What Is Your Why?

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What Is Your Why?

Why do we do what we do?

This is a question that is often asked of classroom teachers. I disagree with the motivation behind what we do being something we deliberately overlook. In every career, it is important to understand YOUR why.

We can all say what we do, we can teach someone how we do it. But the why is always unique. Yes, we all want to make a living, so of course that is a “why” behind what we do. That only scratches the surface of who we are to our companies and who we are to our customers and who we are to our coworkers. What is your why?

This is a question I can’t answer for you. I can only answer what my own why is. It’s a pretty simple answer, really. YOU are my why. Even though our format is one of online learning now, my days of classroom teaching still drive what we do here at Learning Without Scars. Contributing to someone’s improvement and understanding is the reason I do what I do. Every student, every manager, every individual who comes through our virtual doors is a student. Helping students to succeed is the best why of all.

I encourage you to take a look around today as you are at work. Pay attention to your interactions and your processes throughout the day. I challenge you to answer the question: what is YOUR why?

The time is now.

It’s All About the People

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It’s All About the People

Recently I came across this in Material Handling Wholesaler. It is well worth reading and talks to elements of the management job that we feel are critical for successful businesses.

7 Steps to Turn Employee Potential into Performance

Imagine on Monday, you discover that your meticulous, rule-following accountant and creative, eccentric marketing person have switched positions. How’s this likely to work out? In truth, some variation of this misalignment is common in most organizations.

The Waybeloe Potential Corporation was operating at the break-even point for the past five years. The CEO, Harvey Waybeloe was frustrated. Another CEO told him about an employee-alignment process that was delivering amazing results for other companies. Out of desperation he decided to try it. Within two years, profits increased from break-even to $3.2 mm! The fix? Putting the right people in the right seats!

Most business leaders say that 80% of the work is done by only 20% of the workforce. This 20% are the top performers. They usually produce 3-4 times more than the others. The main reason is due to job alignment rather than attitude or drive. Here’s evidence: It’s common for top performers to be moved or promoted and then become poor performers. Likewise, many poor performers become top performers when moved to appropriate roles. Bottom line: everyone can be a top or poor performer depending on how well the work aligns with their innate characteristics.

How do you deliberately create an organization where people’s work is aligned with their innate characteristics (abilities)? Here’s an overview of a proven process that was used above.

1. Shift your mindset from focusing on skills, experience, and education to innate characteristics first

It’s common for people who are “great on paper” to get hired and become poor performers. In that same vein, many top performers started off lacking in the “required” skills experience and education. When people’s work aligns with their innate characteristics, they can utilize their natural abilities and unleash their passion for their work. Also, the best training and management will not turn poorly aligned employees into top performers.

2. Select the right assessment tool

Many organizations use personality assessments in the hope of gaining more objective information about people to set them up for success. However, the results are usually disappointing due to four inherent pitfalls:
• What you think of as personality is mostly surface-level, observable behaviors; not what’s underneath, driving these behaviors. The drivers of behavior are more accurate, predictive, and stable.
• Assessment-takers usually provide different answers based on which of the following they consider: how they actually see themselves, how they believe others see them, and how they want to see themselves.
• Assessment-takers use a specific context or situation to answer the questions. For example, answers to questions related to “extroversion” (sociability and talkativeness) may vary depending on context differences: small vs. large groups, familiar vs. unfamiliar people, level of interest in the topic of conversation, etc.
• If an assessment is used for a job application, the applicant often has an opinion on what traits the employer is looking for and skews the answers accordingly.
• What’s a better option? Select an assessment that delves beneath the personality into what is more core or innate with people. This eliminates the biases of personality assessments and provides more valid and reliable data.

3. Establish trust with the employees

Inform the employees about the company’s commitment to align their work with their natural gifts. Don’t hide things or surprise people. People want to do work they’re good at and enjoy.

4. Develop an understanding of the innate characteristics being measured

Before you can align people’s innate characteristics with their work, it’s essential to understand what these characteristics mean. In other words, how each one impacts the way people think and behave. Now you have the basis to identify which characteristics are needed for different types of positions within your organization

5. Develop clarity on the job duty break-down

It’s important to know what people will do on a day to day basis in each job. The hiring team (direct manager and others with a major stake in position success) meets to gain clarity on the percentage of time spent performing each job responsibility. Group together duties that are very similar in nature (family of duties). Estimate the percentage of time spent working on each job duty family.

