Gooooooo Dawgs! ....Building Season.

I am a proud University of Georgia alumnus and support the Red and Black year in and year out. This has been a frustrating season as our results on the football field have been lackluster (though other programs are doing very well). Back in my college days when the team went through a rough patch here and there my friends and I joked that it was “building season.”

This year I initially complained that this was Mark Richt’s fault. Obviously he didn’t develop a successor for Matthew Stafford. Hasn’t he ever heard of bench strength? Where’s the succession planning? I realize that often these phrases are used in a corporate context but doesn’t it still apply?

I am not a college football expert. Frankly, I have no idea what I’m talking about regarding Richt’s decisions. Overall, I like him as a coach and a leader and I hope he stays a long time. I do know a thing or two about training and bench planning. Regardless of your stand on Georgia football, the context can help us think about planning in your organization.

1. It isn’t enough to coach and develop current leaders. Candidates need time and opportunity to experience real life situations. Once you identify the back-up quarterback, this up and coming leader needs a chance to get on the field. It isn’t enough to put them in when you’re up by 30; future leaders need the chance to experience the normal pressure of the role. This is easier to do in the office than on the football field…or is it?
2. Play to the strength of the successor. Don’t expect that a successor will be exactly like your current leader. The current leader leveraged a set of skills and leadership characteristics to be successful. The successor may have the experience to do the job tasks and have different leadership characteristics that can impact how the job gets done.
3. Never stop developing bench strength. Just because you have a replacement lined up doesn’t mean you can’t prepare a second replacement or start cross-training leaders across functions. This is critical to building a well-rounded, engaged team.
4. Give up and coming leaders the opportunity to actually lead the team not just be the voice of the team. Being the go-to person while you are on vacation is a nice pat-on-the-back for your successor. Unless you empower your stand-in the right way, it hardly puts them in a position to be a decision-maker or to hold the team and other leaders accountable to organizational goals.
   

The challenge is to make all these things happen within a learning culture and to build formal and informal systems that will support old and new leaders. Some ideas include:

• Classroom experiences - Great for best practice sharing and leader networking.
• Wikis and blogs - Useful for capturing ideas that team leaders and managers can search later.
• Just-in-time tools: Provide questions that any leader could access to help them facilitate a book or article review, meeting agendas, short instructional videos, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
• E-learning – Distribute training that communicates the leadership platform provides consistency across the organization and the opportunity to learn at one’s own pace.
• Mentoring programs – These should be learning opportunities for mentors and mentees so be ready to help both sides prepare for the relationship.
• Blended programs – Well sure, why would you only choose one way when multiple means have the best chance of ensuring execution?
  

My Dawgs will come out of their slump (soon I hope) and at least we beat Georgia Tech. Your business has the chance to avoid dips in performance by making sure leaders are in the wings and engaged in the business rather than feeling ignored and constantly put off. By continuing to develop future leaders and keep them engaged in the growth of the organization, you can keep your business growing and thriving.

Dad, can I have a "do over"?

Remember those? The "do over" is a childhood standard, practiced on playgrounds and classrooms, at friends' houses and on the street. It is a universal code that erases the prior result, without erasing prior learning.

How great would it be if we could bring that forward to adulthood? I find it interesting that as we get older we often disagree with that idea. You hear things like, "You have to pay for your mistakes," or "You should've known better, now live with it." But we certainly don't wish that on our younger selves, and we all learned and improved via the "do over."

The forward thinking learning organization creates training that allows learners the chance to practice and fail. I can't think of anyone that learned to ride a bike without ever falling. No one learned to read without stumbling over words. No one learned playground games without a practice round in which feedback was delivered (often in a non-constructive manner).

Likewise, as trainers, we should create learning experiences that provide an opportunity for people to fail and then try again. Not just a chance to hit the "reset" button. Give learners the time to try, contemplate, reflect, discuss, process, plan, and then try again.

