The Performance Improvement Blog

Investing in Training in Downturns and Upturns

2012-01-26T11:12:11-05:00

The U.S. is emerging from a training drought that occurred during the worst economic period since the Great Depression. At least, that’s what’s indicated by organizations that do this kind of
research. ASTD reports an increase in spending on L&D in 2010 (latest year for which data is available); they estimate companies spent about $171.5 billion. Bersin & Associates reports that corporate spending on training increased 9.5% in 2011 – the largest gain in three years. And Training magazine’s research found a 13% increase in spending on L&D in 2011. Each of these studies uses a different method for calculating spending. However, the trend is undeniable: spending on employee training is increasing.

With this increase in spending comes a great opportunity to do things right. In our book, The 5As Framework, Sean Murray and I wrote that most training programs significantly impact only 10% to 20% of their participants. This represents a huge waste that no organization can afford any longer. As the worldwide recession comes to an end, organizations must use every dollar very wisely. Garry Marsh, director of the U.K. company THM Business Simulations, gives us some thoughts about best ways to use those dollars. Here are those seven ideas with my spin on each one:

Get it right first time – Think in terms of what learners need, not the latest training fad (content or delivery). Only provide experiences that will help learners improve performance and contribute to achieving the strategic goals of the organization – no more and no less. Pay attention to the quality of content and quality of the learning intervention.
Keep employee satisfaction high – Involving employees in opportunities to learn is an effective way to increase engagement. Many employees value learning more than a pay increase. To keep engagement high, make continuous learning part of the culture of the organization.
Train your managers – Many managers did not reach that position because they were great managers of people. This is something that all managers need to keep learning. And if organizations want to prevent their top talent from leaving as the economy improves, they must give managers the opportunity to learn and grow.
Focus on customer experience – All organizations should have the improvement of customer experience as one of their top strategic goals. To achieve this goal, they will have to train employees in how to create a better experience. Learning about the customer experience should be on every manager’s agenda.
Spend less, get more – Organizations should not rely on the usual suspects and usual methods for delivery of training. It’s about learning; it’s not about glitzy programs. It doesn’t have to cost much to develop talent. Maybe a manager will become a more effective team leader with the help of a mentor. Maybe a manager will become more effective at giving performance feedback with the help of a coach. Maybe a manager will become better at financial management by attending the CEO’s “open-book” meetings.
Be ready for the upturn – As the economy improves and companies start hiring again, the best talent will look elsewhere. They have stayed only because nobody else was growing and hiring. Unless managers continue to see opportunities in their current organizations and they feel respect from their leadership, they will be gone. Organizations should do something about these conditions now.
Look after yourself – Many resources are available to help any organization be successful while keeping costs low. Look for help internally and externally. Use what the organization already owns when that makes sense and then go outside to peers, consultants, and training organizations when they can help you improve performance and achieve your business goals.

Can Groups Be Creative?

2012-01-18T07:00:00-05:00

It would be easy to become anti-teamwork after reading “The Rise of the New Groupthink”, a Sunday New York Times opinion piece written by Susan Cain, author of the forthcoming book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” She writes a thought-provoking article that challenges the prevailing thinking about employee innovation and creativity. In effect, she makes the case for solo innovation. While I agree that organizations try to do too much in groups, I fear that an article like this might prompt managers to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Cain starts with this generalization about workplaces:

Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

This describes the image, not the reality. First of all, most of us are in work groups, not teams, at least not the kind of teams that Katzenbach and Smith (and others) define as being a team. And work group meetings tend to be poorly planned and badly run. I’ve posted about this previously. As for people skills, managers sure don’t act like these are prized abilities. A command-and-control management style still dominates the workplace. And regarding collaboration, too few managers and employees know how to collaborate effectively. To them, collaboration means ccing everyone on an email.

There is much rhetoric about teamwork and collaboration, but these behaviors are still very rare in organizations today. So to indict the current work environment as not being conducive to creativity and innovation because it is too collaborative misses what is actually happening in the typical workplace. In fact, employees are not collaborative enough.

