All 128 Division I college football teams are just wrapping up spring training. The senior players are only memories. The incoming class hasn’t yet arrived. And hopes for a successful season are as plentiful as flower blossoms and tree buds.

This flow of players through college football teams is a microcosm of the flow of people and talent through corporations today. The promise of thirty-year employment has long vanished, and with the arrival of the millennial workforce, corporations are struggling with the reality of a “learn-and-leave” mindset. The importance of continuously recruiting new players for college football programs and modern corporations alike has become paramount.

The notion of recruiting has always fascinated us. The most common mantra heard in the hallways of companies today is “hire only the best.” At first blush, this seems to make perfect sense. The implication is that hiring only the best will result in top performance. How true is this assertion? As examining this premise across corporations proves difficult, let’s take a look through the world of college football.

The 2015 college football season ended with Alabama regaining its throne after a convincing victory over Clemson in the title game. Using the final season rankings as our measure of performance, let’s examine the performance ranking of all 128 Division I teams. What influence did recruiting have on this ultimate result?

Every year around this time, each college football program is ranked on the number and quality of its incoming recruits. We’ve compared these two sets of rankings in the chart below. The final standing is based on the 2015 win–loss records. The recruiting rankings are from 2013. We picked this year as the very best players in the college game only stay around for two of the four years they are eligible to play.

Last year’s recruiting headlines might read:

Alabama #1 in Both Recruiting and Final Standings

As you can see, Alabama has a perfect correlation. The team was ranked number one in recruiting and number one in performance. This result, of course, gives credence to the adage, “hire only the best.”

But another significant headline regarding recruiting might read

Navy Finishes the Season at #17 despite Ranking 112th in Recruiting

Navy’s program provides a strong counterargument to the adage that recruiting is the number one priority. Not only does this ranking indicate that factors exist beyond recruiting, Navy’s particular story demonstrates that there are ways to succeed that do not rely on recruiting. When we look at the full spectrum of 128 schools, we can clearly see that while success can be positively impacted by recruiting, it is dependent on more than simply hiring the best.

Let’s look closer:

• Three top twenty-five schools had a strong correlation between their recruiting and their final rankings: Alabama, Ohio State, and Notre Dame
• Of the top twenty-five recruiting schools, nine (or 36 percent) finished the season within +/- 10 percent of their recruiting ranking
• This breakdown holds for all 128 teams:
  • 34 percent fell within the +/- correlated recruiting range
  • 32 percent outperformed their recruiting expectations
  • 34 percent underperformed their recruiting expectations
• Four schools in addition to Navy significantly outperformed their recruiting rankings
  • Houston (7th in performance/76th in recruiting)
  • Utah (18th in performance/67th in recruiting)
  • Iowa (8th in performance/59th in recruiting)
  • TCU (9th in performance/43rd in recruiting)
• Five schools had some clear issues and significantly underperformed their recruiting rankings
  • Auburn (60th in performance/6th in recruiting)
  • Texas A&M (45th in performance/5th in recruiting)
  • Texas (74th in performance/16th in recruiting)
  • South Carolina (95th in performance/19th in recruiting)
  • Kentucky (83rd in performance/22nd in recruiting)

The story painted by this data indicates that while top talent is important, what happens to these potentially high performers when they arrive is equally important: How strong is the program they enter? Does it continue to develop top performers? Is leadership aligned around a clear strategy?

Questions to ponder:

• How would you rate your recruiting program?
• What does your development program look like for your critical roles?
• Are your leaders aligned around your strategy?

Originally published on Outcomes Thinking Blog

The era of work-life balance has evolved due to changes in work flexibility and advances in technology. We now live in a world where the boundaries between work and life and the way we learn and grow, follows suit. To be a top performer in today’s world, you need to drive your own professional growth and development, while maintaining a healthy work-life synergy. The key question is, “How do you effectively integrate a personal learning strategy without experiencing burnout?”