Some of you may be asking, "I don't have that kind of time in these economically challenging times." I'm glad you brought that up because it gives me a chance to refer back to some of my earlier posts on blended learning, failing and informal learning. The learning experience might be a computer based simulation, followed by a web seminar, social sharing sites, classroom sessions and several outside readings. It then closes with another web based engagement.

Packaging learning and development in a way that allows participants to try, fail, and try again is critical to long term behavioral change. Desired behavior is never created by magic wand, or dunking in the waters of the latest model. Long term change is created by constantly creating context, providing opportunities to process and reflect and the chance to practice and get feedback to become more successful.

Making Leaders

They say that leaders are born not made. I don't know who "they" are but I disagree and so do others including Colin Powell.

Think about the best boss you ever had. I'll bet he/she had years of experience. I'll bet he/she had plenty of stories of successes and failures that shaped managerial behavior. I'll bet he/she empowered you to make decisions, recognized your hard work, provided feedback and coaching and rewarded results. In other words, these leaders were made, not born. They had learned how to translate the vision of the organization into actionable practices. They learned how to communicate their own vision of excellence and how to model it and reinforce the behavior that supported it.

What does all this mean for the learning organization? Learning and organizational development go hand in hand. To develop future leaders, organizations utilize sound succession planning strategies and encourage development plans and professional growth. This works well for the high potential employees who have been selected as future leaders. To truly grow leadership, I would argue that you need to cast the net a bit wider.

1. Teach the fundamentals across the organization. There are a core set of communication and feedback skills that everyone should know. These skills should be used every day between managers and employees and between peers. The skills are the basis for every other leadership paradigm. For example, Situational Leadership is a very popular coaching model (you can learn more about the model at wikipedia.org or through a very well put together online course). I am a huge fan of Situational Leadership, but asking someone to diagnose and then engage in the correct leadership style is still a tough task. They can probably make the right choice but do they have the skills required to handle the conversation and respond appropriately. When everyone in the organization has the skills, they are more likely to hold everyone accountable to the behavior.

2. Continuing Leadership education. It is not enough to roll out the yearly management skills course, or hold biannual leadership conferences. These are great tools and go a long way to maintaining a consistent leadership environment. I would also add informal learning to the mix. Provide opportunities for leaders to share success and failure and learn from each other. Some of my most successful classes involved sharing the "war stories" and allowing leaders time to learn from each other. Consider creating easy to implement tools that leaders can take back to their work groups to continue leadership education on their own and gather feedback. There is plenty being written about leadership in books, articles, white papers, web seminars and other places. Create a clearinghouse through which your leaders can easily access these resources and enjoy them as needed.

3. Create a culture in which feedback is a good thing. Some people love feedback. They see it as an opportunity to improve and receive recognition for their effort. Many people fear feedback and with good reason. I've seen (and received) feedback delivered poorly and it does very little to improve performance. Teaching people how to give and receive feedback goes back to my first point. Once the foundation is in place, create opportunities for people to receive feedback on a regular basis.

4. Create vertical alignment. Leadership starts at the top of an organization. If the senior leadership isn't bought in to leadership development, no amount of training intervention is going to matter because the senior leadership doesn't recognize it or reward it. Fortunately, this isn't the case in most organizations. Keep the top of the organization in tune with the leadership training by offering them a place in the program as a speaker, facilitator, or participant. Offer them access to the same informal opportunities to leadership content.


Leadership is a hot topic these days. Plenty is being written and there is always room to improve it and drive performance. Make sure that in your organization leadership is something everyone is involved in, not just a select few.

Training with the Experience in Mind

While perusing the blogs I follow, I reacquainted myself with this article from Josh Bersin. I was pleased to see that my ideas align pretty well and I was able to learn a few new things. I love the focus on informal, casual learning and the value of networks. I've been blogging about informal learning quite a bit and was pleased to see I'm on track.

I also enjoyed some of the specifics regarding human networks outlined in this recent article in CLO magazine. It got me thinking about the power of people and the kind of experience they have getting the information they need in a practical, timely fashion. User experience always brings me back to the work of Lou Carbone and his book Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again. This book really changed the way I viewed the guest experience and as such changed the way I think about developing learning tools.

