Lessons Learned from the PGA

Shame on me for not keeping up with these posts. I truly enjoy doing it but when I finally landed a new job I let this fall to the bottom of the priority list. I’ll work harder to keep up.

Today my thoughts turn to the PGA Championship. For those of you who are not golf fans, the number one player in the world, Tiger Woods, was upset by the number 110 player, Y.E. Yang. It was a stunning round of golf and pointed out that anything can happen.

You’re likely thinking, “Great news recap buddy, what’s the point? What does that have to do with training?” I’m glad you asked. I think it forces us to ask ourselves if we have assumed too much. Everyone assumed that Tiger would win the tournament. After all, he had won 14 of 14 when he had the lead after 54 holes. He had led the entire tournament. He was on a roll, having won the previous week. Who bets against that?

Sometimes, Learning and Development organizations find themselves rolling along quite safely in the larger organization. They produce solid products that meet the need of clients and stakeholders. They have a seat at the operations table. They have aligned curriculum around performance and organizational competencies.

I would challenge the leader of that organization to look around and see who the upstarts are. Examine the market place and even their organization for new ideas. I’m not suggesting sweeping changes every few months. I am suggesting that success can be the mother of complacency and while there is still spoken homage to the bottom line and ROI, there might be a lack of innovation.

In the world of golf, no one is going to say that Tiger is done with the game, that this somehow signals his demise. He will surely recover from this loss, and he’ll probably be a stronger player for it. The successful L&D organization will also survive a mediocre program or worse, a failure. The question is how do they recover?

I’ll suggest two things for learning leaders to consider:

1. Never stop innovating. Ask the question, are we really operating at our best? Be mindful of the design ruts into which we all find ourselves and challenge your team to get out of them. Look for the best way to deliver learning rather than deliver learning the way you work best.
2. Be prepared to fail. Failure is one of the best ways to learn. No one plans to fail. Great leaders and great learners, model behavior that acknowledges failure, owns up to it and plans forward.

Much like golf, learning and development is an occupation that requires its practitioners to be analytical, creative, knowledgeable, patient, focused and competitive. I’m sure there are more adjectives we could add. The point is that, like golf, external factors also challenge our performance and we must be constantly focused on not only improving the performance of the organization but also challenging ourselves to operate at the top of our game.

Leading, Learning and Change

Everywhere you look, learning professionals and consultants are writing about coping with tough times, surviving the downturn, or bracing for the worst. I don't blame them, times are tough and many people I talk to are cutting corners and balancing expenses. By people I mean friends, family, and business contacts. Personally or professionally, anyone with a checkbook is paying even closer attention to what's going out.


So when I ask training leaders, and I've spoken to quite a few, what the biggest learning need is in these times, I get a handful of answers: leadership, continuing development, and change management top the charts. I think these are very achievable and can be closely aligned with your business results.

1. Leadership Training. Spend the time developing leaders to be more successful and building your succession plan. And face it, they will leave. Strong leaders will help guide your company in these challenging times and then be tempted away when conditions improve. How you keep them is a different conversation, but make sure you have their successor lined up.

The other benefit to leadership development is the establishment of a shared language. Leadership development, done right, involves both the leaders and the led. It creates a common understanding of the role of leaders and accountability for leadership behaviors. Employees know what to expect from their leaders, managers are better able to provide peer coaching and feedback, and executive leadership has an "apples to apples" way of describing and identifying high performers in the organization. For more on leadership and succession planning, Talent Management has a very good article on developing emerging leaders.

2. Continuing Development. Many organization are adopting the "do more with less" mentality these days. I don't have a problem with that, as long as people are prepared to do the work you need them to do, and that might mean more training. Yet in the "more with less" mindset, the learning organization has less to work with. Once again, social media comes to the rescue as does a proactive communication plan.

• Let the organization know you are creating informal learning and development opportunities.


• Communicate the topic areas and the means to obtain training.


• Partner those who have skills with those who don't for more peer training and informal development.


• Have experts answer questions on discussion boards or document success in wikis.


• Create lunch and learn sessions through which experts can share experience and answer questions.


• Remind employees to document learning opportunities and time spent practicing new skills.


