RealTime Leadership

As a young high school English teacher in South Bend, Indiana in the 1930s, John Wooden, the legendary former coach of the UCLA men’s basketball team, was not satisfied with the prevailing definition of success.   The conventional wisdom was (and still is) that success is the accumulation of possessions and power.   This definition was unsatisfactory to John, so he came up with his own definition of success:

Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing that you made the effort to do the best at which you’re capable. 

In this timeless definition, success does not depend on any external factors or the perception of others. Rather, success is completely determined by the individual.  Only you know if you delivered your best effort.

Peace of mind, seems to me, to be severely lacking in today’s business world.  We are constantly bombarded with information, data, email, twitter, voicemail, texting and all manner of distractions.  It  is common to get to the end of the day and feel overwhelmed.  John Wooden’s advice reminds us that we hold the keys to our own success.  There are many aspects of life over which we have little to no control, but we do control our level of effort and therefore, our ability to both succeed and attain peace of mind.

I will be speaking at the 2011 ASTD International Conference in Orlando (May 22nd – 25th) on how to achieve business results from training. The following is a description of the presentation and learning outcomes for the event.

Those of us who have been in and around the learning  industry a long time know that the quality of instructional design, materials, delivery, and facilitation of training has steadily increased through the years and continues to improve.  In addition, technology keeps providing new ways to deliver learning to employees.  The potential of mobile learning through smart phones and social-learning through social networking are just two recent and exciting examples.  However, there is one aspect of learning that has not kept pace with innovation, and that is the transfer of learning into concrete business results. 

Although the quality of learning events continues to improve, I would argue that these improvements have not translated directly into increased business results for companies.  The problem is not the training; rather it is everything that happens before and after the training that makes all the difference.

There are five key organizational and cultural factors that impact business results from training:

1. Alignment - Aligning learning objectives to business results.
2. Anticipation – Preparing learners for success before they arrive at training.
3. Alliance - A learning alliance between the learner and their boss.
4. Application - Opportunity to apply learning immediately on the job, and receive feedback and coaching.
5. Accountability - Holding learners and bosses accountable for measurable business results.

We call these factors the 5As and when they are applied specifically to a training event or program, they become the Five Steps to Business Impact. 

At ASTD 2011 I will walk participants through each of the 5As.  Together we will identify how they impact the transfer of learning and explore tools to help organizations each step along the way.  Participants at the session will:

• Learn how to conduct a 5As Audit to identify the greatest opportunities for increasing business success from training in their organization.
• Create an Action Plan for achieving business outcomes by effectively applying the 5As Framework.
• Understand how successful organizations are using the 5As Framework to achieve business results.

I hope you can join me in Orlando and I look forward to your participation and contribution toward making this a successful session!

For most of Google’s history, and especially in the early years, it took a laissez-faire policy toward leadership. The company hired smart engineers, promoted the most brilliant into leadership positions and then pretty much left them alone. The assumption was that they were smart and would figure it out or ask questions if they needed help.

As Google evolved, it became apparent that some managers thrived in this environment more than others.  In a recent article, Laszlo Bock, Google’s innovative SVP for Human Resources, made the observation:

“Our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better.  So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good?”

This touched off an internal research project in search of the traits and qualities that make up a great leader at Google.  After analyzing reams of data consisting of performance reviews, surveys, feedback and interviews, the statisticians zeroed in on 8 key qualities, ranked in importance:

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
3. Express interest in your team members success and well-being
4. Be productive and results-oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have technical skills so you can advise the team

Although there is nothing on this list that you can’t find in the leadership 101 course of any Fortune 500 company, there is something refreshing and new about it.  By limiting the list to 8 qualities and ranking the competencies from top to bottom, Google helps leaders focus their improvement effort in areas with the greatest return on investment. 

Furthermore, Google went against its own cultural bias toward the importance of technology expertise and followed the data when it ranked this trait least among the eight.  Yes, it is important, but other qualities matter even more.  I imagine this came as a shock to more than a few leaders at Google.