1. Develop tools with the end user in mind. Specifically, what is the emotional connection you want users to make with the tools or learning experience? Developing learning interventions can become fairly methodical. Great learning professionals also consider the overall experience of the user and strive to measure the degree to which participants feel confident, secure, knowledgeable and prepared.

2. Develop tools with the customer in mind. Your clients eventually interact with your organization's clients. How would those individuals describe your people? The tools prepare learners to perform on the job, but are they performing in a way that creates an enjoyable experience for the guest and a profitable experience for the organization? For example, sales teams are provided plenty of material on "up-selling" or "adding value." I would ask how the guest perceives the outcomes of the training. Do they feel like they are getting a better service experience or do they feel are they being pushed to purchase things they don't want.

3. Keep it simple. Make learning tools easy to obtain, easy to use, easy to reuse, easy to share. The Bersin article calls it "Facilitating Learning." Learning organizations have plenty of informal tools and can guide and enable learning rather than focus on delivering training.

To come full circle, I think high-impact learning organizations also make the learner experience an important part of their design process. More than just a look at the user requirements, training solutions should be built within the context of the entire learning structure and organization's cultural experience.

March Madness and the Learning Professional

March Madness has hit my home like a tornado. We are staunch supporters of Villanova basketball so you can imagine the ups and downs we've been going through.

My wife and I had friends over for the very exciting Elite Eight match-up with Pitt. After the game, we got into a discussion of scholar-athletes and how focused they should be on education. We spoke of athletes who leave school early for the draft and those that finish. We spoke of college tutors and how many athletes slip through the system (sorry NCAA) and have tutors do the work for them. Probably not the typical conversation in your house, but my wife is an Advanced Placement English teacher and her friend is an English teacher.

I think we all agreed that it's a shame that so many college athletes leave college early lured by big professional paychecks and miss out on a quality education and becoming "well-rounded." It's almost as if the system is failing them. As a former high school teacher, I completely related to this. What about the importance of a degree? What about the value in the entire education that gives you the experience and background to understand and relate to current events?

The problem lies in the expectation of results. For many college athletes, who have spent a lifetime training to be "best in field" the measure of success is the pro contract. Likewise, in corporate learning cultures, personal development needs to be tied to business results. Organizations want to develop the whole person; the financial ledger demands accountability to the bottom line. So how do we as learning professionals walk the fine line between developing the whole person and meeting the needs of the business?

1. Be a Performance Consultant. Don't develop training for the sake of training. Be a partner with the business and make recommendations for better accountability, enforced compliance, and motivational perks if those are the true problems. The problem may not be in knowledge or skill, it may be because the process is broken or it creates obstacles further down the line. The role of the learning professional is to point those out. It may simply be that people need the right incentive or better feedback systems, rather than more training.

2. Keep the training specific to the task at hand. Sometimes all that is required is a performance support tool that shows workers how and when to do a particular task. Don't muddy the water with extra information that only confuses the worker. Adult learners certainly need context and want to know why the task is important. I'm not arguing against this. I am saying that for some learners, the answer may be as simple as, "Because this will help you do the job the right way and you will be more successful."

3. Provide content formally and informally. Make sure that the training that drives performance is formal, tracked, measured and impacts productivity. Development for the "whole person" can be provided formally, through classes and workshops, or informally through social media. I recently viewed a video from a leadership series at Google featuring Marshall Goldsmith, renowned author and executive coach. I admit to catching it pretty late, but this served as a great opportunity for both the people in the room at Google and the thousands who viewed it later and took something away from his presentation. In fact, I recommend his library as a great place to start with leadership development. Tools like this and other shared media like Wikis, blogs, and discussion boards can be powerful and inexpensive learning solutions.

When you act in the best interest of the business, you gain credibility with the leadership team for being honest about performance and being fiscally prudent. When you provide targeted, quality learning interventions that address true training needs, your training organization will gain credibility for results. Finally, when you provide learning opportunities for your corporate citizens to develop themselves personally and professionally, you provide the whole package as a learning and development organization.