Monthly Archives: January 2011

31
Jan

Why doesn’t employee training work better?

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Companies spend about $100 billion on training of all sorts annually. Yet most executives would admit, some willingly, that they don’t get the bang for the buck they expect from their investment.

What is missing? Why do well-intentioned, well-constructed, well-run training programs fail to deliver expected bumps in productivity?

Look at preparation, commitment and follow-up

We lay the blame not in the training room (good work happens there more often than not) but in the preparatory work before the event, and the follow-up afterwards. In short, here are the missing elements we demand clients pay attention too before a single session is scheduled:

  • Rigorous Diagnosis: If you do not properly diagnose the problems that hinder increased productivity, you will not create and apply the right training regime. Buying prepackaged solutions off the shelf that seemed to work for others will at the very least require restructuring to fit your culture and the key issues you seek to address.
  • Executive Buy-in and Involvement: Unless you have this, you have nothing. Your bosses must roll up their sleeves and model the behavior and effort they want to see up and down the ranks. The ranks will reject the training regime as “another waste of time foisted on us by our clueless leaders” if this executive commitment is not clearly demonstrated.
  • Relentless Tracking: You cannot measure a return on your investment unless you track the changes in behavior and results that occur after each training session. At Bovo-Tighe, we only know that our employee development programs work because we demand that our clients put an organized tracking program in place.

We found excellent support for our thinking in a recent report from the management consultancy McKinsey (yes, good ideas do come out of our friendly high-priced competitors!) 

We encourage clients to take the time to do serious up-front diagnosis to pinpoint the true problems, and commit to in-depth tracking of results post-event. Without these pre- and post-event commitments, development wastes everyone’s time and gives “training” a bad reputation that it does not deserve. Without strong diagnosis ahead of training to properly structure it, strong senior executive backing and involvement, and strong tracking post-event, the program can not eliminate the problem work habits or install the critical good new habits that productivity improvements demand.

20
Jan

Change Management: The entire organization needs to participate

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I found a great article on Change Management on the Booz and Company website (actually two: See my other post on “How Aha! Really Happens.”)

The article boiled down the success factors to just five (which is a manageable number, a critical element in adopting any new idea.)

First let me quote their definition of Change Management, which fits the Bovo-Tighe philosophy so well:

“Successful change management targets leaders but also engages people across the organization, while adjusting key enabling processes such as performance management.”

There is a bit of consultant-speak in there (“enabling processes”), but the engagement of people across the organization is critical. My partner David Tighe wrote about the perils of change management last year, stating that people-driven change is best, and that remains true.

However, if you must make strategic changes, here are the five factors to control for:

  1. Understand ALL the impacts the changes will have, and spell them out. We hope against hope that the need for change itself has been fully diagnosed, but at the very least understand in detail how the changes will impact alls aspects of your organization.
  2. Build an emotional as well as rational case for change. Your people must embrace the change, not just hunker down to “live through it.” Engagement ahead of action (and revisions based on inputs received) is critical here.
  3. Leaders must lead and be changed themselves. Do not impose change that is one-directional, and unevenly applied. Leaders adopt the new paradigm first, and model it for those who will follow.
  4. Make the change as organic as possible, with peers helping peers to navigate the process. Avoid “top-down” directive approaches.
  5. Embed the change in the fabric of the organization. Change takes time to take root. Results come only after hard, long periods of work that change the underlying culture of the organization. Quick, rushed changes will not stick, and waste resources in the end.

Of course, the best culture is an engaged one that changes organically from bottom up, without formal direction or special initiatives.

19
Jan

Fostering Innovation: HR Must Lead the Way

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Companies in the 21st Century are desperate to be out in front in fostering internal innovation, and HR must take charge of establishing the proper environment by infusing the right mindset into all employees.

To read more, click here.

19
Jan

About that left brain-right brain split: It doesn’t happen.

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It has been an article of faith that the famous Left Brain/Right Brain split explains why some people are creative and others not. So much for that easy crutch. New studies are uncovering evidence that turning off or turning on either side of the brain (or even being a “right-or-left-brained” person at all) simply does not happen.

So all that brainstorming that has been going on in corporate America for thirty years? A waste of time, or at least, a less productive use of it. Turns out you can’t turn on or off your brain’s left side when you need to think creatively. And brainstorming goes on at every desk in every company everyday. We just do a poor job of capturing it.

What follows cribs from this article.