I recently presented a 20-minute webinar covering an expanded definition of self-directed learning and presented a toolkit of steps learners can take to be more effective at owning their self-directed learning strategy. During this interactive webinar, I provided insights on:

• How to develop a personal learning strategy
• Best practices for integrating your strategy as an element of your work-life synergy
• Strategies that learning leaders can use to help support personal learning within their teams and organizations

You can download the full webinar session here. But if you’re looking for the abbreviated version, I’d like to offer a quick look at some of the key takeaways for creating a synergistic self-directed learning plan:

1. Clarify your learning journey
2. Integrate time to learn and reflect
3. Think beyond traditional experiences
4. Expand your moments of learning
5. Create a dynamic list of questions and topics
6. Incorporate brain science into your plan
7. Set smaller, achievable goals and track progress

Are you prepared to own your self-directed learning journey?

Of Fortune 500 companies, 71% have mentoring programs, so it is clear that many organizations see mentoring as a key developmental offering. According to research by Professor David Clutterbuck, “Mentoring’s impact on retention is consistent internationally. One of the most significant ways well-constructed mentoring programs pay for themselves is by increasing the chances people will stay—by at least a third on average.”

But how effective are these programs? The difference between a good and a great program all comes down to program design.

“When effectively designed and managed, formal mentoring makes a positive impact on organizations, women and men, and mentors and mentees. Research shows that well-designed and well-executed programs are well worth the investment” Catalyst

We recently caught up with Jo Gray, Principal Consultant at Clutterbuck Associates, a Division of GP Strategies Ltd., for a 20-minute webinar on Discovering the Why and How of Mentoring.

Sharing insights from her experience, Jo focused on the following questions:

• Why do organizations set up mentoring programs?
• What are the key ingredients of a great mentoring program?
• How can organizations enhance an existing mentoring program?
• What can get in the way of success?
• Why is mentoring still as important as ever?

You can download the full webinar session here. But if you’re looking for the abbreviated version, Jo has offered a quick look at some of the key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Be clear about why you want to implement a program.
2. Prepare, prepare, prepare.
3. If your current program hasn’t been as successful as anticipated, a number of small fixes can be implemented that will have maximum impact.
4. Remember—creating human connections at work has never been more important; mentoring is a great vehicle to bring people together and offer development.

During the session, a number of questions came up, and while we were able to address most of them, we weren’t able to get to all of them due to time. Below are those questions and our best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, so we encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: Should mentees have a say in who their mentors are?

A: Best practice says yes. You will get a much greater commitment from mentees if they have had a say in who their mentors are. Having said that, it can be a very time-consuming process to do this, and you will need a pool of mentors to allow the element of choice. If you’re running a small program with 12 mentor-mentee pairs, sometimes you have no choice but to pair people up based on who you think will work best together.

Q: How important do you think it is to provide a choice of mentor to participants?

A: As stated above, it does add value and if you have the scope of resources to do it, then it’s great to offer this. However, you do have to watch out for giving a totally free choice. Mentees need guidance in making the right choice. You will often find that there are two or three popular mentors, mainly because people are already aware of them as strong people in the business. Sometimes mentees will choose the most senior people, thinking that this is a way to advance their careers (seeing the mentoring as a sponsorship opportunity), or mentees may pick someone who is doing the job they’d like to do in the future. In mentoring, it is arguable that sometimes it is more effective to work with someone who is very different from you, rather than the same. The different perspective you are offered can be even more beneficial.

Q: Are there any good resources on training mentors and mentees?

A: I’m not aware of much material on how to train people to mentor. If you’re setting up a program, the seminal book on the topic is still Professor David Clutterbuck’s Everyone Needs a Mentor—the book does touch on the topic. There are some key elements you’d always want to include, but great mentoring training is about having a facilitator who can share real experiences and help people practice and develop the core skills, including giving them feedback on practice.

Q: Is there a difference between mentoring and coaching, and if so, what is it?

