The Performance Improvement Blog

The Unexamined Leadership Program is Not Worth Doing

If you’re not going to evaluate a leadership development program, don’t do the program! It will be a waste of time, money, energy, and trust. End-of-program reactionnaires (aka smile sheets) don’t count as evaluation. I’m talking about a systematic, evidence-based look at why it was done, what was done, how it was done, what happened as a result, how it can be improved, and what the organization learned from the process.

Viv Nunn of UK’s Open University, in an article for TrainingZone, explains some of the reasons for evaluating professional development programs. She writes that evaluation should provide the following:

• Evidence of the extent to which the professional development is contributing to your organisation's success
• Validation that the correct learning solution has been identified and suggestions for programme improvement
• Advice about how to get the most from your L&D budget by considering the workplace learning environment

I would add:

• Reinforcement of learning. That is, the act of evaluating (i.e., observing) a leadership development program reinforces learning. If done well, evaluation heightens awareness of goals, unintended consequences, and the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that were learned.

To achieve these purposes, you have to look beyond the seminar, workshop, internship, mentoring, coaching, online course, or any other method of instruction. Learning, especially about leadership, is affected by the organizational environment and external factors, as well as the program. To fully understand why and how learning did or did not occur and what impact it had, you have to examine organizational factors in addition to program factors.

Nunn provides us with an excellent description of the factors that can affect learning:

If the workplace learning environment isn't right, if learners cannot find opportunities to apply what they have learned at work, if the organisational culture is not one which encourages them to try out their new skills and knowledge, there will be little or no impact to report, regardless of how effective the actual learning solution has been. Isolating learning from its context will not provide useful data alone. Evaluating the context of learning along with the learning solution will give you the greatest opportunity to get the most from your investment.

I hate to think about how many leadership development programs I’ve participated in as either a learner or facilitator that were thought-provoking, information-rich, and emotionally powerful only to find that they resulted in little or no change because there was no immediate opportunity to apply that learning back on the job. Participants might learn about team-building but not have a team to lead in the workplace or be discouraged by management from applying what they learned in their teams.

Evaluation of professional development must examine how workplace culture supports or hinders learning. Knowing whether intended results follow, in time, a professional development program or not, won't help you unless you understand the factors that affected those results. And, as Nunn suggests, it's things like clarity of goals, manager's attitudes toward learning, incentives for professional development, opportunities to apply new learning, and feedback, that have more to say about performance improvement than does the quality of instruction alone. 

Evaluation is not an option; it’s an integral part of the learning process. If you want a leadership development program to be more than entertainment and you want it to achieve learning that results in significant performance improvement, than you must evaluate the program and the organizational evironment of that program.

 

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.

 

Leadership and Health Care Reform

The Obama administration’s health care reform legislation will change incentives, which is badly needed, but it will not improve the quality of care unless an integrated, team-based approach also becomes the way health care professionals do business. This kind of approach is what the legislation refers to as ACO (accountable care organization). However, to be successful, such an approach will require health care professionals, especially doctors, to learn new competencies and form new attitudes regarding collaboration and cooperation.

The assumptions behind the new legislation make the need for change abundantly clear:

• the cost of health care in the United States on a per capita basis is too high
• the health of the United States population is too low
• health care in the United States is not sufficiently accessible, particularly for the uninsured
• health care in the United States is not sufficiently coordinated
• the quality of health care services in the United States is too low
• the federal government, as the largest purchaser of health care services in the United States, has the right to demand high quality, reasonably priced, accessible, coordinated health care services
• the federal government should no longer purchase health care services on a fee-for-service (or a la carte) basis because it gives health care providers an incentive to order more tests and perform more procedures in order to make more money
• there needs to be a “sea change” in how health care is delivered and paid for in the United States

Shifting from a fee-for-service model to a high-quality, low-cost model will address part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong - this change is essential, though the challenge with incentives is to ensure that “low-cost” doesn’t become more important than “high quality”. The other part of the problem is managing health care organizations in a fundamentally new way. Rather than the command-and-control style of leadership that is prevalent among doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, these leaders will need to facilitate teamwork. They will need to respect and listen to the input of other health care providing organizations and integrate diet and life-style experts into the team. They will need to manage these teams so that optimum results are achieved for patients. They will need to keep all of the stakeholders engaged. They will need to draw out the best from everyone. And they will need to do all of this in a cost efficient manner. This is a tall order for people who come to their profession because of their high need for control, for prestige, and, for many, the financial benefits.

