RealTime Leadership

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow with our families, now is an appropriate time to take account of the many things to be thankful for at work.  As a leader, what comes to mind for me is the debt and gratitude I have for the people I have the honor to work with everyday.  So how do I, as a leader thank the many people around me who not only contribute to my success, but more importantly to the success of the organization?  One way is to simply say “thank you.”  But another more powerful and sustainable way to say thank you is to treat people with respect and acknowledge and encourage their full commitment and contribution throughout the year.

There are times, however, when the pressures of work kick in and deadlines need to be met, and it is easy to slip back into the mode of barking orders.  It is times like this when I try to remember a simple rule; “Treat your people as if they were volunteers.”

I did not come up with this rule, rather it was given to me as a “gift” by Vice President at a major global company, who I was interviewing for a leadership development project.  When I asked this individual to characterize his approach to leadership, he summed it up this way;

“In my mind, I like to lead people as if they were volunteers.  The fact is, the great people who work for me, the high-performers,   can leave at any time.  Their skills and expertise are in demand.  If I don’t lead them and treat them as volunteers, all I get is what I ask of them.  But if I ask them what they think and how they approach a situation, I get their full input, energy and passion.”

So let’s be thankful for the people who work for us this Thanksgiving, and let’s acknowledge the gift of their presence by treating them like the volunteers they truly are.  Happy Thanksgiving!

The current global economy is forcing people and organizations to find ways to do business more efficiently and more effectively. Companies are revisiting strategy, markets, R&D, size of workforce, and their entire cost structure. There is an intense focus on business results with an added emphasis on trimming anything that doesn’t directly contribute to the success of the organization.  These same forces are affecting training and development departments at corporations across the globe.

It is within this environment, where training departments are being asked to cut back on resources while increasing their value, that my colleague Dr. Stephen Gill and I set out to use our research and experience to help organizations make their learning interventions more effective. Specifically, we want to provide training professionals and frontline managers with a simple framework and strategy to get more from their investment in learning. Our new e-book, “Getting More from Your Investment in Training: The 5As Framework,” is for training professionals and business managers who are grappling with this new environment and the heightened expectations for results.

This book is not about how to be a stand-up trainer, or how to design e-learning, or even how to get more buns on seats. It is about what your organization needs to do to ensure that people learn and use that learning to achieve business goals.  We identify the organizational factors that have the greatest overall impact on how learning contributes to business success.  And then we offer tools and strategies for increasing the impact of learning at each step in the learning process.  We call these organizational factors the 5As, and they are;

1. Alignment – Align learning with strategic goals by helping learners understand how the skills and knowledge they acquire through training can be applied to deliver business results.

2. Anticipation – Research clearly shows that if learners anticipate success before training they are much more likely to experience success.  Help your learners anticipate success.
3. Alliance – Create a learning alliance between learner and boss.  Learners need feedback and coaching, especially as they attempt to apply new skills and behaviors on the job.
4. Application – Apply learning immediately after training, not six months later or even never, as so often happens.  Create opportunities for learners to apply new skills on the job, and receive relevant and timely feedback.
5. Accountability – Hold learner and organization accountable for business results from training.  Establish the expectation from the beginning that training is critical for organizational success and all participants will be held accountable to apply what they’ve learned to meet business goals.

This is the time, more than ever, to re-examine your training function and make all of your learning interventions (classes, simulations, e-learning, coaching, internships, etc.) more efficient and effective.  By applying the 5As framework to your organization, you can immediately identify areas for improvement that will help you achieve your business goals.  Download the first two chapters free.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is a joint venture between Gallup and the health management company Healthways.  The Index is designed to measure the overall well-being of the United States and its various regions by randomly administering a comprehensive survey measuring the overall mental, physical and emotional health of individuals across the country (Hawaii and Utah top the list). 

Healthways being a client of RealTime Performance, I have been following the index carefully and I was struck with a report released earlier this month on the relative well-being of different professions.  The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index found that Business Owners are the happiest, most engaged workers in the workplace today.  On one level, these results are exactly what we might expect, but if we dig a little deeper into the data, there are some important findings that offer insights into how to increase employee engagement among regular (non-owner) employees. 