6. Determine which innate characteristics are critical and where they need to measure

The hiring team determines which innate characteristic is critical for each job duty family. They also agree on the desired range for each characteristic. For example, on a 1-10 scale the range for creative thinking should be between 7-9. Now you can develop an optimal range for each critical characteristic.

7. Administer assessment & align employees with job functions

Assess both current employees and potential new hires and compare to the desired ranges. Take the appropriate action based on how strong the level of alignment is. Top performers almost always fit into desired ranges for each critical innate characteristic. If this is not the case, you need to adjust your desired ranges based on the data. Here’s more information on aligning employees:

• When current employees don’t align with their jobs evaluate other positions within the company that do align well.
• Openly discuss available options with employees who are misaligned. Develop a plan to shift roles or tweak job descriptions when this is feasible. Frequently, there are other employees who’d be thrilled to trade positions or some duties that better match with their own innate characteristics.
• For applicants applying to open positions, only interview the people who align well with the desired innate characteristics. When you interview people who don’t align, you may be tempted to discount the assessment results. This rarely ends well.

In the end, the most important job of management is to maximize the ROI of its workforce. Peter Drucker said “The task of a manager is to make people’s strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. The most important thing you can ever do as a leader is to put people in a position to excel rather than get by or fail. How are you doing in your most important task?

About the Author:

Brad Wolff specializes in workforce and personal optimization. He’s a speaker and author of, People Problems? How to Create People Solutions for a Competitive Advantage. As the managing partner for Atlanta-based PeopleMax, Brad specializes in helping companies maximize the potential and results of their people to make more money with less stress. His passion is empowering people to create the business success they desire, in a deep and lasting way. For more information on Brad Wolff, please visit:

www.PeopleMaximizers.com.

 

The time is now.

So, What Are We Doing?

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So, what are we doing?

When we looked at our mission in the internet-based learning business we had to face a series of questions:

 To whom will we be providing our learning products?
 How will we be able to reach the student base?
 How will we measure our ability to provide learning to the student base?
 What will be the learning objectives for each of our programs?
 How important will our learning business become to the employers?

These questions, and many more, caused us some serious reflection time.

We had come from a classroom setting with Quest, Learning Centers. We offered traditional training in two, and three day, programs. We were focused on the management and supervision at equipment dealerships. We had started providing this training in the early 1990’s when most of the OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturers) stopped providing their dealers with their own management training classes. They stopped providing this training due to costs. We decided we enter this market and satisfy what was still an important need; training managers and supervisors in parts and service to improve their performance for them personally and for their dealerships.

We created a lot of content. Each of our classes covered 15 hours in the classroom and we provided a “text” book each of which were approximately 250 pages. We had nine such text books and offered nine different classes. In the more than twenty years that we did the classroom training we covered North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Russia and the Middle East. We had several thousand people taking classes.

Then dealer needs for training evolved.  There were different vehicles that management wanted to try to reduce the costs of training. Along came the webinar. As a teacher I wasn’t very excited about teaching online via a power point with me talking to a group of people who were looking at my screen and hearing my voice. I had no idea if they were “getting it” or perhaps they were doing other things at the same time. However, one of the things it did do is that if forced us to develop products that had a shorter duration. We developed webinars that were designed for 45 to 60 minutes in length.

At last we arrive at the place where we were confronting what the future of learning was going to look like. I wasn’t that interested in travelling all over the world to teach in classrooms and webinars didn’t strike as a good vehicle from which to teach people.
• We chose the internet as the delivery system.
• We chose slide shows, audio tracks and film clips as the vehicle.
• We chose pre-tests, final assessments, and opinion surveys as measurement.
• We chose “badges” as our “certification measurement tool.”

The goal was to keep the cost down and employee learning time investment at the lowest level possible. Then, based on customer input, we determined that the learning programs should be job function related not management and supervision related.