Cain is also critical of group brainstorming. She writes,

…brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity…The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

I believe the problem is in the implementation, not the method. Any group that makes a list of ideas these days calls it “brainstorming”. This is not the kind of brainstorming which results in new and better ideas. When done right, brainstorming is free-flowing, non-judgmental, and relies on the dynamic interaction of everyone in the group, regardless of status. Unfortunately, every manager thinks that he or she can manage a brainstorming session. After all, how difficult can it be to ask a question and make a list of the answers? However, effective brainstorming requires highly skilled facilitation and not every manager has the skills and temperament needed to provide this to a group. An effective brainstorming leader ensures that everyone is engaged in the work, encourages everyone to contribute their own feelings and beliefs to the conversation, and doesn’t allow one or two people to dominate the conversation.

Isolating everyone and putting up barriers to interaction is just as counterproductive as forcing everyone to interact with others all day long. Some people need some quiet and solitude to be at their productive best and some people need some social interaction. Even the research cited by Cain supports this notion. Not everyone in the research populations she cited seeks isolation. The last thing you want to do is label someone “introvert” based on an assessment tool and then make that person toil alone until they come up with the next big idea. While some people can’t tolerate frequent interruptions, becoming tense and irritable, others thrive on the chaos and perform best in that kind of high-energy, social environment.

We need to do a better job of helping employees figure out in what kinds of environments and on what kinds of projects they work best and provide those conditions for them. We need managers who take responsibility for helping employees optimize performance. And we need leaders who can build teams that nurture creative and innovative thinking.

Thank you, Susan Cain, for stimulating this blog post.

Ban Those Words!

2012-01-13T12:43:08-05:00

In my last blog post, I wrote about the Harvard Business Review blogger Dan Pallotta and his post titled, “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore.” He writes about business buzz words and how they get in the way of clear communication. Speaking of words that do not improve communication, Lake Superior State University recently announced its "37th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness."

The words for 2012 are:

Amazing
Baby Bump
Shared Sacrifice
Occupy
Blowback
Man Cave
The New Normal
Pet Parent
Win The Future
Trickeration
Ginormous
Thank You In Advance

Read the entertaining comments about these words on the LSSU Web site.

What words do you think should be on the list? "Learning Organization" would be my nomination.

What Do You Mean?

2012-01-03T07:00:00-05:00

Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and HBR blogger, in a post titled “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore”, writes about business jargon and how it affects communication in organizations. The blog post must have hit a nerve because it has broken the record for most comments to a single HBR Blog Network post.

One of these comments is a perfect way to begin 2012. That is, with humor that pokes fun at ourselves and the way we talk to each other. The commenter, BrainToniq (Scott Ohlgren), writes as if talking to his staff:

While in the run-up to transitioning in this phase of right-sizing and redeployment, we still need to—at the end of the day—drill down and make sure that our mission-critical, goal-oriented core competencies are in alignment and on the same page as the most current best-practices paradigm. While we as a customer-centric longtail company are still on the runway, we need to each firewall enough time to allow out-of-the-box thinking and strategize the low-hanging fruit in the marketplace. Envisioning the metrics here will require accountability management on each team member to come up with a value-added solution that doesn’t require putting out fires or a lot of bandwidth. Bottom line? The truth is we have to step up, work smarter, not harder, and create a Web 2.0 solution. This is an exciting model for limitless potential and mutually agreed synergies!

I’ve got an open door policy, so touch base and keep me in the loop. If we can move forward and proactively get on the same page about this, it’ll be a win-win-win. Remember: our people make the difference.

Come again? The truth is this is how we sound sometimes. And with email, text messaging, and all of the forms of social media, the use of buzzwords to replace plain speaking has gotten much worse. We are sacrificing clarity for brevity, which means there is greater risk of miscommunication.

Dan Pallotta’s solution is to “speak authentically” in communicating with employees and customers. He writes:

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, "I don't have any idea what you just said to me."

Let's hope communication improves in all of our organizations in 2012.

A Year of “The Performance Improvement Blog” in Review

2011-12-29T07:00:00-05:00

It’s that time of year again. It seems like everyone has their top this or top that from 2011. Not to be left out, I thought I would do a little year-end reflecting of my own.

Throughout 2011, I used this blog to shed some light on critical leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from “the vision thing”, to shaping organizational culture, to improving the effectiveness of employee training programs, to building trust, to breaking down communication silos, to doing better presentations, to seeing organizational blind spots, to increasing employee engagement, and more.

