What is the technical incompetence they are willing to allow candidates to have? It seems ridiculous that any leader would come to the table without the basic technical competencies for technology (MS Office and online technologies) and any leader that doesn’t have all the technical competencies of a leader, budgeting or HR law for example, is a weak leader.

How can a weak leader support the vision and the culture of an organization? A weak leader will be forced to support themselves and their weaknesses. The culture now becomes about covering mistakes and eliminating threats (employees who may have the competencies the leader lacks). Weak leaders will also support each other because anyone truly competent would recognize the incompetence and possibly threaten the weak managers. That is the problem with incompetence, it doesn’t always seek opportunities for competency but breeds insecurity which means propping up the incompetence.

The only culture that could support and nurture a weak leader is a culture of learning but most leaders see themselves as competent because they are leader. "Hey, I’ve been promoted to a leadership position, I’m doing something right!"

Can an organization support and develop weak leaders? What would they need to have in place? Can a leader own up to incompetence to develop themselves?

There are still things that I want to learn just because I’m curious and it seems like a handy thing to know:

Picking locks – I have no plan to start breaking and entering places but for all the times I’ve been locked out of homes or rooms I think it would be useful!

Hotwiring a car – again, I don’t have any plan to start stealing but you see it all the time in the movies, it just seems like a fun thing to know.

Spinning – I have always wanted to learn how to spin yarn. Taking something like a pile of fleece and creating something so useful is a little magical. It is one of those skills that seems like a life-saver in the event of all our technology going away.

What are some of the things you have always had a secret desire to learn?

I’ve also seen shockingly incompetent leaders and I’m always amazed that they made it to a leadership position when they are clearly so unsuccessful. Unfortunately, this generally happens at the expense of talented people and because of incompetent leaders on up the ladder. It is a house of cards but it is a prevalent condition that exists across organizations and industry. I have yet to meet someone who hasn’t been the victim of an incompetent leader.

Psychology Today has a really interesting article about the behaviors of leaders that fail. I think I recognize all these behaviors in organizations.

How do leaders “get away” with behaviors that fail? There is often a culture within leadership of protecting each other because it protects leadership reputation in general. But that begins to impact their own credibility. Interestingly enough, in all the research I’ve done in what behaviors and qualities great leaders have, credibility rarely, if ever, comes up. I think it should be one of the top 5.

If an employee doesn’t believe their leader has what it takes to be a good leader, how motivated are they going to be to implement strategies? Will they go the extra mile to make something happen or do they believe their time and resources are wasted and they move on to something they believe to be a better use of their time?

I frequently hear “how do we get excellent employees?” I believe it begins with excellent leaders.

Wow, we have a superstar this week! I love it when someone integrates models and fits all the puzzle pieces together! Check out how the ADDIE model, Phillips Needs model and Kirkpatrick’s integrate. I’m going to go out on an enthusiastic limb and suggest all training orgs print this out and discuss it in their next team meetings.

A list of the top e-learning tools. This is another source of information training departments should review to make sure the tools in their toolbox are meeting their needs and to see what else is out there.

Another list of e-learning tools and this one includes the open-source versions. I’m giving you training orgs so much good information today I should be on your payroll!

When talking about leadership development we can’t ignore the Peter Principle. Personally I blame the promoters/hirerers who know what the job requires and should be checking existing skills and experiences to meet these. We can’t keep holding people accountable for not knowing what they don’t know.

By the way, if you are ever curious what articles I’m going through to get my weekly roundup, I list the articles at the bottom of the site. The articles change almost daily.

This is an interesting article about social learning. My immediate thought is that this is a great strategy for learners performing similar job tasks that are separated geographically and on different shifts. It seems like a variation of cohort groups which I’ve found to be highly successful for myself as a learner.

My interest in leadership development has been peaked with each news story about failures and meltdowns. However, I think one of the early statements in this article is incorrect. I don’t believe we can teach ethics. Ethics are values and we can influence them, we can teach ethical behaviors, we can create an ethical environment but I don’t believe we can train ethics. I’d be curious to see what you think.

Absolutely fascinating article about cognitive dissonance and how this can negatively impact the results from a training program. This is not something I had ever considered (or I should say, successfully articulated. Usually I just say “they think everything is fine!”) but it is absolutely something I’ve dealt with in organizations. I’m sure you have too. Now, how do we tactfully communicate this when we come across it?

I haven’t even completely digested this article yet but it has some really good information. I’ve worked in training departments that were creating great content but struggling to get the learning audience to engage in the material rather than just check it off a list. Blended learning is clearly going to help it be more effective but I see the role social learning plays in helping engage learners.

So many times, teams or departments, or even entire organizations become homogenous because the organizations are using the same criteria for hiring and promoting. I don’t mean that people doing the same job should have different job descriptions but there is a tendency to take a quick look at skill sets and experience (this is often done by the recruiter before the team even looks at the candidate) and then the focus becomes about “fit.”

