencies for cultural transformation
•Create competency models
•Implement competencies in selection and performance management

You'll learn what really makes an organization successful…understand how HR's role is central to building a high-performance organization…find out what technologies are being used to change corporate culture…then combine these elements to create a highly effective, competency-based organizational strategy.

Creating a Culture of Competence offers a blueprint for hiring, developing, and retaining a superior workforce. By encouraging individuals to realize their potential, then motivating them to work in concert, you can lead your organization to reach its objectives…and get superior business results.

About Michael Zwell, Ph.D., PCC
Michael Zwell, Ph.D., is Managing Director of the Human Emergence Group and CEO of the Foundation for the Realization of Human Potential. He is also Director of the program and Professor of Transformational Coaching and Leadership at Maharishi International University. He is a certified coach for the Great Game of Business, a Professional Certified Coach with ICF, and Past President of the Graduate School Alliance for Education in Coaching.

He is also a globally recognized Competency and Talent Management expert who has helped hundreds of organizations achieve their potential and fulfill their mission by developing systems, processes and people. He has worked on both sides of the table, having founded and built several companies himself in addition to implementing solutions in other organizations.

Dr. Zwell has helped design optimal business processes for organizations for the key talent management systems:

•Competency development and training
•Talent acquisition
•Performance management
•Coaching
•Succession planning

Dr. Zwell received a B.A. from the University of Chicago with honors in 1970. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he received an M.Phil. (1972) and a Ph.D. from Yale University (1974), both in anthropology. Throughout his professional career he has used his anthropological perspective to analyze how organizations function and help them maximize their potential and their mission.

After teaching at Rutgers University, consulting, and writing a book, Dr. Zwell began a career in executive search in 1980. He founded his own firm, Zwell International, in 1982, initially focusing on executive search in financial services. In 1989, however, realizing that the traditional executive search process did a mediocre job of predicting performance, he began to study the research on factors predicting job success. In the next few years Dr. Zwell developed groundbreaking tools for assessing leadership competencies and evaluating corporate culture and fit in executive searches. The use of these technologies catapulted him to the top of the profession, and by the mid-1990's he was filling CEO and board positions as well as consulting for organizations on their human capital processes and systems. He continued developing and installing competency-based selection, performance management, and competency development systems in organizations and in 1998 founded Exxceed Inc. to automate those processes on the web. Exxceed was sold in 2006.

Dr. Zwell has culled academic research to develop the functional knowledge and skills that make him uniquely suited to help executives, management teams, sales teams, and organizations optimize their performance and results. Clients include Johnson Controls; JP Morgan Chase; Lenovo; Lehman Brothers; the Chicago Public School System; SkillSoft; Robert Half International; JB Hunt; American Capital Strategies; Sanofi Aventis; RLI; MedSolutions; Fiserv; and many more.

Dr. Zwell has written and spoken extensively on topics related to getting the best and the most from your human capital. In 2000 he published the highly acclaimed Creating a Culture of Competence (John Wiley & Sons) on how to create high-performing organizations. Boards & Directors published two articles, "How to Hire the Right CEO", in 1998, and "How We Are Finding our Future Leaders" in 2013. His third book, Six Figure Salary Negotiation, was published by Platinum Press in 2008. His first book, "How to Succeed at Love," was published by Prentice-Hall in 1978.