We have plans to be offering 117 two-hour Learning On Demand (LOD) classes, then there are 25 job function programs we call Planning Specific Program (PSP) classes. Each of these programs covers four two-hour classes, and we also have leadership classes we call Planned Learning Programs (PLP). Each of these programs covers ten two-hour classes. We will introduce our Virtual Classroom (VCR) programs in 2019. These classes are for fast track employees and consist of five classes requiring ten hours of learning.

We are redesigning the LOD’s to break the two-hour class into three sections, each section will be about 30 minutes ending with an essay question. We are introducing this in 2019 with our third-year programs, The Final Staging, within the PLP’s then we will redo each of the programs for the Building Blocks and finally The Framework.

We have also changed our reporting to the clients. Each month we send out a progress report to each dealer showing each student and four or five steps or progress. Program Progress, Pretest Results, Final Assessments, Surveys, and Certificates. This allows the students and their employer to track the progress of the individual learning path. We are sincerely interested in providing each student with an employee development program.

We are finalizing our badge structure which we will introduce to you in a later blog.

The Time is Now.

Make It Visible.

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Make It Visible.

We have written often about Goals and Objectives and Management Measures and Key Performance Indicators. And rightly so. It also ties into my management philosophy of Understanding, Acceptance and Commitment. We MUST have clarity, everyone has to Understand what it is we are trying to do, everyone has to ACCEPT that what we are trying to do and that leads to everyone being committed to getting it done. I call that UAK, from my friend Malcolm Phares, who felt it was more memorable that way.

I want to address now the reporting of the progress towards meeting or surpassing the goals, objectives, management measure and key performance indicators.

Some time ago I was on a board of a manufacturing company. They did fusion welding on cylinder heads and line boring and rebuilding of various components as well as resurfacing camshafts and crankshafts. It was a good business. The owner wanted me to see what we could do about improving throughput. We went about the project in the usual manner and had UAK. But what really made a difference was in how we presented the results of everyone’s efforts. We put up graphic and table results every day in the employee break room.

We had a quick team meeting in which we explained what we were going to do and how we were going to collect the data and how we were going to present it to them. I was a little surprised at the level of interest in this reporting approach. There was very little interest.

The first few days, we started at the beginning of a month, there was rather disappointing interest. It started picking up toward the end of the first week. By the time the second week was finished the employees had figured out how their efforts could influence the results. They started trying out different methods to achieve the results, some that worked and some that did not work. But they quickly figured out how to have the maximum results in how they approach their work.

No one told them what to do, they figured it out themselves. I have always said that the employees doing the job know how to do their job better than anyone else. It has always been rather easy for me to explain to employees what is needed and you will be surprised at what comes out of it. This is standard best practice management isn’t it? That sure happened in this example.
By the end of the first month the improved results were very obvious to everyone. No additional spending, no changed written procedures, and no-one standing above every employee pushing them. Just management and supervision helping the employees out when they wanted assistance.

By the end of the first quarter under this program the throughput nearly doubled, open work orders were down by more than 50% and as you can imagine profit increased. The customers had improved results as well. Lower invoices as the times to do the work went down and the invoices were produced within a day of the jobs being completed.
I believe it was simply the reporting of the results. Made the results visible, explain how you get the information and how you produce the results and then just let it go.

If you already are doing this you know what I am talking about. If you don’t what have you got to lose? Try it out you will be surprised by the results.

The Time is NOW.

Attracting and Retaining Employees

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Attracting and Retaining Employees

 

On January 25th 2016 we published the first blog called Memorable Moments. It dealt with my early years and life. It stopped with the line “That was the beginning of the end.” And it was also the end of the beginning of my life.

Hewitt Equipment provided me with a tremendous opportunity. I was hired on a twelve-month contract. My mission was to find and fix what they felt was a problem with the computer system application in use to manage parts inventories. When I found the fix and got it implemented my job was completed unless we both agreed that I should stay.

