The Performance Improvement Blog

Leadership Hustle

In his column for Forbes.com, John Baldoni writes about how Rick Pitino, coach of the 2013 NCAA national champion Louisville Cardinals basketball team, would keep track of his players’ deflections during their games. He wanted to measure “hustle” and a count of deflections was his best indicator. A deflection in basketball is anything that a defender does to “redirect the intended flight of the ball.” Depending on who is counting, this could include blocked shots, tipped balls, kicked balls, steals, taking a charge, and touched passes. You might hear about blocked shots and steals, but the other kinds of deflections are rarely mentioned. Each of these actions on the part of a defender usually requires concentrated, determined effort at disrupting the play of the offense. Do this enough and at the right times and it can be the difference between winning and losing a game.  

If you've read my previous posts, you know that I think we overuse sports analogies in our understanding of organizations. However, I wonder if we can use organizational deflections to measure leadership hustle? We could count the number of times a leader proposes a change in the strategic direction of the organization, asks an insightful question about current policies, challenges a bad decision, gets a co-worker to think about a situation in a new way, suggests new positioning for a product or service that is not doing well, uses own initiative to solve a problem for a customer, has a difficult conversation with a direct report, or embraces change. In each instance, the leader is deflecting the organization from its current path. 

Top level leaders do not necessarily have to hustle to keep their jobs and advance their careers. In fact, deflection is the kind of behavior often avoided by leaders because they fear the risk and consequences. To them, it is safer to continue doing what they've been doing then to change direction, even if things are going badly. They stay the course at all costs.

Leaders that hustle are open to opportunities for deflection. They are always questioning the status quo. They ask themselves and others if they are doing something simply because they can or because it’s the right thing to do. They ask, "Is this what is best for our customers, our employees, and the community? Is there a better way?" 

What actions indicate leadership hustle to you?

A Year of “The Performance Improvement Blog” in Review

It’s time to do a little year-end reflecting on my blog posts from 2012.

Throughout last year I used this blog to illuminate important leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from creating a learning culture to increasing employee engagement to improving organizational communication to evaluating executive coaching, and more.

Out of all of these blog posts I’ve selected five that seem to have had the most interest for readers. Here are the links with a short excerpt from each post:

How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations - Organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

 

Leaders Make or Break Employee Engagement - A leader’s attitude and behavior determine whether an organization has an engaged workforce or not. In other words, what leaders think and feel and say and do has a profound impact on employee satisfaction, enthusiasm for their work, desire to do their best, and commitment to go beyond their job descriptions every day. In an article for The Business Thinker, my colleague Jim Stilwell and I describe 13 ways in which leaders affect employee engagement. 

 

 

What Gets Measured Gets Done...Revisited - Measurement is not enough. An organization has to do something with those metrics in order to “get done” what needs to get done, i.e., organizational learning, performance improvement, and change. The act of measuring things like sales, customer service, product quality, teamwork, employee engagement, or learning, does not necessarily mean that anything will be done differently.

 

 

Why Evaluate Executive Coaching - CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in executive coaching is paying off.  Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.

 

 

What Do You Mean? - Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and HBR blogger, in a post titled “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore”, writes about business jargon and how it affects communication in organizations. The blog post must have hit a nerve because it has broken the record for most comments to a single HBR Blog Network post. 

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2013!

Executive Coaches Talk About Coaching Effectiveness

I participated in a presentation on coaching at Zingerman’s Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 21, 2012. My co-presentors were Rob Pasick and Barb Allushuski. We talked about the growth of executive coaching, the range of styles of coaching, the ups and downs of coaching, and how to evaluate coaching. See below:

 

Why Evaluate Executive Coaching

Executive coaching has quickly become a nearly two billion dollar industry. Many companies now rely on coaching for the development of their leaders. Having a coach, once perceived as an admission of failure, is now perceived as a normal part of managing large, complex organizations. And coaching has also become common for entrepreneurs who need help transitioning from leader of a start-up to manager of a rapidly growing company.

With this acceptance of coaching, CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in it is paying off.  Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies of coaching tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.

For example, an American Management Association survey of coaching found that respondents from organizations that use coaching more than in the past are also more likely to report two kinds of advantages:

1. They’re more likely to report that their organizations have higher levels of success in the area of coaching.

2. They’re more likely to say that their organizations are performing well in the market, as determined by self-reports in the combined areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

The problem with this kind of study of coaching is that it is correlational and correlation does not necessarily mean causation. It is highly likely that high performing organizations choose to use coaching more than low performing organizations. In other words, high performance predicts coaching rather than coaching predicts high performance.

