RealTime Leadership

“Get a feedback loop and listen to it. … When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.”

- Randy Pausch (1960 – 2008) was a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a best-selling author, who achieved worldwide fame for his speech The Last Lecture, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and having only a few months to live.

Most people, by now, know the story of Randy Pausch and his Last Lecture.    The book was a best-seller and the video of the lecture itself has been viewed by over 11 million people on YouTube.  The entire lecture is a powerful and moving presentation on achieving your dreams and living a fullfilling life. 

Being that I’m in the busines of helping organizations develop leaders, I found the lecture fascinating on another level – namely the insight it provides us into one man’s struggle to achieve his goals, to continually grow and develop as a person and to live a happy life.  The popularity of the book and the lecture lead me to believe that the insights shared by Randy do not apply to him only, and are really fundamental to the human condition.  We can learn from these insights and apply them to leadership development programs at our organizations.

One thing that Randy discusses is the importance of feedback.  During his childhood and into his college days, Randy had little use for feedback.  Like many of us, he didn’t initially see the value in feedback.  But at some point in our lives and careers we hit what Randy calls a “brick wall.”  This is a barrier that temporarily prevents us from achieving our goals.  Randy has a great attitude about these barries; ” Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”  Well, in order to break through these brick walls, we often need feedback from others to tell us what’s missing or what we need to do differently.  During graduate school, a professor did just that for Randy, helping him to see how his attitude was holding him back.

Through the course of his life, Randy came to appreciate feedback so much so that he would seek out what he called “feedback loops.”  These are processes that give us the feedback and information we need to continually improve and develop as leaders. 

Contrast Randy’s attitude and feelings about feedback with what we sometimes encounter with leaders who are receiving 360-feedback.   Through our leadership development practice at RealTime Performance, we deliver thousands of 360-feedback reports every year to companies like Emerson, Nordstrom, FedEx, Chubb and Johnson & Johnson.  Although many leaders do view 360 as a positive excercise, there is always that group of managers who perceive it to be a negative experience right from the start.

These employees mistakenly consider receiving feedback an unpleasant exercise to be avoided if possible and minimized if absolutely necessary.  Successful leaders like Randy understand that feedback is a special gift because it is something we can’t give ourselves.   We can go out and buy ourselves a watch or new clothes, but we can’t give ourselves the knowledge of how we are perceived by others unless we ask. 

Furthermore, the people who invest their time to provide us with feedback are often taking on a risk.  When someone delivers feedback, they risk damaging the relationship, especially if the feedback is critical or hits on a touchy subject.  Feedback comes at a price to the feedback-giver as well.  That’s why, feedback truly is a gift.

IBM interviewed over 1,000 CEOs and asked them what the enterprise of the future will look like.  What IBM discovered, and recently published in a study,  is that future organizations will be even more dependent on collaborative global teams to drive innovation.  In the opening letter, IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano says:

“A focus on innovation works. That is also evident in this year’s study results. Those of you who are making the boldest plays — pursuing the most global, collaborative and disruptive business model innovation — are outperforming your peers.”

The study identifies several key trends that will shape the enterprise of the future.  These trends are fascinating from a leadership development perspective because they give us insight into the skills and capabilities required of successful future leaders:

• Change is accelerating.  Technology is driving change, but the gap between the pace of change and the ability of the organization to manage change is accelerating even faster.  This means future leaders must not only embrace change, but recognize that change will increase throughout their careers.  For training departments, it is no longer enough to offer a series of courses or learning events.  Employees require learning environments where self-directed learning can occur throughout one’s career.

• Collaboration is driving innovation.  Forty percent (40%) of organizations are evolving their enterprise business models to be more collaborative.  The ability to collaborate with others, especially on global and virtual teams will drive future success for leaders.  This trend is increasing the importance of developing emotional intelligent leaders who can effectively work with others to achieve results.

• Global integration is increasing.  Businesses are reconfiguring around global integration.  Work is naturally migrating to the locales where it is most cost-effectively produced.  Successful organizations are taking advantage of this on a global scale by integrating their business across geographic and functional boundaries.  For leaders to be successful in this environment they must enhance their cultural and organizational understanding and address challenges with a global business mind-set.  This trend is increasing the importance of inclusion in the workplace.  Global leaders value diverse opinions, backgrounds and ideas.    

Taken together, these trends paint a picture of the enterprise of the future, which IBM describes having five characteristics:

1. Hungary for change.
2. Innovative beyond customer imagination
3. Globally integrated
4. Disruptive by nature
5. Genuine, not just generous

Our challenge as leadership development professionals is to create environments and tools that help employees gain the critical leadership skills to be successful in the enterprise of the future.  In order to do this, we need to practice continuous process improvement and apply these prinicples to our learning departments.  By measuring our results, holding our learners and ourselves accountable and constantly looking for incremental improvements, training departments will evolve over time to effectively support the future enterprise. 

The 5A’s Framework is a great tool to use when assessing your training departments current level of effectiveness, and to guide you as you transform your department to meet the learning challenges of the future.

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.