The Performance Improvement Blog

Agile Learner; Agile Leader

I have to admit that prior to hearing Elliott Masie talk about “learning agility” last week at the virtual Human Captial Media Symposium for CLOs, the concept was not on my radar. However, aspiring to be agile myself (mentally and physically), I’m willing to learn something new and, maybe, discard some old notions about human development and leadership.

It appears that there are at least three definitions of learning agility being used in the field. Each is worth considering. One has to do with openness to experience, another has to do with adaptability to change, and a third has to do with the range of methods one uses to acquire new information and abilities.

In Learning About Learning Agility, a white paper from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Center for Creative Leadership, the authors argue that agile learners are effective leaders because they are life-long learners about leadership. They write that agile learners…

…show the willingness and ability to learn throughout their careers, if not their entire lives…Learning-agile individuals seek opportunities for growth and are able to process these opportunities in order to learn. They are open to new experiences, seek challenges, and are willing to introduce new ideas and question “norms”. Moreover, they are able to remain present in challenging situations, performing and adapting “on the fly”. Finally, learning-agile individuals understand that experience alone does not guarantee learning; they take time to reflect, seeking to understand why things happen, in addition to what happened.

The authors make the point that we usually judge people based on what they have done and what they already know when another, maybe better indicator of leadership success is how well they learn. This is a profound observation because it flies in the face of standard recruiting and selection practices. Do we throw out the resume and observe how people behave in novel situations instead?

Vicki Swisher, with Korn Ferry International, in a webcast says that organizations with learning-agile leaders succeed more than other organizations. These leaders adapt their leadership style and actions to the changing internal and external environments of their organizations. Agility, according to Swisher is about having the flexibility to change given the circumstances.

I would say that this kind of learning agility is most needed when leaders are under pressure to respond quickly and decisively. We know that when people are under stress they become less mindful, their perception of options becomes restricted, and they often make the most expedient and safest, rather than best, choice. Agile leaders are able to step back from these pressure situations, engage with others in a way that helps them see the range of possibilities, and make choices that are best for the organization.

Masie’s comments suggest a third definition of learning agility. This is the ability of leaders to find the information they need when they need it, to use a wide range of methods of learning (technology, social, practice, etc.), and turn that information into the knowledge and skills they need to be effective leaders in the situation. Being an agile learner by this definition means being able to sift through all of the sources of information that we have at our fingertips (literally), evaluate what is useful and what is not, and apply that information to solving problems and improving the performance of employees and our organizations.

 

Related articles

The Unexamined Leadership Program is Not Worth Doing

Tools of a Learning Organization

Future of Employee Learning

Leader Learning Library

Online resources for leaders and wannabe leaders are quite extensive these days. We are witnessing the democratization of leadership, making the "servant leader" even more possible. Everyone can become a leader (as well as an effective follower) by learning about leadership when and where it is most convenient and applicable.

But it's not easy to find Web links that have been screened for quality and topics. Masters in Leadership has put together 100 Exemplary Sites for Future Leaders. And I have the honor of having my blog included in that list.

One of the very useful features of the list is the categorization of topics. These include:

• Leadership Coaching
• Team Building
• Business Leadership
• Women in Leadership
• General Leadership

While Masters in Leadership has created an excellent resource, that has something for everybody, as with any best-of list, each of us can think of people and organizations that we would have included. For example, I would have selected the sites of Wally Bock and John Baldoni for a hundred-best list. I hope Masters in Leadership continues to monitor the sites on their list and remove and add links as these Web-based sources of information change over time.

 

When Did You Become A Leader?

I recently returned from a nine-day trip to Rwanda where I teamed with two colleagues to train the leadership team of Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a residential community for orphaned youth, in how to use evaluation to continuously improve their educational and personal development programs.

One of the first things we did with the staff was to ask them to share a story about when they discovered that they were leaders. This exercise, which had their enthusiastic participation, set the stage for our week of training and learning. We heard many inspirational stories. We heard stories about:

• Feeling compelled to take action to right an injustice
• Making a difference in other people’s lives and their communities
• Being entrusted with leadership responsibilities by people who are highly respected
• Taking a risk to fill a major leadership role and then succeeding
• Having leadership thrust upon them and rising to the occasion
• Being chosen by peers to be their leader

Interesting to me was that nobody mentioned a college course on leadership, a leadership training program, or leadership coaching. Their newly acquired awareness of their own leadership capabilities came from meeting challenges they faced in everyday life.

When did you first discover that you were a leader? Where were you? What were you doing? What happened that told you that you could lead others and be effective at it?

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:

 

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.

 

Organizational Learning Tools

What are the tools of organizational learning? As I’ve stated in a previous blog post, a high performing organization needs a comprehensive approach to learning and a set of tools to facilitate learning. A training program, or an educational event, or even a CEO’s speech about the importance of learning is not enough. Continuous learning requires continuous learning interventions that encourage and facilitate knowledge acquisition and application to the workplace. An online leadership course is nice but it will have little to no effect if not integrated with a long-term learning and performance improvement plan and an organization-wide culture of learning.

One way to think about organizational learning is to consider who are the learners (hint: everyone) and what kinds of tools would help them learn.  Learners are: 1) individual employees/members/volunteers; 2) work teams; 3) the enterprise as a whole (company, nonprofit, government agency); and 4) the communities in which the organization lives and interacts. Types of tools that can be used for learning are: 1) assessments of level of functioning; 2) models of organizational systems; and 3) solutions to deficiencies in individual, team, organization, and community performance.

These categories of learners and tools translate into a four by three matrix of learners and learning tools. In the left-hand column are the targets of learning interventions and in the row across the top are the types of tools for learning. A true learning culture is constantly considering what tools to apply in order to enhance learning in every cell of this matrix. I’ve inserted examples of tools in the matrix below.

Learners	Assessments	Models	Solutions
Individuals	Interview questions to Identify causes of performance problems	Chart of the learning process in organizations	How to have a learning conversation between manager and learner
Teams	Survey of team readiness for high-performance	Table of characteristics of high-performing teams	How to apply action-learning to teams
Whole organization	Survey of employee engagement	Chart of process for achieving strategic goals	How to overcome barriers to organizational learning
Community	Survey of community's capacity to support organization	Chart of community pressures on organization	How to engage external community in mutual learning and change

 

Each tool in this matrix is intended to be used in a reflective environment. To ensure learning from each tool, participants must be willing to collect information and feedback and then have conversations with others about what the data mean to the organization and what can be learned from this data. It’s the feedback and reflection that results in learning, not simply the application of a tool. For example, assessing team readiness for high-performance isn’t useful unless the team looks at that assessment data, reflects on its meaning, and intentionally learns from the information. 

 

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.