• Remind your experts to document time spent teaching, training or mentoring. Ask them how you can help develop them further by making them better trainers.

This continuing development should fit hand-in-hand with your leadership development and succession planning process.

3. Teach people how to manage change. Change management isn't just a task for the senior leadership or the training department. Managing how team members cope with and respond to changing conditions falls to front line leaders. Since these line managers may be formal or informal leaders, it is important to create an awareness in the population of how people handle change and how to help people use the tension to move forward and be productive. I'm not arguing for enterprise-wide change management training. I am arguing for creating opportunities for the entire workforce to learn about the change process and some of the ways that successful organizations handle and grow from change pressure.

To be successful, organizations need to continually grow, develop and innovate. By focusing on a leadership platform, all team members share accountability for leadership. Through continuing development, team members have an opportunity to grow and be successful. Continuing development doesn't have to draw on excessive resources when information sharing becomes the norm. Finally, create a culture that knows how to adapt to and use the tension caused by change events and you will have an organization ready to cope with the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Innovation, Learning and...Soccer?

I spent a good portion of this past Saturday coaching my kids’ soccer teams. I try not to be that dad, reliving my better days through my kids. I coach like crazy in practice and then in games I sit in my chair and watch. I was proud to see my teams do some great stuff on the field and it reminded me of how we learn to play games like soccer. Sure, as a coach I provide skill practice and drills to hone soccer ability. But true soccer knowledge is gained from playing the game, through trial and error. Kids learn what works (what helps them score goals, or stop the other team from doing the same) when they try the things I’ve been telling them and it pays off. The thrill of scoring or stopping that attack brings its own sense of fulfillment that I can’t create on the practice field.

As I watched my kids play, it reminded me of a webinar I viewed recently featuring Scott Anthony of Innosight. In his presentation, he emphasized the need for organizations to practice the art of innovation. He provided some great guidelines and some memorable facts and figures. His position is that for companies to be successful in these tough times they must be innovative all the time. He gave many examples of companies that rose out of tough times by doing exactly that. In every case, companies that rigorously practice and encourage innovation, ultimately succeed.

Innovation, like learning, demands that we try new ideas and often fail. Okay, I said it. It means we fail. Scott shared a great quote by Ted Williams, one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

"Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer."

Scott does a great job showing how companies invest wisely in innovation because they know that many ideas won’t pan out. They plan for it. They invest a little, to learn a lot.

In a learning culture, failure has to be an option. We often learn the most when we fail. Failure, and the introspection that follows, guides us to new directions that we may not have tried before. I love the quote from Batman Begins (2005), in which Alfred Pennyworth, the faithful butler to the Dark Knight, asks a young Bruce Wayne, “Why do we fall, sir?” The answer, though it seems trite, is packed with meaning. “So that we might learn to pick ourselves up.” I admit to being a comic book fan, which makes the quote more memorable. Regardless this is still a great lesson. For learning to actually work, participants need the chance to get all the information and practice it in a safe setting in which failure is an option.
Back on the job, our clients will have the opportunity to try the new skills. If our design was solid and the course a success, our learners should have some success at the new skills. When they do fail, and they will, the learning organization should be there to quickly assess the conditions that caused failure, provide the introspection required, and be ready to meet the need in a timely and cost-efficient manner. I’m not condoning failure as a standard. My belief is that in failing, we learn what not to do and sometimes that’s a good piece of information to have.

Soccer coaching may not be the best model for how to run a learning organization but there are some good parallels:

1. Give learners a safe environment to practice the skills and use the relevant information.
2. Provide lots of feedback and generate dialogue about what’s working and what isn’t.
3. Motivate participants with praise and positive reinforcement.
4. Unfreeze counterproductive behaviors and refreeze productive ones.
5. Prepare learners as best we can for “game time”.
6. Document the successes and failures and build new training experiences to address the shortcomings.
7. Repeat and have fun.

I'm constantly telling my assistant coaches, a group of helpful dads, to relax. If we teach our kids the basic soccer skills and make it fun, the kids will start to experiment and have success. That's how we can support innovation on the soccer field.
How is your learning department supporting innovation in your business?