Health care professionals can be retrained if motivated. The real transformation of health care in the U.S. will come over time as a different kind of person is admitted to the health care professions and as measures are put in place to evaluate this team-based approach to delivering health care.

 

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall; I Don’t See Myself At All.

As leaders, we tend to overestimate our abilities and underestimate the amount of help we need in order to improve. It’s like looking in a mirror and not seeing yourself the way others see you. Wally Bock, in his post about a Development Dimensions International (DDI) study of front-line leaders, draws three major implications:

You can't trust your mirror. No more excuses. After reading this post you can't fall back on the "nobody ever told me I overestimated my abilities" excuse.

You must commit to the rigorous and discomforting process of getting the true picture of who you are and how you're doing. Seeking feedback must become a habit. Hearing the feedback and acting on it, hard as it is, must be part of your plan. You can get some help from Mary Jo Asmus' excellent post, "The Value of Knowing Exactly Who You Are."

You must commit to the difficult habit of getting better. As you grow and develop, that target will move as Marshall Goldsmith wrote in What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

The process for “getting a true picture of who you are” and for “getting better” is best facilitated by a coach. Bill Ryan, consultant to foundations and nonprofit organizations and research fellow at the Harvard University Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, in an interview with Ruth McCambridge, Editor-in-Chief of The Nonprofit Quarterly, describes coaching as helping an executive answer this question: “If my organization wants to get to Point X, what do I, as a leader, need to do to build on my strengths and manage my weaknesses to help it get there?” If a leader doesn’t want to ask this question or won’t act on the answer, that person is not a good candidate for coaching. If a leader is willing to learn and to change behavior, then that person will likely benefit from coaching. For video examples of how coaching can help leaders change their behavior see the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund site. 

Other modes of learning and change could also be beneficial to executives having a more realistic understanding of themselves. Carol Kauffman and Diane Coutu draw distinctions among consulting, coaching, and therapy. Based on a survey of coaches, Kauffman and Coutu created the following model to show the differences and commonalities.  



I think the researchers should have included "counseling" in this model. Professional counselors help people deal with normal life development, such as career, family, and avocation, with the intent that people learn how to successfully manage these common life challenges.  I would put “counseling” between coaching and therapy in the model. It overlaps with coaching in that counselors are “paid to ask the right questions” and counseling “tackles difficult issues at work and at home…focuses on individual behavioral change…explores subjective experience.” Counseling differs from therapy in that it tends to focus on the present, is short-term, and deals with normal life development problems.

Coaching differs from consulting, counseling, and therapy in that the focus is on each executive’s success in the work setting. Coaching is similar to these other professions (consulting, counseling, and therapy) in that they all rely heavily on skillful listening to clients (executive) and reflecting back what is heard and what is meant so that clients can achieve deeper self-understanding and learning. Then when they look in the mirror, they should see themselves, warts and all. 

 

The Course Catalog Is (Should Be) Dead

Recently, I was asked a very thought-provoking question by the director of HRD for a large organization. I was explaining the “5As Framework” to her and she asked, “What are the implications for what we do here?” I immediately launched into my usual speech about getting managers of learners
involved in actively supporting the learning process. This led to a discussion of all the excuses she hears from managers to explain their lack of involvement in employee learning. It wasn’t until later, after further rumination, that I realized the better answer to the director’s question is, “Throw out the course catalog!” 