Out of all of these blog posts I’ve selected five that seem to have had the most interest for readers. They are:

Hospital Culture Trumps Equipment and Techniques - Culture, with all of its values, assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms, is a powerful force within organizations. Culture shapes how things are done. In hospitals, culture has life and death implications. Evidence suggests that health care outcomes are improved when the culture of a hospital encourages trust and honesty among staff and with patients and when people act consistently in accordance with these values.

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation: A Critique – I explain why evaluating training by using a survey that asks trainees questions about each of the “Kirkpatrick Four Levels” is a flawed way to determine if that program is having a meaningful impact on an organization. Although a four-levels survey is a very common way to approach evaluation of training in organizations, it probably will not provide managers with the information they need. I suggest an alternative approach.

Performance Management is Broken - What is intended to pass for performance management in too many organizations today is the annual compulsory performance review. To label this a “performance management system” is to give the process much more credit than it deserves. A perfunctory meeting between a manager and employee once a year to review a standard rating sheet that lists competencies and goals that are probably no longer relevant, is not a performance management system.

How to Use PowerPoint – Millions of presentations are given every day using some form of slideware, often PowerPoint. It is an important communication tool of managers. Yet, management’s messages are not getting across. I frequently hear that employees didn’t know something that had been mentioned in an all-staff presentation, or that they didn’t realize its importance, or that they didn’t understand what it had to do with them. Apparently, PowerPoint slides are, in many cases, failing to communicate key messages. I refer the reader to suggestions for more powerful PowerPoint presentations.

20 Signs of Employee Disengagement - An important question for all managers is, “Do I have an employee engagement problem in my organization?" You don’t need an organization-wide survey to answer this question. Pay attention to what your employees are saying and doing. Look and listen for the clues. This blog post lists twenty tell-tale signs of disengagement.

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2012!

Evidence-Informed Practice

2011-12-20T08:48:08-05:00

Some nonprofit organizations, in an effort to improve outcomes for their clients and to be more accountable for results, are applying an “evidence-informed practice” approach to their work. They are examining practices that have been proven to be effective and applying this experience to their own delivery of services. They are taking adult learning theory and systems thinking, combining that with evidence from program evaluation studies, and using the information to make their own organizations more effective.

For example, PART (Practice and Research Together) is promoting evidence-informed practice in child welfare agencies across Ontario, Canada. In November, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at a
retreat in Toronto for members of PART. Formed in 2006, PART is modeled after Research in Practice, a world-renowned partnership of children’s services in the U.K. that is “creating new knowledge, new skills and a new energy to improve outcomes for children, young people and their families.”

At their retreat, I talked with PART members about developing a learning culture in their agencies that would help them in the process of continuous improvement. We discussed making reflection, feedback, and knowledge-sharing the way they function on a day-to-day basis. We identified organizational barriers to learning and how those barriers can be overcome. We explored ideas around building their organizational capacity to apply action-learning through small experiments using Deming’s model of plan-do-check-act. They shared ways in which they are continuously learning from their own experiences and from the knowledge and best practices of others.

Many of these ideas were taken from my book, Developing a Learning Culture in Nonprofit Organizations, and then incorporated into the PART guidebook, Broadening Horizons: Linking Evidence to Child Welfare Supervision, which can be ordered from PART. I’m very pleased to see a book of mine having practical value and being interpreted for child welfare organizations.

My warning to these child welfare agencies, as well as any organization that’s taking an evidence-based approach, is: guard against ways of thinking that prevent the acceptance of new information. I’ve written previously about “confirmation bias” and the “illusion of cause.” Both of these common ways of thinking are barriers to evidence-informed practice. Human beings have a tendency to attend to data that confirms what they already believe to be true and disregard the rest (e.g., a respected leader would never abuse a child), and to attribute a causal relationship between factors simply because they occur close in time (e.g., a child has poor grades because his father is out of work). We all believe that we are reasonable people and that we base our judgment on facts, but sometimes we won’t accept the truth.

What Kind of Leader Are You?

