A practical guide to implementing the 5As Framework for making any learning and change intervention in organizations successful.
Webinars
5As Framework for Increasing Impact of Training Sean Murray interviews Steve Gill about the 5As Framework for achieving business impact from training. This is a 45 minute Webinar with several audience polls and responses to chat room questions from audience.
Introduction to 5As Framework for Increasing Business Results from Training A brief presentation of the key factors for leveraging training in organizations to achieve important business results. Sean Murray and Stephen Gill explain what to do before, during, and after training to maximize learning and impact.
Leaders today face many challenges in facilitating organization performance improvement. Fifteen of these problems are listed in a survey of organizational performance challenges. The link to this survey follows this paragraph. Please click on the link and take a few minutes now to rank order the items on the list. I think you will find the exercise to be enlightening. If I receive a sufficient number of responses, I will report the results in a future post.
The dust has settled a bit on the working-from-home issue
which was stirred up about a month ago when Yahoo's 11,500 employees received an email
from the HR department putting an end to “work-from-home arrangements” throughout
the company. Apparently, Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, is trying to
change a culture that had lost the nimbleness and creativity that it needs in
order to compete in the world today. Whether you agree with this action or not,
it is clear that she needed to do something about Yahoo’s workplace culture and
reign in the behavior of some folks who were taking advantage of Yahoo’s
work-at-home policy.
Unfortunately, the media debate quickly focused on the
future of telecommuting and the plight of
working-mothers rather than on the
real issue which is creating a culture in which everyone is focused on
innovation and results. Sometimes, to change culture, especially in a large, complex, global organization in a fast-changing industry, one has to exert greater control in the short-term to create a culture in which collaboration and teamwork will be how work is done in the long-term.
In a results oriented culture, how one works is determined by what one needs to
achieve. If that goal can be achieved by working from home, then that could be
an option. If achieving a particular performance goal is best done by face-to-face contact
with other employees, then being in the office is probably the answer.
For example, if my work objective is to write code for a
particular Web site transaction and I can write that code from home just as
well as I can from the office, then maybe working from home is a good option
for me. If my goal is to create a new look and feel for an online news service,
and I need the creativity that comes from give and take with other employees,
then I should be in the office.
The problem is not with working from home per
se; the problem is how to achieve the intended results. To start with location without consideration for the performance goal is to put the proverbial cart before the horse.
If a CEO is concerned with how employees are using their
time, then she needs to talk with her managers about helping these employees
set goals and be accountable for achieving results. Often, employees are not
clear about what is expected of them. In the absence of this specificity, they
(like all of us) fill the void with their own ideas of what they should do and
how they should do it (within a general policy). When their actions come into conflict with the goals of the
organization, then leaders may have to institute controls on behavior until managers can shape the expectations of employees and create a culture that is aligned with intended outcomes.
The new Pope appears to have made culture change top on his
list of priorities. He has shown surprising humility in his words and actions, riding
the bus with his Cardinals, rejecting wearing some of the elaborate vestments
worn by past popes, and stepping out of his car and engaging with the crowds. These are signs that Pope Francis is taking
steps to change a historically secretive institution; one that has recently
suffered from leaked internal documents that imply palace intrigue.
Marissa Mayer, new CEO of Yahoo, received notoriety recently
when she instituted a new policy that ended employees working from home. The media were abuzz with debate about her
actions which, on the surface, appeared to be swimming against the tide of
flexible work hours and locations. However, the action may have been part of
Mayer’s plan to change the culture of a company that was losing market share
and stock value.
Bob Flexon, Dynergy CEO since July 2011, has instituted many
new policies to change the culture of this $1.3 billion electric power producer
that has only recently emerged from bankruptcy. He has eliminated some of the
expensive trappings of executives, moved managers out of private offices and
into an open work space, and re-instituted annual performance reviews. Using
Dynergy as an example, Joann S. Lublin writes in WJS:
Increasingly, leaders of troubled businesses try to fix the
company's culture along with its bottom line. Since the financial crisis struck
in 2008, CEOs have sought to improve collaboration and decision making,
recognizing that a strong culture is "a critical component of their
long-term success," says Nick Neuhausel, a partner at consulting firm Senn
Delaney, which advised Dynegy.