Survey studies of coaching are problematic in other ways, too. One, they lump all coaching into a black box without examining the many variations of coaching. Two, they are based on the assumption that the purpose of coaching is to change the individual when, in many cases, the purpose is to change a team or the organization as a whole. Three, they don’t tell us exactly how the coaching contributed to performance improvement within an environment in which many other factors may have contributed to the change. And four, they rarely look at long term impact, which is what is often the intended purpose of coaching.

To evaluate executive coaching, first we need to define what is meant by "coaching" in the situation being evaluated. Do they mean coaching for greater self-awareness, for developing leadership skills, for making a transition to a new job or role, or for solving a specific problem? Do they mean face-to-face, by phone, or email? Do they mean an hour a day, an hour a week, an hour a month, or as needed. Is the coaching process mostly inquiry or mostly advocacy?  Does the coaching include interviews of supervisors and direct reports? Does it involve observation of work situations and interactions? In other words, what does coaching mean for that executive and that organization?

What we need are studies that tell us what kind of coaching under what circumstances contribute to what kind of results for the organization and over what period of time. Surveys are helpful for knowing the extent of coaching and the general attitude of employees toward coaching. But to understand coaching well enough to be able to replicate effective coaching or improve coaching for an organization, we need to tell the story of the coaching experience. How did the executive get involved in coaching? What were her expectations? How did she work with the coach? What did the coach actually do? How much time did they spend in coaching? What happened? What did the executive learn? What is the executive doing differently? What impact is that having on her team and organization? What evidence is there that this kind of change is occurring and that it is linked to coaching?

When we can answer these questions we will understand what it is about various coaching interventions that have an effect on results.  We will be able to compare coaching to other potential interventions and replicate effective methods. We will know the return on investment. We will know what makes an executive coach qualified to coach. We will know what makes one approach to executive coaching better than another.

Evaluation of coaching is also important to do because it reinforces client learning. When we ask someone questions about what they have learned, it helps to make that learning stick. This is what happens when we ask clients questions about the coaching they received. Their self -awareness is increased, behavior change is strengthened, and long-term follow-through is more likely.

Executive coaching: How do we know it works?

Executive coaching has quickly become a nearly two billion dollar industry. Many companies now rely on coaching for the development of their leaders. Having a coach, once perceived as an admission of failure, is now perceived as a normal part of managing large, complex organizations. And coaching has also become common for entrepreneurs who need help transitioning from a leader of a start-up to a leader of a second and third-stage company.

With this acceptance of coaching, as with any performance improvement intervention, CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in it is paying off.  However, we don’t know any more about the impact of coaching then we did in 2008 when I wrote the blog post, “Coaching for Results.” Studies of coaching tend to be surveys of people being coached. Sometimes they include direct reports and supervisors to find out if anyone observes attitude or behavior change in that executive.

The problems with these kinds of studies are fourfold: first, they lump all coaching into a black box without examining the many variations of coaching; second, they assume that the purpose of coaching is to change the individual when, in many cases, the purpose is to change the organization; third, they don’t tell us exactly how the coaching contributed to performance improvement given an environment in which many other factors could have contributed to the change; and fourth, they rarely look at long term impact, which is what is often the intended purpose of coaching.

Researchers Erik de Haan and Christiane Niess write in Training Journal:

Coaching is an organisational intervention. The client is part of the organisation. He brings with him deep traces from the organisation. And if anything changes, he will act differently upon the organisation, where more people will be affected.

So if one is interested in the impact of executive coaching, one would have to measure its effects at the organisational level. This has only been done to a very limited extent. Three hundred and sixty degree assessments by others in the organization about the client have been used in the past to measure effectiveness of executive coaching. However, in those cases, feedback from bosses, peers and direct reports was used essentially to measure the impact of executive coaching on the client, not on others in the organisation. As far as we could determine, organisational feedback on the impact of executive coaching on organisations in a wider sense, has not been investigated or analysed.

Coaching can take many forms so that when someone says they are being coached, that doesn’t tell us very much about their coaching. Do they mean coaching for greater self-awareness, for developing leadership skills, for making a transition to a new job or role, or for solving a specific problem? Do they mean face-to-face, by phone, or email? Do they mean an hour a day, an hour a week, an hour a month, or as needed. Is the coaching process mostly inquiry or mostly advocacy?  Does the coaching include interviews of supervisors and direct reports? Does it involve observation of work situations and interactions? What does coaching mean for that executive and that organization?