This was the point at which I was given a gift of learning. A senior partner from Urwick Currie, his name was David Steele, was tasked with teaching me everything I needed to know about inventory management and business systems to manage parts inventories. He spent one day a week, all day, with me and only me. How many people are given that type of opportunity? I received this opportunity because of my university programs majoring in Mathematics and Physics, with minors in Statistics and Computer Science. In the early days of computer applications mathematics was heavily involved. For instance, there was no square root operator in the computer systems at that time. In using Machine Language, COBOL or FORTRAN programming languages, you had to develop a mathematical model to calculate a square root. Without totally boring you there was an error in the formulas used. The number “10” was put into the program instead of “1.” This meant that the Order Quantity for each part put on a stock order was too high by a factor of about 3.17.

I also was given an opportunity to go to Caterpillar in Peoria and meet with the Parts Management (Bob Kirk) and some of the founders of Dealer Data Processing (Larry Noe). We were going to build an interactive model to simulate our parts business under variable order point and order quantity conditions. Both of these men were extremely talented in their fields and took the time to deal with me even though I was only 22. I am told by coworkers at the time that I was a very impatient pushy person. That clearly is a description with which I will disagree. I mention this because of the view that the leadership and team members have about millennials and the younger workers in the Industry. I don’t think they are any different than I was at the same age.

That first six months left me with a hunger for more. I was a new hire. I was given a specific mission, a project if you will. It had clarity, a very clear objective and time line. I was given specialized training, by the consulting firm and Caterpillar experts. I was given a free hand. I had to make a presentation to the executive and make my case and get the changes I wanted to get made approved. I felt that I had a purpose and an important task.

How do we go about attracting and retaining these new employees? These younger workers? They are our future. I think we better figure out what we are going to do and how to get this plan implemented. Don’t you?

The Time is NOW.

The Why and the How

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The Why and the How.

The transition to team management, while still encouraging personal curiosity and initiative, continues to struggle as the usual leadership doesn’t know how to encourage risk taking without contradicting the work of the team. The true story of the ages is that people will take risks when they have less to lose and be risk averse when they have a lot to lose. In his book Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek, talks about the “Circle of Safety.”  Within this circle we can say what we want about what we want, as long as it doesn’t get personal, without fear of exposure or consequences.

The German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said “He who has a ‘why’ to life can bear almost any ‘how.’” That is a very powerful statement to me. So, we are confronted with a conundrum: How to encourage individual participation inside a team while at the same time maintaining the health of the team. All of our operational and process challenges exist because we have been rather timid over the past years to tackle changes necessary in a meaningful manner.

We have to have each of our teams understand the rules. Each team member has to understand their responsibilities and job functions. They have to know what has to be done and how to do it. The primary working rules from Lou Holtz, the one-time coach of the Notre Dame football team, are very simple and very clear. Do your best. Do what is right. Honor the Golden Rule.
This about the team goals having supremacy to individual goals. Team success ahead of selfishness. The role of the leaders is to provide protection, cover, to the employees working on their team. The individual team members will have more confidence in doing what is right when they feel trusted by their leaders. And that is a winning position to be in.

The Time is NOW.

Badges, the Computer, and College Everywhere

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Badges, the Computer, and College Everywhere

Last week, we left off with Patrick Suppes and his realization that students learning online were receiving modestly better results than those in the traditional classroom.  This week, we continue with his journey and conclude our discussion.

In 1972 Suppes taught a class on the Introduction to Logic. He created a wholly automated computerized version of the class. He introduced the class on the first day and from that point forward he did not attend any lectures. The students did all their learning in the educational laboratory. Then he computerized his Axiomatic Set Theory course.
This created the important concept in learning science of “transfer” which is the process which people apply patterns and concepts learning in one context to another. Strengthening transfer is the goal of all good education programs.

The next step in this process brings us to Sebastien Thrun. His specialty is Artificial Intelligence. Carnegie Mellon hired Thrun as a professor in 1995 where he also worked on how computer science, statistics and machines interact. In 2003 Stanford hired him back as head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. IN 2005 the pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency held a contest to see who could build a car that used AI to drive itself across treacherous desert terrain. Thrun was part of the team that build the winning Volkswagen SUV. Google hired him to work in its research laboratory while he continued to teach as a tenured professor at Sanford. In 2011 he was viewed as a rock star in Silicon Valley. He gave a TED talk describing how he and his colleagues had built the self-driving car. Afterward Thrun watched an energetic former hedge fund analyst named Salman Khan. Kahn was the creator of the Kahn Academy, famous for instructional videos for elementary and high school students. Thrun thought the same could be done for college.