2011-12-16T09:30:13-05:00

“What kind of leader do I want to be?” This is the question that leadership expert Meg Wheatley asks us to ask ourselves. She talks about the tendency of leaders in challenging economic times to resort to a command-and-control style of leadership, even though this is not what is best for the organization. In an interview Art Kleiner did with her for strategy+business, she said:

In most companies, we do not have (and I believe won’t have for the foreseeable future) the money to fund the work that we have to do. Leaders have two choices. One, they can tap the invisible resource of people who become self-motivated when invited to engage together. This approach has well-documented results in higher productivity, innovation, and motivation, but it requires a shift from a fear-based approach to a belief in the capacity of most people to contribute, to be creative, and to be motivated internally. Alternatively, they can continue to slash and burn, tightening controls, and using coercive methods to enforce the cuts. This destroys capacity, yet it is the more common approach these days.

This “more common approach” is being played out in health care these days. For example, hospitals are making deep cuts in nursing staff. I have no way of knowing if these layoffs are the only option for those hospitals. I do know that employee engagement and quality of care will suffer greatly in the process.

Regardless of evidence to the contrary, many executives, faced with difficult challenges to their leadership, almost reflexively, impose rules and restrictions on and increase monitoring of employees. The result is that employees put more time and energy into managing these controls and less into innovation and customer service.

Data is Not Knowledge

2011-12-12T09:24:18-05:00

I like this quote by the Swedish author Henning Mankell that appeared in a Sunday New York Times op-ed column titled “The Art of Listening”: “

Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.

We are awash with data and information. Numbers, facts, and observations are constantly at our fingertips in our Blackberrys, iPhones, and Droids. Online newspapers, magazines, and social media smother us in sense and nonsense. Marketing and survey research companies publish mounds of opinion data daily. The key question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we learning anything? Are we turning that data and information into knowledge that can be applied for the betterment of our organizations?”

TED and the pecha-kucha movement provide excellent examples of how data can become knowledge and move people to action. Those presenters tell a story about their data that engages people emotionally. They realize that just because someone has data doesn’t mean they have knowledge.

This graphic, from Epic.graphic, makes the point:

20 Signs of Employee Disengagement

2011-12-07T10:04:18-05:00

Employee engagement seems to be the current hot topic of survey organizations. Gallup, Mercer, BlessingWhite, and others are regularly conducting national and international studies of engagement. It’s interesting to discover from these surveys that roughly 30% of employees indicate that they are engaged in their work.

However, the more important question for you is, “Do I have an employee engagement problem in my organization?" You don’t need an organization-wide survey to answer this question. Pay attention to what your employees are saying and doing. Look and listen for the clues. Jim Stilwell, of Arborquest Consulting, and I have identified twenty tell-tale signs of disengagement. They are:

High turnover – the rate of employees leaving the organization is greater than what you want in this type of business
Absenteeism – the amount of time workers are gone from their jobs is hurting performance
Disgruntled/complaining/whining employees – negative comments about the work and the organization have become common place and are poisoning the environment
Time off-task resolving employee problems – you and other managers are spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with individual problems and with conflicts among employees
Employees and managers blaming others – people bring complaints to you without accepting any responsibility for their contribution to the problems
Lack of teamwork – employees resist cooperation and collaboration on tasks that require teamwork to succeed
Lack of performance feedback – employees don’t know where they stand in terms of their performance; they don’t know from day to day if they are doing well or doing poorly and what they need to do to improve
Lack of learning – employees don’t ask for opportunities to learn different jobs, improve their skills in their current jobs, or prepare for future positions
Difficulty attracting and retaining talent – you can’t find the right people for the work that needs to get done; when you do have the right people, they tend to be attracted to opportunities elsewhere
Difficulty developing talent, especially leadership talent – few employees are aspiring to or stepping up to leadership roles on teams, on projects, and for open positions
Poor product and service quality – employees are not doing their best work, are not paying attention to customer needs, and are not showing a high level of concern for quality
Customer dissatisfaction – you are hearing customer complaints that could have been prevented if employees cared more about the work that they are doing
Vendor dissatisfaction – you are hearing complaints from vendors that could have been prevented if employees cared more about their relationships with external business suppliers and partners
Low compliance with rules, regulations, and processes – employees are not attending to the legal and normative expectations of the organization; they are putting the organization at risk by their complacency
Theft, shrinkage, and waste – these inventory and operational losses are happening at a higher rate than what can be tolerated in this kind of business
High injury rate and poor safety – employees are neglecting the standards that create a safe work environment
Lack of innovation and creativity – you are not hearing new product and service ideas and new problem-solving suggestions from employees
Lack of initiative – employees are not acting on their own to start new projects that contribute to the ongoing success of the organization
Lack of trust – employees don’t come to you with their concerns, suggestions, and new ideas; they don’t ask for help in handling challenging tasks and interpersonal situations
Lack of recognition and celebration – employees don’t take time to publicly acknowledge the success of individuals, the success of teams, and the success of the organization as a whole