Like HRD departments in many large organizations, each year they offer a long list of courses and programs that have all of the current buzz words in their titles. I have no doubt that her department delivers excellent, world-class courses and programs. And I’m sure employees enjoy the courses and even say that the knowledge and skills will be very useful to them in their work. However, I’m also quite sure that very little has changed in the wider organization as a result of the many outstanding events put on by this unit. The problem is the lack of alignment between event-based instruction and important business results.

The competency model, which provides the underlying theory of event-based training, is doing a disservice to the current needs of organizations. Training and development professionals seem to believe that if they can identify the competencies that people need in order to do their jobs and then offer courses to teach those competencies, employees will be more productive and successful. The problem with this way of thinking is that performance has as much (if not more) to do with work culture as it does with job competencies. To be successful, employees need supervisors and co-workers who are supportive of learning and performance improvement, they need a supervisor/boss/mentor who talks to them regularly about learning and results, they need the opportunity to apply new learning and to receive feedback, and they and the organization need to be held accountable for learning and results. If there is this culture of learning, employees will continually improve performance.

According to my colleague, Ralph Jacobson, we have to change the local environment so that people actually “work differently”, not just learn how to work differently. All the courses in the world will not change behavior and improve results unless the local culture supports change. At one time, when jobs were static and organizational change came slowly, a menu of well-designed courses was sufficient. Now, when change has to happen rapidly, when we have to find ways to lower the cost of learning, and when we have better and better online, just-in-time, mobile learning resources, event-based learning is no longer the best answer.

We must provide learning experiences to people when and where they need it and in ways that optimizes application to achieving important business results. We need training and development that is timely, short duration, and project-focused. We need frequent on-the-job feedback from supervisor/boss/mentor to employee. For example, leadership skills are best taught during a challenging, team project while the leader is trying out new behaviors and receiving ongoing feedback from a coach. This way of learning will have much more impact on performance than a course or conference on leadership.

What do you think? Can we throw out the course catalog?

Improving Communication in High Performance Organizations

My colleagues, Leslie Stambaugh and Jim Stilwell, and I have published an ebook to illustrate principles and best practices of effective communication in organizations. Leaders in every organization in which we have worked have told us that their organizaion had a "communication problem." The
communication problem bucket is very large, making it quite easy to pour most organizational concerns into it. Lack of productivity, lack of efficiency, failure to meet budget requirements, failure to meet market demands, delivery of products to customers that are out-of-the-box failures, and a whole host of departmental, team and interpersonal issues are all attributed to a “communication problem.” No doubt there is some truth to this attribution, but what does it really mean when people say they have a "communication problem?" These problems can be extremely complex because of the multiple factors that cause messages to go awry.

We have created scenarios (short, fictional case studies) from a composite of our own experiences that reflect many of the assumptions stated above. These scenarios  provide reality-based situations that are typical of what managers face in most complex organizations. The situations are:

• Facilitating Cross-Functional Projects
• Planning for Organizational Change
• Building Support for Organizational Change
• Collaborating Between Teams and Non-Team Members
• Resolving Conflict Among Team Members
• Organizational Transparency
• Communicating Down the Organization
• Communicating Up the Organization
• Building Trust in Leadership

For example, the chapter titled, "Facilitating Cross-Functional Projects," starts out with this story: 

Bill Smith, VP of Sales at High Tech Inc, and his leadership team, had gathered feedback from customers and concluded that the sales department needed a major reorganization. Customers were complaining that they were no longer receiving the customized solutions they had come to expect from High Tech Inc.  

Originally, the department had been regionally-focused, with U.S., China, and India sales offices providing services to all industries, types, and sizes in their specific regions.  This strategy had been extremely effective during the past ten years as High Tech Inc was perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the rapid regional growth in the computer industry. However, new entrants into the market had increased competition making the old structure no longer effective.  

Based on the customer feedback, Bill and his team determined that there was a clear need for change.  They decided that the structure that would enable High Tech to compete most effectively was to change from five U.S. regionally-focused sales offices and two global offices (China and India) to one centralized office with salespeople dedicated to particular industries and sizes of companies. They also understood the magnitude of this change and potential impact it would have throughout High Tech. To make a change of this size, Bill and his team would need company-wide support.