Then there is the simplicity to the traits.  They don’t require major changes to personality, and incremental progress is possible.  Laszlo Bock boils it down nicely:

What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.

And finally, there is the fact that Google took the time and effort to determine the leadership qualities that are most important in their culture.  Yes, they could have borrowed a list of competencies from the latest leadership best-seller, but they didn’t.  They tackled this challenge the same way they improve their search results; by analyzing their own data and drawing their own conclusions.

Information overload is not only a productivity killer; it can also lead to low morale, anxiety and mistakes.  The U.S. Military has identified “information overload” as the underlying cause of several major mistakes in the war in Afghanistan, and is taking steps to address the issue.  A recent article in the New York Times explains that modern warfare generates unprecedented amounts of data to help soldiers make better decisions, but:

Research shows that the kind of intense multitasking required in such situations can make it hard to tell good information from bad. The military faces a balancing act: how to help soldiers exploit masses of data without succumbing to overload.

If the challenge facing modern soldiers sounds eerily familiar to what you face every day in the modern business world, you’re not alone.  IBM’s recent launch of the “Jeopardy!”-playing computer system called Watson, is validation that corporations are themselves drowning in data and struggling to make sense of it all.  Watson uses specially designed analytics software, along with the processor power of 90 servers and 360 computer chips, to help executives make better decisions.

Watson may help organizations deal with this problem, but what does the individual leader do to address the continuous stream of email, iphones, twitter, blogs, websites and other distractions? 

1. Remember, You’re In Control.  It’s easy to forget that technology is supposed to work for you.  You’re not a slave to technology.  Take control by turning off all alerts and processing your email in batches.  Because you’re in control, you get to decide what you’re working on at any given moment, and where to focus your attention.  That doesn’t mean you can just ignore email and other data as it streams in all day long, but it does mean you can confine your email management time to short bursts of rapid processing.
2. Manage Your Day From Your Calendar and Task List, Not Your Inbox.  This is easier said than done, especially because we are addicted to the little “high” we experience every time we check a new email in our inbox.  However, the calendar gets way too little respect and attention from leaders, especially compared to the inbox.  Your calendar is your game plan for the day, and the meetings, phone calls and activities that make up a calendar and task list, each require appropriate preparation and focus.  Spend your time and energy on the activities that will help you deliver results and achieve your goals. 
3. Define a Personal Purpose and Vision.  If you want to conquer information overload, you have to know where you want to go.  Imagine you are a boat adrift on the sea in the midst of a nasty storm.  Information overload is like the rain, wind and waves, pushing your boat in all directions.  To counter these forces and eventually overcome this storm, it helps to have a destination in mind and the navigational tools to get there.  Identifying your personal purpose and vision, what you want to achieve with your life (not just your career), is a first step toward defining that destination.   By settings goals and objectives, you are placing navigational markers to help you along the journey.  Without a clear sense of the destination, and a plan to get there, don’t be surprised if you remain adrift on the ocean, in a perpetual state of unease and lacking any sense of progress and accomplishment.
4. Find Time for Reflection. President Lincoln was an avid reader of newspapers.   If we consider newspapers the “Internet” of his day, he spent a lot of time online.   But he was also known for spending a lot of time reflecting on the major problems he faced as President.  He balanced his time with thoughtful analysis, often times writing out in long hand the positions for and against a policy and carefully weighing the options.  He deliberately moved out of the White House during the summers and into a kind of retreat house called the Soldiers Home.  Here he was less distracted and carved out time for reflection as well as conversation with trusted advisors.   In a similar way, we all must find time to break away from information overload to carve out time for reflection and analysis.  For me it is walking to work.  For others it might be keeping a journal, meditating or prayer. 

If you’re interested in this topic and want to learn more, download a free white paper on Using Email Effectively.