What we need are studies that tell us what kind of coaching under what circumstances contribute to what kind of results for the organization and over what period of time. Surveys are helpful for knowing the extent of coaching and the general attitude of employees toward coaching. To understand coaching well enough to be able to replicate successful coaching or improve coaching for an organization, we need to tell the story of the coaching experience. How did the executive get involved in coaching? What were her expectations? How did she work with the coach? What did the coach actually do? How much time did they spend in coaching? What happened? What did the executive learn? What is the executive doing differently? What impact is that having on her team and organization? What evidence is there that this kind of change is occurring and that it is linked to coaching?

When we can answer these questions we will understand what it is about various coaching interventions that has an effect on results.  We will be able to compare coaching to other potential interventions and replicate effective methods.

 

Harry Levinson 1922-2012

For many managers, motivation and manipulation mean one and the same thing; but employees know the difference. –Harry Levinson

We lost one of the giants in the study of organizational learning and performance this week. Harry Levinson died at the age of 90 after a long and productive career making organizational leaders aware of the importance of psychological dynamics to their employees and themselves. Every leader and manager should take heed of Levinson's thought-provoking theories and practice.

Levinson made us aware of the psychological contract between employer and employee. This is the implicit understanding of what is expected and how they will act toward one another. Acting contrary to this contract causes a great deal of stress for both and can be detrimental to the working relationship and productivity of employees.

Levinson was one of the first to speak about the impact of organizational culture on worker performance. In his article for Organizational & Social Dynamics titled “Organizational Immersion and Diagnosis: The Work of Harry Levinson”, Michael A. Diamond writes:

For Levinson, the informal and affectionate bonds between workers and their foremen (supervisors) helped to explain effective, physically safe and emotional[ly] healthy, management performance in the workplace. The study [of Kansas Power and Light Company] also pre-dated much of the popular enthusiasm several decades later with organizational culture.

Regarding Levinson’s notions about performance review, Diamond writes:

…he emphasized the human compassion inherent in and necessary for providing subordinates with unambiguous, direct, and honest feedback in performance evaluation.

Regarding Levinson’s thoughts about mentoring, Diamond writes:

Executives and their management must become better mentors, he argued, and to do so they must become more knowledgeable about what motivates their employees.

Levinson had some strong words for organizational consultants. He believed that they should do assessments (diagnosis) before recommending interventions. He didn’t seem to have much patience for consultants who are ready with a solution prior to fully understanding the problem. This belief became the cornerstone of Levinson’s advice to consultants and clients. In an interview that Diamond conducted with the consultant’s consultant, Levinson is quoted as saying:  

Clients and consultants prefer the `quick fix' approach to organizations. This approach assumes the consultant somehow magically knows what the client and client system require without organizational assessment and diagnosis. Moreover, it is this impatience and short sightedness that has led to the acceleration and popularity of more prescriptive approaches that promise more than they can possibly deliver. These approaches include executive coaching as practiced by many non-psychoanalytic consultants. Furthermore, these practices tend to focus on a part of or member of the system rather than the system as a whole and that contradicts the spirit of organizational diagnosis. One can imagine how this sort of orientation would leave consultants vulnerable to counterproductive collusions with the executive client…

Levinson blamed the psychological dynamics of leaders, more than business and economic factors, for the failure of large companies. In an article for the journal, American Psychologist, titled: “Why the behemoths fell: Psychological roots of corporate failure”, Levinson writes:

The failure of many American corporations to adapt to changed economic circumstances has become a major social concern. Many reasons have been alleged for those catastrophes. These allegations describe the ostensible reasons, but they do not explain adequately. The explanations are fundamentally psychological, significantly having to do with individual and organizational narcissism, unconscious recapitulation of family dynamics in the organization, exacerbating dependency, psychologically illogical organization structure and compensation schemes, inadequate management of change, and inability to recognize and manage cognitive complexity. To deal more effectively with such problems calls for greater psychological sophistication among boards of directors and senior executives.

That article was published in 1994. I wonder what Levinson would say today about captains of industry who are leading companies that are “too big to fail”. What would he say about the demise of some giant financial services companies over the past few years?