This situation requires careful planning of an organizational communication strategy. What would you do? How would you handle communication with the sales force and the wider organization? How would you ensure buy-in from all of the stakeholders? Our book offers suggestions and explains the principles that should guide managers through this situation and other similar challenges to effective communication.

 

Evaluating Training Through Stories

Participants rated the management training program 4.3 on a five-point scale. Sixty percent said that they have applied the training to their work. What do we know about effectiveness of the program? Not much.

We cannot determine from this data if the management training program made a difference for the organization. If it didn't make a difference, there is little reason to continue to offer the program to managers in the same form. Unless we’re talking about a training company, training is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is how Maggie Bayless, head of training at Zingerman’s, a “Small Giant” company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, describes this link between training and business results. She is quoted In an interview for a local magazine:

"We call it ‘bottom line training,’ Bayless explains, “because we know that the purpose of Zingerman’s businesses isn’t to train staff. For The University of Michigan, one of their bottom lines is education; that’s why they exist. But Zingerman’s wasn’t launched with the idea of creating an organization where we train staff. Zingerman’s was created to be an organization where people delivered a great experience, with great food and great service. To do that, we need to train staff effectively.”

 “So in order for it to make sense to do training,” Bayless explains, “it has to improve food quality, improve service quality, or improve financial results. Those are our three bottom lines; that’s why we’re here. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be doing it.”

So, if the purpose of training is to achieve bottom-line results, then we should measure how and to what extent the program does that and what the organization needs to do to improve results in the future. A “smile sheet”, or even a follow-up survey, is not going to give you this information. We must tell the employee's story. That is, we must create a narrative that clearly explains the causal links between what people learned in the training program, how they applied that learning, and what the effect was on business results. In addition, the story should describe what the organization did and did not do to facilitate learning and results (e.g., providing an opportunity to apply newly learned leadership skills).

David Zinger describes the power of stories in his blog post, "Employee Engagement Stories: Altering Our Personal GPS." He writes:

Stories are the building blocks of understanding. We understand the world through story. Story is not just something we read in a book or see in a movie. Story is how we make sense of ourselves, situations, and others. Stories function as fundamental building blocks of understanding and also as a social GPS. Stories are the conclusions, judgments, hypothesis and assumptions about what we see and hear. Stories are the way we communicate with ourselves.

It’s like evaluating a summer car vacation by counting the miles driven, gas used, days on the
road, and money spent. All nice to know, but it’s the experiences along the way, anticipated and unanticipated, that make the trip meaningful and memorable.  

 

St. Jude Trains Its Leaders

We could have been invited to speak about org charts, making tough decisions, managing finances, etc. Instead, we were asked to talk about vulnerability, trust, and engagement. This is what my co-presenters and I did at a one-day leadership program for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital last week. This exceptional pediatric research and treatment center recognizes that it needs to keep learning and that the intra/interpersonal aspects of leadership are as important as the mechanics of managing hospital departments and labs.  

I facilitated a workshop on the leader’s role in ensuring the success of employee learning and development programs.  Brené Brown gave a keynote address about how everyone's sense of vulnerability and shame can be a barrier to leading. Greg McKeown had St. Jude managers 
thinking about how they can make the people around them smarter, more motivated, and more successful. Jim Ferrell talked about minimizing the self-deception we all do as both individuals and organizations. Rich Brandt emphasized the importance of leaders building trust and engagement. And Carl Cohen described the interpersonal dynamics of leading biomedical research teams effectively. The day provided a tremendous learning opportunity for St. Jude’s managers to become more effective leaders. 

 

College Completion Matters

If companies care about having high performing managers, they should become involved in supporting high quality K-12 and post-secondary institutions. They should care deeply about government policies and legislation that affect education for all students. Success in the workplace is related directly to success in college and success in college is related directly to success in K-12 schools. Managers who cannot read and write at college level  or don’t understand the math needed in automated, computer-driven, 21^st century companies will not be successful and, worse, will be a detriment to their organizations. Managers today need the kind of critical thinking and creative problem solving that one can learn in good educational institutions. Businesses need schools and colleges to help more people complete a post-secondary education with the basic knowledge and skills for the modern workplace.