A: There are whole chapters in books on this. But I will venture my opinion here, which is that they are more similar than they are different. I believe that a mentor and a coach use the same skills—listening, questioning, offering feedback, and helping people to find their own solutions. Mentoring and coaching use a lot of the same models and approaches. I think the difference is more in the application: Coaching tends to be shorter term and performance focused, and mentoring tends to be longer term and more career and future focused. However, there are exceptions to all these!

Q: Who should serve as mentors? What factors should play into mentor selection?

A: Mentors are often role models for mentees, so they should be your best people! However, it will depend on the purpose of your program and the needs of your mentees. Graduates probably need to be paired with people who aren’t more than five to six years ahead in their career; those in leadership programs would need to work with leaders.

Q: For mentors in sales, what are your thoughts on having that person be a more experienced teammate (same manager) or someone from another team?

A: I think for it to be a true mentoring relationship, your mentor has to be out of the performance line, that is, not your manager or anyone too close. Mentoring works best when it is a confidential and safe space to share and learn. Regardless of how great your manager or teammate is, you would never be 100% safe to say anything as they will have a say in managing you and your performance. However, that’s not to say that great managers don’t use their mentoring skills to work with their team. They do. In fact, it’s something many mentors report on taking away from mentoring—that they go back and work differently with their team, that is, they listen and question more than they tell.

Q: What if, instead of having a mentoring program, mentoring as a behavior is part of every supervisor/manager’s role? Have you seen this work/not work?

A: Brilliant! This is what great organizations are always looking to achieve—a coaching and mentoring culture. Where everyone understands what a good conversation looks like and regularly employs this approach with peers, managers, direct reports, and clients. I think it takes a high level of organizational maturity and many years of embedding coaching and mentoring behaviors.

Q: In terms of evaluating the program, when is the best time to request feedback from mentees—three or four months after completing the program?

A: I guess evaluation and feedback are two different things. I think you plan your evaluation as you define your purpose. So ideally you will be clear on the measures you are using; it’s great if you can have a mix of quantitative and qualitative. Evaluating on those is good at the mid and end of the program, and you may even want to set a benchmark at the beginning if it is relevant to your measures. I think feedback should be happening all the time! It’s important to do an early, light touch check-in to make sure pairs have actually met and are happy with their match.

Q: How do you recommend recruiting mentors for the program?

A: Set expectations early! Be clear about the skills people need and the commitment you expect from them, and provide a rough guide to the process. The more people know up front, the easier it is for them to self-select. You may well identify a certain group that you need as you’re wanting them to support specific mentee needs, so maybe this will require people to be at a certain grade/level or they do work in specific areas of the business. Make sure you invite people to take part voluntarily, and if that doesn’t bring in enough people, then directly approaching people in your network can help. If this is a new program, ideally you want the best people involved so that you start in a good place.

Q: What are the main soft skills mentors should have?

A: I recently wrote a blog on LinkedIn called “What Makes a Great Mentor?”—this might help.

Q: Our challenge is when we hire well-seasoned salespeople who feel they do not need mentoring as new employees. How do you “sell” a program to potential mentees?

A: It’s really about enabling people to see the huge potential of mentoring. I think some people misunderstand and think this is about training or some kind of support as you might be struggling. But it is so much more. Sometimes offering lunch and learn-type sessions to explore this or having people who can share successful mentoring stories is great. Ultimately, if you can’t convince someone, then you’re probably better off not having them involved as they won’t be committed and will use up the valuable time of a great mentor who could be helping someone else.

Q: Should an employee’s dedication to participation be part of their review? That is, if someone agrees to mentor a new employee but drops the ball, should it be reflected in their merit review?

A: I think this is a great idea, and those mature organizations I mentioned earlier that have a well-established mentoring and coaching culture will definitely recognize these skills and commitments as part of their performance review systems. It would be an expectation of people who took on this type of activity.

Q: Is there a technology you recommend to help support the mentoring program?

A: If you’re looking for a great tool to support your mentoring, check out CRB Hub. This is a system I’ve seen in action, and it’s great and can be totally customized to fit your needs.