Much of what Levinson theorized and applied in his consulting has now become mainstream thinking among organizational psychologists and consultants. However, at the same time, much work still needs to be done to create psychologically safe cultures for employees and employers.

 

Active and Passive Learning in Organizations

Many of the typical methods of learning in the workplace make the learner a passive recipient of knowledge and skills. Employees are asked to read, watch, or listen to information being dispensed. The method might be entertaining, interactive, and of their own choosing, but fundamentally these methods are passive for the learner. Another approach is to make the learner an active creator of knowledge and skills. In this role, employees (as individuals, teams, or the organization as a whole) receive feedback about what they are doing and how they are doing it and, through individual and collective reflection, learn how to make themselves, their teams, and the enterprise more effective.

Jane Hart has provided us with an excellent list of “passive” ways in which people learn in their workplaces. She includes:

1. Company training (face-to-face workshops and e-learning)
2. Self-directed study of external courses (of their own choice)
3. Company documents (manual, policies, strategy documents etc)
4. Internal job aids (to support use of systems, processes and activities)
5. Working collaboratively within their team (sharing resources, ideas and experiences)
6. General conversations and/or meetings with people (formal or ad hoc)
7. External personal and professional networks and communities(including online social networks like Facebook and Twitter)
8. External blog and news feeds (reading subscribed resources)
9. Content curated from external sources (daily summaries of key articles, blog posts, etc)
10. Google search for Web resources (looking for and using external resources)

Although “active” methods might be implied by some of the items on Hart's list, I think “active” ways of learning should be made more explicit in our organizations. Otherwise, I fear they will continue to be overlooked even though for many individuals, teams, and organizations they are more powerful learning methods and more likely to result in organizational improvement than the “passive” methods.

Here are ten of these “active” ways of learning in organizations that I would add to Hart’s list:

1. Action learning (structured reflection on one’s own actions and experience)
2. Logs, diaries, and journals (recording reflections and learning as it occurs)
3. Simulation and debrief (group exercises to test assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes about processes and systems)
4. Shared visioning (whole organization identification of collective values and goals)
5. Large-scale events (whole organization system change)
6. Appreciative inquiry (identifying strengths of individuals, teams, and organizations)
7. Dialogue (conversation that seeks mutual understanding of beliefs and values)
8. Coaching (facilitating an individual’s self-awareness and performance improvement)
9. Learning histories (structured group reflection about the meaning of past events)
10. Benchmarking (comparing processes of one organization to those of another)

 

How to Keep Talent from Walking Out the Door

Are you worried about employee turnover in your company and how it might get worse once the economy improves? If you aren’t worried, you should be.

It has been estimated that as many as a third of employees are looking to change jobs. Now that the recession is easing and more companies are beginning to hire again, these employees will start acting on this desire.

My friend and colleague, Bernie Donkerbrook, retired Ford Motor Company program manager and now executive coach, places responsibility for retaining talent on the shoulders of an employee’s supervisor or manager. Bernie believes that there is much those managers can do to keep their employees engaged and productive. He writes:

In today's sluggish economic environment, companies operate lean, demanding more of employees in the process. Many are focused on surviving, not thriving. While uncertainty in the marketplace may keep employees loyal today, when the economy improves, they may be more apt to seek out career opportunities elsewhere. If organizations ignore the retention issue today, they will undoubtedly regret it tomorrow.

You should be asking yourself, “What am I doing to ensure that my key talent remains once the job market improves?” and, concurrently, “What am I doing to strengthen loyalty and build a positive work force, positive people, and good relationships with their immediate bosses?”

Here are actions you can take to increase employee retention (all of which are behaviors that can be coached, trained and developed in supervisors and managers):

• Improve relationships between employees and their immediate bosses. Many employees leave because they perceive that they are not appreciated, recognized, and valued by their immediate bosses.  Here is what you can do:
  • Have HR determine if there are supervisors/managers that have a higher than normal turnover rate in their units. Provide them with a coaching process for understanding and dealing with difficult issues. The supervisor’s/manager’s behaviors need to be understood and changed. There is usually a reason some bosses have higher turnover rates than others.
  • Make it clear to supervisors/managers that employee retention is part of their job and that long-term development of employees is part of their job, too...and part of their evaluation.
• Revitalize your organizational culture to include employee appreciation, recognition, and valuing.  “People honor a culture that honors them.” This is incredibly important…honoring, valuing, respecting and recognizing your people.  It makes a big difference in building loyalty to the company and also is definitely teachable.