The research supports this emphasis on completion. Lou Glazer, President of Michigan Future, Inc., reports a high correlation between the percentage of college graduates in a region and the vitality of the economy in that region. Speaking of Michigan, he writes:

Human capital is the asset that matters most to knowledge-based enterprises. Michigan’s fundamental economic challenge is that we rank 34th in the proportion of adults with a four-year degree. States without concentrations of talent will have great difficulty retaining or attracting knowledge-based enterprises and are unlikely to be the place where new knowledge-based enterprises are created. 

In a more recent blog post, Glazer writes:

…all the evidence is that the premium for college attainment is increasing. The gap in pay between college educated adults and those without has been growing for decades. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that life time earnings of those with a four year degree is a million dollars more than for those with a high school degree.

And job growth is coming in those industries where college educated workers are most concentrated. From 1990 to 2007 job growth in what we call high education sectors (predominantly health care; education; finance and insurance; information; and professional and technical services) was twice that in the rest of the economy (primarily manufacturing, hospitality, transportation, construction, retail and temporary services). And during the Great Recession those trends accelerated. Of the 8 million lost jobs, 7.6 million came in the low education attainment sectors.

President Obama has made college graduation a high priority of his administration because of the evidence that connects education to jobs. This week Vice President Biden announced an initiative to reward states and schools that are doing something significant to increase their graduation rates. The administration has set a goal of 8 million additional college graduates by 2020.

The College Board has set a goal of 55 % of the 25 to 34 age group achieving a post-secondary degree by 2025. They write:

The United States ranks fourth out of 36 nations in terms of postsecondary attainment for citizens

ages 55 to 64 years old. The United States is fourth behind the Russian Federation, Israel and Canada in the percentage of citizens with postsecondary degrees.  However, among 25- to 34-year-olds, the United States falls to 12th in degree attainment. For this key demographic group, Canada, Korea, the Russian Federation, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia have managed to leap ahead of the United States, while Denmark and Sweden are close to parity with the United States.

One can quibble with the notion of a causal relationship between a post-secondary education (one-year certificate, two-year associates degree, or four-year bachelors degree) and an increase in jobs and income. It is clear, however, that there is a significant relationship and, given this, it seems to be in the best interests of all of our institutions (business, nonprofits, government) to encourage and support post-secondary education for all students.

 

Retaining High-Impact Employees

As we crawl out of the recession, high performing employees will be in greater demand than ever (See blog post: The Coming Turnover Storm.). What are you doing to keep them? Kelly Goldsmith, professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Marshall Goldsmith, executive coach and author, offer excellent advice for retaining these valued employees. They contend that companies need to do essentially six things to keep their talent: 1) show respect for them; 2) create a work environment in which they can thrive; 3) provide ongoing training and education to them; 4) develop a coaching relationship with them; 5) provide continual feedback to them; and 6) involve them in decision-making.

They make the case that developing these “high-impact” employees is strategically important to a company. They write:

Developing people is a strategic process that adds value to both the employees and the bottom line of the organization. Highly committed, highly competent people create financial rewards for the organization; organizations that develop their people and provide opportunities for growth are sought-after by high-impact performers. Great leaders know this simple formula. They understand it and strive to create an environment that supports it. And the result is success!

The tendency of executives is to assume that employees are motivated by money and that if they are paid well, they will stay with a company. Money is a motivator but it is not the only motivator and often it is not the strongest factor in retention. The opportunity to develop one’s skills and abilities, to continue to learn, and to feel respected and valued, are stronger drivers of retention for many high performing employees.

And this is not only true for high performers; all employees are happier and more productive when they feel respected, are developing their abilities, can contribute to the success of the organization, and are involved in making important decisions. The Goldsmiths' recommendations for retaining high-impact employees are also the characteristics of a high performance organization.