Don’t look now, but the digital transformation ship may have left you on the docks. So, what is a digital transformation? As you might guess, there are more than a few definitions floating out there, but here’s a good one that I found in a Forbes article by Jason Bloomberg:

“The realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touchpoint in the customer experience lifecycle.” 

Many companies have already embarked on the digital transformation journey, and inevitably, most will follow. According to Gartner, “by 2020, 75% of businesses will be a digital business or will be preparing to become one.”

My colleague Linda Lamppert is writing a blog series on when “everything old is new again” that focuses on learning. Reading her blog made me think about the recent conversations we’ve been having with our customers on digital transformation. I worry that inevitably there will be those who will invest too much on the technology hype and forget to place the right focus on what is arguably the most important variable—people—just as many did for most of the age of ERP.

Naturally, customers are an important focus of this investment, but where is the mention of the other people, the people whose worthy efforts day in and day out are the foundation of any successful business? Failing to elevate the frontline workforce that supports digital initiatives to the appropriate level of importance will place a costly drag on that initiative and put the overall strategy in serious jeopardy.

We are really in exciting times when in-memory, real-time data access is at our fingertips and where mobile, social, the Internet of Things, the cloud, and other technologies of digital transformation promise to take us to previously unheard of levels of competitiveness. Some even talk of a place where we can leverage these capabilities so that we need have no more fears about our competition disrupting our business and surpassing us. Could it be possible that we will be able to disrupt our own business to create never before imagined success? Imagine the possibilities.

Yet at the same time, although the role and impact of technology in business may help enable incredible success, some basic things remain the same. Yes, what is old is new again! To be successful, humans have to occupy a central focus. The technology is only as good as the worker’s ability to assimilate that data; make quick, insightful decisions; and produce value that will impact the business in a positive way.

Some suggestions as you consider your people strategy:

If you’re looking for a differentiated customer experience and competitive business agility, you should know that a digital platform alone will not deliver that to you. The ability to drive unprecedented value happens on the business front lines. So, if critical roles in your organization do not know what value they must produce at the right time and place in the process, your digital transformation strategy will toil needlessly at sea or it will be doomed to sink.

If you’re interested in reading more about creating programs that are focused on driving this kind of performance, check out this award-winning book The New Game Changers by Butler Newman and Greg Long, two of my colleagues, and get your initiatives to smooth sailing by having the right people in your organization focused on doing the right things.

What are some of your tips for smoother sailing?

When designing technical training, face to face training experience is often the preferred method, but this isn’t always possible and with advances in technology, it may not always be the best approach. The challenge becomes, how do you take all of the information normally conveyed during face to face instruction and map the content to the right modality to get the same outcomes, including when to use hands on experience? Sheri Weppel, Director of Training and eLearning Development, addresses this challenge in our latest video: Rapid Technical Design.

The first step is to identify the top performers. All too often, leaders assume that top performers are the most senior, typically either those who have been in their roles the longest or, worse yet, performed so well that they were promoted into management roles. More on that group in a minute.

First of all, what about the idea that the most senior, usually also the longest tenured, are also the top performers? We would answer with a definite maybe. The problem with that assumption is just that: it’s an assumption. But it’s based on the wrong criteria. In many organizations, promotion to senior status within a role comes from tenure more often than competence. Organizations have a strong tendency to elevate people simply because they have persisted and stuck it out longer than others. But that may not correlate with sustained superior performance, which is the only criteria we should be using when identifying top performers.

So what are the hallmarks of sustained superior performance? Depending on the type of role, there are various indicators. In many roles, such as in call-center or sales organizations, data can be analyzed based on the organization’s business goals. If customer loyalty is a primary goal, then which representatives have the highest satisfaction scores or the best Net Promoter Scores? If the goal is customer expansion, who generates and closes the most new leads? If the goal is customer growth, who garners the largest share of the budget? Note that we didn’t simply ask who generates the most revenue. We’ve found that to be a rather poor indicator of top performance. Revenue is, of course, critical. But it’s usually a level or two removed from what performers can really deliver. Revenue is a result, a way to keep score, but it may not be the best indicator of front line performance.