• Remind your managers and supervisors of the power of the “Golden Rule” of behavior at work.
  • How would THEY like to be treated by their bosses?
  • What would THEY like to experience in their jobs?
  • How would THEY like to be recognized, appreciated and thanked for their efforts?
  • How long will THEY want to wait to be appreciated, recognized and valued?

• Tell your best people they ARE your best people. It is highly motivating to know you are well thought of. Let your best people know you want to keep them, to retain them with the Company.  Really… it makes a difference. Imagine yourself being told by your boss, or your boss’s boss, that you are important to the Company and they are counting on you.
• Ask employees what they need, want, would like to be doing. No promises, but it shows you are interested and want to make it work for them and the company.  For your best and key people, make sure they have a career development plan. This is so obvious but managers and leadership are so busy they often fail to take this seriously.  And, there is often no corporate plan to set this up.
• Ask employees for feedback on YOUR management behavior. How can you improve? What would they like to see more of and less of from you? Are you helping too much or not available often enough?
• Carve out one-on-one time with your employees.  Much successful retention and employee loyalty comes from, simply, one-on-one time with the boss.  Regularly demonstrate personal care and concern for individuals, their life and family, and what is important to them.  (Bosses may need coaching/mentoring on how to do this effectively.)
• Put people to work where they are their best.  Allow them to work at what they already do well, where they have excelled, and what they are excited about.  Ask them.  Everyone wants to be doing what they know they are good at and what they enjoy doing.
• Find out what inspires, motivates a person.  What is that person passionate about? Find that person work in these areas if at all possible.  At least, let him or her represent the company externally in the areas where there is passion.  This builds the corporate brand and demonstrates corporate engagement with the local community.    
• Find out if career growth opportunities are available for employees.  Do they have opportunities for development, growth, new challenges, and promotion? You may answer, as the manager, “Yes, of course.”  But what do your employees say about this?  There is often a disconnect between what employees experience in career development and what the company policy is said to be.  Do this:  Check it out. Find out what employees believe and what they experience on the job relating to career development. Most often, you, as the boss, will not like what you hear.
• Ensure that compensation is competitive. Eliminating any gap in compensation with the market is a great short-term neutralizer of negative energy.
• Pay for performance.  Do you reward better performance or is everyone at a similar grade-level paid about the same?  If everyone is paid the same, it is not very enticing for the highest performers when they know they are not appreciated in a financial way for their unique contribution to the organization. [Note: Plan pay-for-performance very carefully; these plans can have little or no positive effect if structured in the wrong way.]
• Pay attention to your stars, your top-performers.  Really! Stars will not wait around to be given authority, more responsibility, the opportunity to make decisions, or be promoted.
• Communicate, communicate, and communicate.  Find ways to let employees know you care about them as individuals.

Evaluate Learning Process

As organizations evaluate their programs and services they need to pay attention to process as well as outcomes. Catherine (Brehm) Rain, of Rain and Brehm Consulting Group, Inc., writes this in aea365:

Process evaluation ensures you answer questions of fidelity… did you do what you set out to with respect to needs, population, setting, intervention and delivery? When these questions are answered, a feedback loop is established so that necessary modifications to the program or the evaluation can be made along the way.

Life is a journey—and so is a long-term evaluation. Stuff happens. However, it is often in the chaotic that we find the nugget of truth, the unknown need, or a new direction to better serve constituents. A well-documented process evaluation assists programs to ‘turn on a dime’, adapt to changing environments and issues, and maximize outcome potential.

The problem with much of the evaluation that goes on in organizations, whether that’s evaluation of training and development programs, communication programs, marketing campaigns, a new sales approach, or strategic planning, is that the process is not examined. You might discover what participants thought of the program from “smile sheets” and you might even know how participants applied what they learned if you are fortunate enough to do a follow-up assessment, but none of this tells you what happened and what could be changed to achieve greater impact in the future. This is what process evaluation does.

If you tell me that you provided coaching, or diversity training, or emotional intelligence training, or relationship selling, that doesn’t tell me what actually happened. These interventions could be very different from organization to organization, from department to department, or from day to day. Even if an organization implements a highly structured program such as The Fish! Philosophy with its video, guidebook, playbook, and accessories, the experience could be very different for participants in different organizations with different facilitators at different times. To assess its value to the organization and improve the program for future audiences, we have to know what happened and how that was experienced by participants.