While I agree, we need to know if the person is a good fit on the team and can they be successful (and I’ve been a bad fit myself before which is no fun!) I think this opens us up to the danger of making sure we are hiring people like us. People who think like us, work like us, problem-solve like us, etc. This creates a homogenous team which is ever in danger of falling into group-think or just not recognizing all the different opinions and experiences of those we touch. Especially our customers. If we don’t understand what our customer’s want and where they are coming from, there is no way we can effectively meet their needs and they just won’t be our customers for long.

Diversity is not just about culture, it should BE organizations’ culture.

The question of excellence is a legitimate question and I like hearing that an organization is focused on bringing the right people into positions. But I think this point of view can get skewed and I see organizations letting talent slip through their fingers because they are waiting for all their people to follow them when really, the organization should be following their people. If leadership has done its job and provided a clear vision, it is the talent that will lead a company and make it succeed. Rather than getting worker bees to complete the tasks set out for them, an organization can utilize the power of the employee population and combined education/experience pool to help strategize and implement.

I see potentially great organizations stuck in mediocrity because rather than utilize the talent pool they have or could have, they just want people to do task work. They are more interested in headcount and salary than hiring great talent that may take them to places they never imagined they could and would go. Visions are about potential. Now this may all sound loosy-goosy and impractical. I’m not saying the organization ignores its basic mission in favor of fun pie-in-the-sky projects. This is about giving employees some latitude and support to innovate even the basic mission tasks. Just because one process has worked doesn’t mean it is scalable over time. All processes should be reviewed and improved and even automated down the line somewhere.

I can’t tell you have many organizations I’ve talked to over the years where I discussed what they were doing and what they could do to advance their own work. Time and time again their response is "Wow, we aren’t ready for you yet. Maybe in two or three years…" That always floors me. What do they need two or three years to do? Why wouldn’t they start making changes now so that in two or three years they have those changes implemented? Why put off growth? They just set themselves up to hit a crises first and then they are scrambling to implement change as a response.

Hiring someone should mean matching education and experience with the skill set required for the job. But once they are in, if they aren’t succeeding, simply wondering why the employee isn’t excellent is a mistake and a missed opportunity. What is wrong in the organization where the person with the knowledge and the skill can’t succeed? What barriers are preventing their success? To some people this sounds like coddling but this is also an indication of something that is broken. If a person doesn’t have the resources or the support to be successful, it is likely most people will fail in that position. In fact, it may mean that the WRONG people end up succeeding. Then the question of excellent employee becomes about having the wrong people in the wrong places and whose fault is that?

This is a great tool for anyone that wants to know more about Twitter and especially how it could fit in with learning.

Discovery learning is a fabulous way to engage learners and improve retention. This is well worth signing up to get the white paper.

Evaluating e-learning. This is a great, high-level model for measuring the effectiveness of an e-learning program. I like this as a starting point but I think any training organization should think about how each step is implemented for them. Define those and they have some actions they can take. But this model would be great for any team to start their e-learning evaluation process.

This is a great case stated for the effectiveness of formal learning. I see so many organizations get impatient with the time and resources formal learning takes and try to ditch it for informal, or peer-based, learning. That is very frustrating as a learning professional because we know exactly what is going to happen. Heck, we could probably plot the results out on a calendar for them.

Before I left my last organization I suggested that they release their next big product through employee social networking. I thought this would be a really fun way to reward employees (giving them first dibs to share with their family and friends) and I think the organization would be shocked how successfully this gets rolled out world-wide just through employee social networks. So this post really resonated with me for not only external product launches but internal product launches. When Google was rolling out Google Wave, they did it on an invitation-basis. People who were invited in were given five or six invitations they could send out and each of those people were given five or six invitations and so on. I didn’t even really understand what it was yet and I was dying to get invited in to see! What a fantastic way to create anticipation.

If a training isn’t required for certification or compliance reasons, if it was an “optional” but best-practices training, it would be a fantastic way to create buzz and gain an audience that may otherwise be kind of hard to bring into the training.

What would an internal campaign like this look like?

Are we losing our trainers to developers? What happens to a training organization that replaces performance-focused trainers with an instructional design team. The training can definitely be pushed out more quickly but what is it doing to the learning? This makes me think of the template debate. Can an organization create a form or a template that a subject matter expert uses to plug in the content? If there is an instructional designer working on the content before it is released to learners, wouldn’t this be an effective way of quickly releasing needed information?

I love standards, don’t get me wrong. Past colleagues can attest that I am, perhaps, overly-fond of standards (Laurie! Loosen up!) but trying to take content and cram it into the same template is removing context and discounting the audience. It can turn it into abstract content and lose all effectiveness. The organization is lucky if some of their employees are able to apply this content to their jobs.

How do we stay nimble and still ensure effective learning? When does efficient gobble up effectiveness?

I don’t really have the answer. Coming from the high tech industry, I know the speed that is required to get information to employees and that doesn’t simply change because it makes learning a challenge. It makes sense that some content is directed through a consistent channel for information and that employees adapt and adopt based on the information coming through this channel. Clearly, not all learning can be directed this way but what (or who) determines how the content should be delivered?

What does an ideal, nimble, responsive, world-class training team look like?