If you see any of these behaviors in your organization, then you probably have an employee engagement problem. You don’t need to do another survey. You need to start addressing the problem before you lose the hearts and minds of your most talented employees.

Re-Recruitment and Re-Engagement

2011-12-01T11:09:32-05:00

Every new employee, whether a front-line worker or top level executive, comes to the job with a high level of excitement and a strong desire to do well. Then, sometime during their tenure in their companies, most cease being engaged and many start to look elsewhere for new opportunities. Companies cannot afford to have a disengaged workforce and lose their talent to competitors. This is true now more than ever.

A survey for the American Psychological Association conducted by Harris Interactive at the beginning of February shows that the stress and dissatisfaction workers feel is related to a number of factors. They write:

Money may be on workers’ minds, but that isn’t the only reason the American workforce is unhappy. Employees also cited lack of opportunities for growth and advancement (43 percent), heavy workload (43 percent), unrealistic job expectations (40 percent) and long hours (39 percent) as significant sources of stress. Additionally, less than half of employees (43 percent) said they receive adequate non-monetary rewards and recognition for their contributions at work and only 57 percent reported being satisfied with their employer’s work-life practices. Just 52 percent of employees said they feel valued on the job, only two thirds reported being motivated to do their best at work and almost a third (32 percent) indicated that they intend to seek employment elsewhere within the next year.

One of the most telling numbers in these findings is that only 52% feel valued. No wonder nearly a third are looking to change companies. In this economic environment (or at any time, for that matter), organization leaders should not neglect the hearts and minds of their employees, especially top talent. As I’ve written in previous blog posts, as soon as the economy starts to improve, those folks will leave, taking all of their knowledge and skills with them. And latest retail and hiring numbers indicate that the U.S. economy is starting to move in a positive direction.

Managers need to focus on re-recruitment and re-engagement of their employees, now. That same spark that people felt when they were hired must be re-ignited. Think about what you say to people you are recruiting to entice them to join your organization and how you could say that to veteran employees to keep them committed and doing their best work. Katherine Jones posted five re-recruitment “questions every manager should be able to answer” about an employee:

When was the last time I told this employee that his or her work was valued?
When was the last time this employee got a raise or promotion in the company?
Do I know what areas might impact this employee’s satisfaction with work? (Long commutes, commitments with children or parents that may mean a home office would create a more positive working condition.)
Does the employee perceive that the company or department is fair and equitable in issues of salary, bonus, rewards and other recognition?
Do [I] burden the employee with excessive and perhaps unnecessary administrative work that detracts from the ability to spend time on the real tasks at hand?

I would add another question to this list: Does the employee know where the company is headed and how he/she fits into this picture? The results of two surveys of the U.S. workforce conducted by Modern Survey earlier this year indicate that the primary driver of engagement is “belief in the future of the company.” Don MacPherson, President of Modern Survey, believes that this finding is a wakeup call for CEOs to aggressively and intentionally let people know where their companies are headed and how they will get there. He writes:

Enlightened CEOs are communicating to their employees about the future of their organizations. They are providing the necessary roadmap for company success. They are transparent even in difficult times because they know that in the absence of information employees will make up their own reality…and it won’t be pretty…The CEOs around the country who aren’t enlightened better wake up. It’s a scary place out there and a lot of employees feel lost right now. Step up and show people the way or expect that employees won’t be bringing their best to the job – they’ll be too preoccupied with the frightening environment around them.

Companies have a tendency to front-load the employee experience with the great expectations that will attract those workers to the organization and get them off to a good start. Then these companies seem to take their talent for granted. That is very risky behavior. As we see from survey after survey, a large percentage of employees are disengaged, which means they are not giving all they have to their work and their eyes are looking for greener pastures.

What do you do to re-recruit and re-engage your best employees?