A short history lesson
The two-sided brain theory showed up in 1981, and it “spread quickly throughout the business world, because it seemed to explain why some people came up with creative ideas while others struggled.”

On to 1998, with the publication of a work that proposed to replace the “left/right” model with one that has the entire brain working on “learning and recall.”

Put simply: The brain collects experiences, and uses new experiences to combine old ones in logical patterns. This process of storing old memories in an orderly fashion is called “analysis”; the combining of old memories with new experiences to create new thoughts is labeled “intuition.” So, a brainstormed idea actually comes not from turning off the storage and analysis functions of the brain, but keeping them all fired up, and interacting with new information (this may be why brainstorming sessions can work, as participants acquire a big set of new experiences in a confined period.)

These authors posit, however, that the best new ideas seem to pop up “in the shower, or driving, or when falling asleep at night – When your brain is relaxed and wandering…”

Brainstorming? The best sort happens all the time.

The lesson? Brainstorming needs to be moved out of the meeting room and back into journals, diaries, regular meetings and phone conversations that occur every day in corporate America. Employees who are energized and engaged in their jobs will naturally let their brains creatively wander and make connections between stored and new information, allowing insight to flourish on a daily basis! All you need to do is put a culture in place that allows those steadily bubbling ideas to be captured, and acted on.

And you need to let your workers figure out how to get that done, by engaging them in the process!

12
Jan

With Leadership Development: Are We Smarter that Fifth-Graders?

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We have a Bovo-Tighe consultant with elementary grade children who is intrigued by the underlying principals of a school program called “PEP,” a Parent Education Program that teaches social competence and decision-making skills. Its themes strongly echoed the themes of our own coaching work with corporate leaders.

This has always challenged me, too: Why do we struggle as adults to adopt the very behaviors we try to teach our children? We strive to imbue our children with such values as:

  • Fair play
  • Don’t brag!
  • Learn to share
  • Respect others

Yet we seem not to be practicing what we preach. Corporate leaders come right back around and find themselves contracting with people like me to relearn this positive behavioral mindset through coaching.

What really brought this home to me was the mnemonics that the PEP program used to cement respectful, productive mindsets in children. These really made the comparison to aspects of my own coaching work stand out: Continue reading →

10
Jan

Bovo-Tighe’s January 2011 Client Newsletter

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Here are the contents for our monthly newsletter:

1. Leadership Traits and Development of Your Best People

2. Retirement and the Lost Workforce

3. How Can You Use Twitter To Grow Your Business?

4. One Minute Ideas

5. Ten Business E-Mail Etiquette Tips

The issues we face retaining the knowledge base and future contributions of the Baby Boomer generation as they “retire” is of particular interest for all of us in employee development.

Click here to open the newsletter.

4
Jan

Corporate Flu Epidemics: What Sort of Infectious Attitudes Do You Spread Around?

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Good attitudes are as infectious in the workplace as poor ones. So, you can be an “army of one” in getting better, more productive mindsets established in your company. Here are some thoughts and challenges for starting the New Year off with the right “corporate mindset” with which to infect your workplace to make it a more energized, productive place:

  • Every employee of a company has value and an ability to contribute, no matter the level. Do you value that potential, validate each contribution you generate or receive, and look to encourage more such contributions?
  • Everyone around you comes with their own value system built in, and it isn’t yours. These values drive everything that they do or say. Identifying and accommodating these myriad value systems is crucial to your (and their) success. Do you actively make such accommodation part of your interpersonal skill set?
  • Ask yourself: Would you invest all your energy and passion into any process, decision or program that you were not part of creating? Do you expect anyone else to act differently?
  • Do your personal aspirations mesh/align with those you find advocated by your company? If yes, are you using that congruence to drive your commitment to excellence in both parts of your life? If not, how can you make them congruent? As a start: Have you even concretely identified your personal values and missions?
  • Do you embrace what the human resource profession should call “true diversity?” Do you appreciate all the experiences and viewpoints, skills and talents that fill your workplace? This is the diversity that drives productivity and innovation within a company. Are you doing your part to maximize its value within your area of control and influence?

Fully engaging a workforce is not rocket science. It is hard work, however, that starts with you adopting a positive mindset about interpersonal “diversity”, and then spreading that mindset to the person next to you. This “do-good” mindset virus then spreads around the company, making it simultaneously more enjoyable and more productive.

Good attitudes and respectful interactions are infectious! Start spreading this kind of “corporate flu” around your company!