• Working longer hours does not automatically equate with low engagement.  Business Owners work more hours than any other job category, yet they have the highest well-being.  This tells us that longer hours are detrimental to employee engagement only if the employee is not passionate and does not feel “ownership.”
• Lower pay does not necessarily mean lower well-being.  Although Business Owners make less than Professionals and Managers/Executives,  they have higher overall well-being than these other job categories.  What this tells us is that pay is important, but other intangibles such as passion, engagement, and a sense of ownership more than make up for lower pay among Business Owners.

A Wall Street Journal article about the study noted:

“Regardless of occupational field, the survey suggests that seeking out enjoyable work and finding a way to do it on your own terms, with some control over both the process and the outcome, is likely for most people to fuel satisfaction and contentment. “

So one way to increase engagement among employees is help them discover what their passionate about, and then give them the freedom to pursue that work on their own terms.  This, of course, means we have to trust that employees will make good decisions and do the right thing for the company.  I have written previously about the overwhelming evidence connecting trust and engagement. 

In addition, my good friend and colleague Brad Federman recently wrote a the book Employee Engagement where he underscores the important role trust plays in driving employee engagement.

  One of the great business challenges of the 21st century will be building the capacity of large, complex organizations to change and evolve continuously in order to deliver ever-increasing value to customers.  In the world of leadership development, we often think of this pursuit through the narrow lens of developing individual leadership skills and competencies through training.

Creating a Learning Culture
However, an adaptive and flexible organization is the result of a true learning culture.  To create such a culture requires going far beyond individual training to include team learning, organizational learning and customer learning.  In his new book, Developing a Learning Culture in Non-Profit Organizations, Dr. Stephen J. Gill writes about how organizations can overcome the inherent barriers that prevent a true learning culture from taking hold.  Although Dr. Gill addresses the non-profit audience, the barriers and potential solutions are the same for corporations looking to become more innovative and adaptive to change.

Individual versus Organizational Learning
Dr. Gill advances the theory that, although individual leadership development is important, it’s just one piece of the puzzle.  Effective learning cultures like Toyota are concerned with developing the leadership skills of their managers, of course, but they never lose focus on the more over-arching goal of building organizational capacity to continuously improve performance through the Toyota Production System.

What Dr. Gill is really talking about here is teaching the organization to learn how to learn.  As you focus on developing the latest training programs and action learning experiences for your employees, spend some time reflecting on how these efforts interact with and support the overall learning culture of your organization.  As you begin to consider your plans and budget for leadership development in 2010, ask yourself, how is your organization supporting:

    1. Individual Learning – are you establishing an alliance between the learner and their boss to provide feedback and support to the learner?  Is the learner accountable for results based on applying the new learning?  Is individual learning aligned with critical business outcomes?
    2. Team Learning – are you establishing learning and performance goals for teams?  Are you fostering true dialogue on your teams?  Do teams at your organization practice the principles of continuous process improvement?
    3. Organizational Learning- do you have a clear vision for the future and is everyone committed to that vision?  Are there connections established between various functions in your organization so that knowledge sharing and integrated learning can occur?  Do you regularly assess your organizations learning culture?  Are you leveraging social media to connect people to other people and ideas?

   4. Customer or Community Learning- In Dr. Gill’s book, he calls this community learning, but in for-profit corporations, you might think of this as customer learning or stakeholder learning.  Are you listening to your customers and stakeholders, and incorporating their knowledge and contributions?   Does your organization depend on a healthy environment, strong communities or robust economies?  What is your company doing to ensure sustainability in these communities?

RealTime Performanceand Dr. Stephen Gill recently developed an Organizational Audit to help our clients identify opportunities for enhancing and developing a learning culture.  Our collaboration with Dr. Gill has evolved into an ebook that will be published next month titled “Getting More from Your Investment in Training: The 5As Framework.”  More on this book soon.