What about those former performers who are now managers? Well, they aren’t in those roles any longer. That presents two reasons not to select them. First, they were selected (we hope) because of their potential to excel in a different role from the one they were in. There are innumerable stories in every organization about promoting the best sales representative who then turned out to be a mediocre sales manager. Or just the opposite: sometimes a mediocre sales representative who possesses exceptional leadership and management skills turns out to be a great sales manager.

Second, but related to the first reason, these managers are no longer performing the job. Therefore, they can no longer demonstrate through observation those nuances that mark an unconsciously competent top performer.

Question to ponder: For your critical roles, who are the top performers? On what basis do you know?

For more than a decade, many Fortune 500 power companies have embraced Operational Excellence (OE) as a way to improve unit performance, decrease human error, lower O&M costs, and achieve many other important goals. In the power industry, these OE projects are usually performed on a “fleet-wide” basis under the direction of senior leadership. Creating value from an OE effort can be difficult due to many factors, including the following:

• Differing plant designs
• Variable power purchase/dispatching agreements
• Unique international/cultural aspects
• Aging workforce challenges

GP Strategies supports OE projects with major utilities in 12 foreign countries and across the US. Although some aspects of each project are unique, every OE project involves the following five tasks:

• Designing the OE framework and overall approach to the project
• Creating the KPI scorecards to be used for OE tracking and reporting
• Assessing the OE baseline ratings for each asset
• Analyzing and benchmarking the asset performance to recognized standards
• Establishing a robust continuous improvement process

During a recent 20-minute webinar, I offered a practical guide for companies that are implementing an OE project across a diverse set of assets. You can download the full session here. But if you’re looking for the abbreviated version, I wanted to offer a quick look at some of the key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Operational Excellence (OE) involves continuous improvement (CI) to the KPIs that matter most to your business.
2. OE is based on many different CI methodologies and approaches such as Lean, Six Sigma, HPI, and others.
3. The goal of OE is to change the organizational culture to be more focused on high performance.
4. Our OE team can assist with any questions you may have regarding our systematic, five-step approach to OE for power companies and/or other organizations.

During the session, a number of questions came up, and while we were able to address most of them, we weren’t able to get to all of them due to time. Below are those questions and our best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, so I encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: Do you recommend that clients use internal resources for OpEx projects, or is outside help usually needed?

A: We recommend a combination. There is great benefit to internal approaches and peer-to-peer reviews. But using a 3^rd party gives an independent perspective that might otherwise be missed.

Q: What are some of the ways you increase “buy-in” at the plant level for OpEx projects?

A: First, have a very robust communication plan for all stakeholders. Disseminating detailed information (before, during, and after) regarding the OE goals and processes is critical to help avoid push-back. Second, be sure to celebrate the “successes” that the OE process identifies. This will help create strong buy-in and allow you to spread best practices across the fleet.

Q: How can this guide be applied to industries outside of utilities?

A: The OE process is easily transferred to other industries. It is the target KPIs and metrics that will change the most.

Q: Who develops the KPIs? Is that done at the plant level or is it based on benchmarking?

A: The KPIs are developed by the companies, but our OE team often helps with the selection process. You will find that corporate and the plants often want different KPIs. Similarly, the KPIs desired from plant to plant can vary, too. Having a 3^rd party involved adds some objectivity. KPIs are selected first, and then you should decide on benchmarking sources and targets.

A quick survey of the impact of technology in the global workplace over the last 25 years easily points to dramatic changes throughout global corporations.  Many aspects of the specific impact on corporate people strategies are readily apparent. There is one impact, however, that has largely gone unnoticed and it is leading to repercussions up and down the corporate structure.