Thrun worked with Peter Norvig who was Google research director and they created a graduate course called CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: principles and Techniques. The course consisted of lectures and reading assignments and problems to solve followed by exams to certify what was learned. They put the videos and problems sets and emailed them to members of the global AI community to let them know that anyone could take the course for free. Within two weeks there were 58,000 people signed up for the class. This was when the administration caught wind of what was going on. Then the lawyers got involved. However, a New York Times reported heard about what was happening and wrote a story about the course. Enrollment quickly reached six figures and continued to rise. This was the beginning of the education revolution.

Thrun didn’t start any of this. There were others already doing many of the same things. Notably two professors at the university of Manitoba named George Siemens and Stephen Downes. What Thrun had done was call it a “course.” There were no caveats assigned to it. It was a course. He soon found out that his Stanford students started to take the class like everyone else and they got better grades than when they attended live lectures. BUT Stanford was disrupting the one thing about Stanford that mattered above all else; its name. Thrun gave the students a test to certify what they had learned and that is when Stanford stepped in. Thrun was giving away something for free for which Stanford charged $50,000 a year. The compromise was that Thrun could not issue college credits he could only issue a “Statement of Accomplishment.”

When the university said no to credits Thrun finished out his course and walked away. Then he started Udacity. Another start up aiming at University education online is Coursera. And there will be many more.

The problem is the recognition and the certification. That is why we are working with IACET: the International Association of Continuing Education and Training to obtain certification. This will allow our students to earn CEUs which translate into college credits.

Then Socrates will issue badges along with a “Certificate of Completion.” The badges will represent specific areas of learning: selling, operations, finance and leadership.

The Time is NOW.

Badges, Socrates, and Education Today

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Badges, Socrates, and Education Today

The following comes from a book called The End of College by Kevin Carey which is background information for the internet-based learning environment.

One of the struggles in the changing world of education is the recognition of alternative methods of learning. In each of the traditional Universities and Colleges and Junior Colleges there is a degree. In the vocational or technical school setting there is a “journeyman” standard applied. With the internet-based learning programs none of these are available.

In the book Carey talks about the digital world and how the evidence of learning throughout an individuals’ life will be maintained. “People will control their personal educational identities instead of leaving that crucial information in the hands of organizations acting from selfish interests. To earn a “degree” you had to accumulate credit hours. As Carey says “The creators of the credit hour didn’t mean for it to measure how much students learned. The colleges used it that way anyway.”

Robert Hutchins, of the University of Chicago wrote, “the intellectual progress of the young is determined by the time they have been in attendance, the number of hours that have sat in classes, and the proportion of what they have been told that they can repeat on examinations given by the teachers who told it to them.” Hutchins also predicted that rapid rise in the cost of college and university. He said that the schools would start competing to attract students and would build all manner of facilities that had little to do with learning. He was very outspoken about how the schools operated. He said “You pay no attention to what you teach, indeed to what you investigate. You get great men for your faculty. Their mere presence on the campus inspires, stimulates and exalts. It matters not how inarticulate their teaching or how recondite their researches, they are, as the saying goes, an education in themselves.”

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who for a time was the President of George Washington University. He understood something crucial about the University. He understood that “people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with the name brand.”

I want to leave off here today, because there is a lot to digest.  There’s a great deal more to come over these next weeks, as we take a close look at education and learning.

The time is NOW.

Coaching is Critical!

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Coaching is Critical

Leadership, which is a required aspect or skill of management, cannot be done successfully without the leader being a great coach. Being a great coach means that you are a terrific communicator. However, time becomes your enemy. You really will never have enough time to provide pertinent feedback to your direct reports. So how are we supposed to be able to be effective as coaches?

In the world in which we work and live there is too much going on. We are having to constantly upgrade our skills. This is true for us as managers, as well as for our support groups and teams. As a result of the time squeeze and the need to be constantly upgrading skills, sufficient time spent coaching employees is rare. This is an area that has found a good amount of study at Universities and Think Tanks. How do we continue to be able to lead and coach and keep current with skills? Harvard brings us the concept of what they are calling “a connector.”