It’s like a friend telling you that she went to Las Vegas, Nevada for a vacation and had a good time. If that’s all you know, then you don’t know very much about her trip. You couldn’t replicate her experience or improve on it for yourself. Maybe she stayed on the Strip and spent every waking moment gambling in casinos. Or maybe she stayed downtown and spent each day on Hoover Dam, Red Rock, and Grand Canyon sight-seeing trips without ever setting foot in a casino. Both experiences might receive a “five” on the vacation evaluation form but that data would be useless to you until you knew what “Las Vegas Vacation” means in her case.

So too with learning interventions, whether classroom, online, or informal, we need to know the actual process of learning (anticipated and unanticipated) in those situations in order to improve the experience for other learners and maximize impact on organizations. It is insufficient to know outcomes without knowing what happened to achieve those outcomes. 

I’ve evaluated employee training programs that included follow-up coaching. Some participants used the coaching and some did not. Some coaching consisted of several, hour-long sessions and some consisted of 15 to 20 minute sessions. Some coaching was done by phone, some was done online and asynchronous, and some was done face-to-face. Some coaching was learner-centered and some was coach-centered. Without knowing how the actual coaching process was delivered, we shouldn’t be making decisions about the program.

Lately, the trend in the employee training and development industry has been to emphasize measurement of results and ROI. While I applaud this recognition that end-of-program, smile sheets are an inadequate measure of the quality of programs, I think measuring outcomes without describing the factors that contributed to those outcomes is also inadequate. We need both process and outcome evaluation. 

 

Investing in Training in Downturns and Upturns

The U.S. is emerging from a training drought that occurred during the worst economic period since the Great Depression. At least, that’s what’s indicated by organizations that do this kind of
research. ASTD reports an increase in spending on L&D in 2010 (latest year for which data is available); they estimate companies spent about $171.5 billion. Bersin & Associates reports that corporate spending on training increased 9.5% in 2011 – the largest gain in three years.  And Training magazine’s research found a 13% increase in spending on L&D in 2011. Each of these studies uses a different method for calculating spending. However, the trend is undeniable: spending on employee training is increasing.  

With this increase in spending comes a great opportunity to do things right. In our book, The 5As Framework, Sean Murray and I wrote that most training programs significantly impact only 10% to 20% of their participants. This represents a huge waste that no organization can afford any longer. As the worldwide recession comes to an end, organizations must use every dollar very wisely. Garry Marsh, director of the U.K. company THM Business Simulations, gives us some thoughts about best ways to use those dollars. Here are those seven ideas with my spin on each one:

• Get it right first time – Think in terms of what learners need, not the latest training fad (content or delivery). Only provide experiences that will help learners improve performance and contribute to achieving the strategic goals of the organization – no more and no less. Pay attention to the quality of content and quality of the learning intervention.
• Keep employee satisfaction high – Involving employees in opportunities to learn is an effective way to increase engagement. Many employees value learning more than a pay increase. To keep engagement high, make continuous learning part of the culture of the organization.
• Train your managers – Many managers did not reach that position because they were great managers of people. This is something that all managers need to keep learning. And if organizations want to prevent their top talent from leaving as the economy improves, they must give managers the opportunity to learn and grow.
• Focus on customer experience – All organizations should have the improvement of customer experience as one of their top strategic goals. To achieve this goal, they will have to train employees in how to create a better experience. Learning about the customer experience should be on every manager’s agenda.
• Spend less, get more – Organizations should not rely on the usual suspects and usual methods for delivery of training. It’s about learning; it’s not about glitzy programs. It doesn’t have to cost much to develop talent. Maybe a manager will become a more effective team leader with the help of a mentor. Maybe a manager will become more effective at giving performance feedback with the help of a coach. Maybe a manager will become better at financial management by attending the CEO’s “open-book” meetings.
• Be ready for the upturn – As the economy improves and companies start hiring again, the best talent will look elsewhere. They have stayed only because nobody else was growing and hiring. Unless managers continue to see opportunities in their current organizations and they feel respect from their leadership, they will be gone. Organizations should do something about these conditions now.
• Look after yourself – Many resources are available to help any organization be successful while keeping costs low. Look for help internally and externally. Use what the organization already owns when that makes sense and then go outside to peers, consultants, and training organizations when they can help you improve performance and achieve your business goals.