In a recent 20-minute webinar, Butler Newman and I shared insights on:

• Relevant technology trends impacting the HCM market
• A new approach for your human capital strategy
• What people value in a modern workplace
• How to leverage the Design Point

You can download the full session here. But if you’re looking for the abbreviated version, I wanted to offer a quick look at some of the key takeaways from the webinar:

• Context is still critical. Particularly, what specific role an individual is filling and what the organization’s definition of success in that role is.
• Top Performers balance both purposeful execution and skillful human interactions. Both are essential for success. Gone are the days when simply focusing on tasks was sufficient for success.
• It is not necessary to hire only the very best A players. With a deliberate process, good performers can produce great results. Focusing on outcomes, understanding the context and equipping people with both task and human interaction skills will produce the results businesses need.

During the session, a number of questions came up, and while we were able to address most of them, we weren’t able to get to all of them due to time. Below are those questions and our best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, so Butler and I encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: Do all jobs have human interaction skills, or are there some with just task completion?

A: Not 100%, but certainly all the critical ones in today’s complex work environment.

Q: How should learning organizations use this information?  What actions do you recommend?

A: We recommend a 3 step approach:

1. For any given role, assess the outcomes necessary to produce excellent results
2. Analyze each outcome for both task execution and human interaction components
3. Evaluate existing equipping programs for gaps in preparing individuals to produce the desired outcomes

Q: ­How do you move people from a task environment to a human interaction environment­?

A: First identify the skills needed for both task and human interaction axes. Then assess people’s readiness to perform along both axes and then develop a personal equipping plan to close any identified gaps.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been around for a while now and perhaps crested their peak on the “hype curve” with the “Year of the MOOC” as declared in 2013 by The New York Times. Yet MOOCs, or some variation of them, seem to be here to stay.

MOOCs have spawned a range of variants, including:

• BOOCs (Big Open Online Courses), which are similar to MOOCs but are limited to a smaller amount of students, typically 50.
• SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses), which are similar to BOOCs in that the class sizes are limited, but the teacher-student interactions are more closely modeled after traditional classroom interactions. SPOCs typically use the “flipped classroom” model.
• DOCCs (Distributed Online Collaborative Courses) are courses in which the same core course material is distributed to students at multiple institutions, but the exact administration of the material can vary. Students can also engage with each other across institutions via the online component.

At least two of the aforementioned variations specifically take the “M” (or Massive) out of the MOOC, and all models rely heavily on participation and collaboration among the participants.

Does a move away from “massive” place more focus on “meaningful”?

As the dust begins to settle around MOOCs, their efficacy is coming under increasing scrutiny, particularly by those in the academic field.

A September 2015 study by Patrick Lowenthal and Charles Hodges set out to hold MOOCs up against some of the same quality standards that traditional online courses are expected to meet. The study found that none of the MOOCs in the sample did particularly well in the standard surrounding learning objectives. The authors go on to point out they concluded that the failure of meeting the learning objectives standard is more about transparency than whether the course was designed around clear learning objectives. Finally, the study concludes that MOOCs have the potential to be high-quality online courses, at least in terms of course design. The authors state that high-quality (designed) online courses do not simply happen on their own; rather, they are the result of the intentional application of a systematic process of design and evaluation with a goal of improvement over time.

If the maturation of MOOCs is indeed moving from massive to meaningful, this might be evidenced in the rise of more collaborative and social learning platforms and experiences.

Whether it be through ad-hoc learning sessions on platforms like Jabber, Yammer, or Tribe, or more structured collaboration and curation systems such as Degreed or Learnify, knowledge transfer is becoming more and more learner-centered and driven; MOOCs have likely had a significant impact on this democratization of learning.

By opening up learning experiences to the masses, MOOCs have to some degree separated the wheat from the chaff in filtering out truly engaged and involved learners from the “window shoppers,” thus driving the move from “massive” to “meaningful.” So if the next generation of MOOCs do in fact evolve to “Meaningful Open Online Courses,” then they continue to make their mark in the learning ecosphere.

What have your experiences with MOOCs been? Massive? Meaningful? Mysterious? Please comment below and let’s continue the discussion!