HR leaders surveyed by Harvard found that they expected Management to spend 36% of their time developing their subordinates, their team members. But a survey within the same organizations with the management found them saying that they spent 9% of their time developing employees. This is a tricky result. More time coaching is not necessarily the answer.

Another survey by Gartner of 7,300 hundred employees and 100 HR managers asked “what are the best mangers doing to develop employees in today’s busy work environment?” They created four different categories of management.

1) Teaching Managers:
Coach based on their own knowledge. This is advice-oriented feedback to employee job performance.

2) Always-on Managers:
Provide continual coaching, it is part of their daily work. This category is typically in alignment with what HR executives think that management should be doing.

3) Connector Managers:
Provide targeted coaching. They constantly are assessing skills and provide specific coaching from the best coaches available. Not necessarily themselves.

4) Cheerleader Managers:
They are supportive. Providing positive feedback and have the employees in charge of their personal development.

The most common type is cheerleaders, which represents 29% of management. While the category representing the least followers was teaching at 22%. The splits are relatively the same.
So, let’s go back to the statement that more time coaching is not necessarily the answer. This survey by Gartner found that “there is very little correlation between time spent coaching and employee performance.” “It is less about quantity than quality.” This is pointing out a stark reality. It is time we start teaching managers how to “COACH.”

As I mentioned last blog we are in the process of creating a coaching class. We are aiming at providing learning on coaching that addresses building trust with team members, tapping into employee potential, creating employee commitment, and actually executing and meeting goals and objectives.

We have referenced the International Coaching Federation (ICF) which has published a set of ethical standards for coaches to build this class. They ask coaches to pledge to do the following

 Show genuine concern for the individuals’ welfare and future.
 Continuously demonstrate personal integrity, honesty and sincerity.
 Keep confidences.

More on that list will come in the weeks and months ahead.

The Time is NOW.

Coaching

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Coaching

We are constantly looking to our clients to help us determine what additional learning classes we should create. We get a lot of very good suggestions.

Recently, I was asked to create selling skills classes for service management and supervision, foremen and customer contact personnel. We are creating those classes now.

Another suggestion from our clients was regarding the management courses we offer. We have taught management and supervision now for over twenty years in the classroom, with webinars and most recently our internet-based classes. However, it was tied to the functions within the department. It was never “pure” management functions. That program is now under development.

Another learning area that was requested of us was coaching and mentoring. We were first approached with the need to help a specific individual with their management skills with their team. Communications skills were specifically requested, as well as leadership and trust. That was matched with another request to assist in the development of a new manager in a new job function.

It is always necessary to make changes in our programs based on what is needed in the “learning arena.” As our industry changes, I adapt as well.

Coaching is the subject I would like to explore more with you this week. Personal success is a common and constant pursuit for talented people, for curious people, for self-motivated individuals. Satisfaction comes form being able to tackle and overcome difficulties in our lives. As John Wooden said we he defined SUCCESS. “Success is the Peace of Mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing that you made the effort to become the best you are capable of becoming.”

I have been telling the story in classrooms and in talks for a long time now about the individual who at sixteen years of age, let’s call him James, is told that they have POTENTIAL. That is a wonderful thing. It holds such promise and hope. Now I would like you to imagine that James is now sixty-six years of age and is still told he has a lot of potential. Shouldn’t the next question be “what have you been doing the past fifty years?”

Coaching is vey personal. It is working with individuals and helping them to reach their potential. A good definition of coaching is that the purpose of coaching is “unleashing or unlocking the potential of another human being.” Perhaps that sounds too overpowering to you. But that is what you do if you are coaching another person. You are helping them become better at what they do.

Gallup surveys everything and coaching is one of the subjects on which they have conducted surveys. Their surveys say that 30% of the people want coaching to help them with “life, purpose, vision, creativity and integrity.” That is a real mouthful, isn’t it?

At the end of the blog last week I stated that “I think we all can do much more in our lives and in our careers.” Sometimes that challenge overwhelms us. Don’t let that happen to you. Take up the challenge. Find a coach: someone you trust, someone you respect and someone who will be honest with you. Then get started. As the US Army commercial says “be all that you can be.”

The Time is NOW.