While each of these leaders, from the Vatican to Yahoo to
Dynergy, recognizes that culture change is
essential to the future success of
their organizations, they would be well served to recognize also the complexity
of organizational culture and the necessity of going beyond symbols and
artifacts. For lasting organizational change
they must confront underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values of employees .
(1) the deep underlying beliefs and assumptions
that are often difficult for insiders to articulate
(2) the values and principles that structure
action
(3) the symbols and artifacts that are visible
on the surface for all to see
People act on the basis of tacit knowledge but they are
often not aware of how daily behavior is shaped by this knowledge. It’s simply “how
we do things here.” Underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values become routines
that, over time, go unchallenged. Those routines may or may not serve the best
interests of the organization and its customers. Culture change must confront
the link between the thinking that drives behavior and the effects of that
behavior on organizational success.
Sugata Mitra, winner of the 2013 TED prize, says, “Schools
as we know them are obsolete.” His conclusion is based on his research with
very poor children in India who, when given unfettered access to a computer,
learned English, math, and science without being in school. Mitra calls this
SOLE – a self-organizing learning environment. You might conclude that although
SOLE is the future for poor kids in India, it is not the future for kids in
urban centers in the West. I think that would be a naïve assumption. Development of the hundreds of millions of children who live at the bottom of the pyramid will have a profound effect on the
rest of the globe. How they learn and how they learn to learn will shape the
cultures of all global organizations.
And the challenge to traditional classroom-based education
is not coming only from K-12 educators. Educational leaders, parents, policy
makers, and students themselves are demanding results from their investment
in colleges and universities. Computer technology
is beginning to provide a solution and it is not in the classroom.
Tom Friedman, in a column for the New York Times, writes:
Institutions of higher
learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model
of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world
does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and
will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will
not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a
passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving
to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you
acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a
company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the
competency.
Online course (free!) providers, such as Coursera, are starting to
offer options for measuring competency and thus recognize “stuff learned” and not
just “time served”.
The training and development industry needs to change also.
The method of training is still based predominately on a centuries-old model of
teacher-centered, classroom instruction while most of what employees need to
learn would be learned more effectively if it was a combination of “elearning”
and on-the-job coaching. It might be, as Mitra suggests, that even “knowing” is
obsolete because anything we need to know can be found in the cloud within a
few minutes.
I say all of this with a strong caveat. Some knowledge and skills
are best developed, or at least supported, in a structured classroom
environment, such as much of the social sciences and literature, subjects in which a
facilitated discussion is essential to learning. So I think the classroom,
whether in a school, college, or business, still has a place. However, currently we rely
much too heavily on this method of developing young people and employees. As I
wrote in a previous blog post, “Throw out the course catalog.”
I heard Patrick Doyle, CEO of Domino’s Pizza, speak at a
meeting of the Washtenaw Economic Club on Thursday (February 21, 2013). I was
impressed by his honesty about himself and his company and his sense of humor
even in the face of threats to Domino’s survival. In 2009, at a time of declining revenue and
store closings, Domino’s changed its product entirely. Doyle became CEO in 2010
and it was up to him to launch the new product. If customers didn’t like the
new product, that could have been the end of his career with Domino’s. He met
the challenge and because of having the right product, a successful advertising
campaign, and a comprehensive training program that reached every employee in
all the stores, the company regained its position as market leader.
Domino’s had been known for its delivery service, not for
its pizza. According to all of their taste tests,
the pizza was as good as
their competitors. But that didn’t matter. What mattered is that consumers did
not think that the taste was better than their competitors. So the leaders
listened to their customers and redesigned their pizza. And they were honest about this in their
advertising. In the ads, they admitted that the pizza had not been good but
that they had completely changed it and asked people to give it a try. It
worked. Honesty resulted in a dramatic increase in sales and profit. This made
franchisees very happy because they had taken the risk along with Doyle and the
other Domino’s executives.
I’ve heard the mantra, “listen to your customer”, for many
years. Now, everyone says that they listen to their customers. Help desks and
customer surveys are ubiquitous. However, I don’t see much change in companies
because of all this “listening”. Before I got off the phone with an AT&T
customer service rep recently, he asked if he could count on me to give him a
good score when I received a follow-up survey. How is that “listening to your
customer”?
As a business owner myself, I’m trying to listen to my
customers every day. I am continually amazed by what I can learn from them. A customer
(member) of Learning to be Great™ told me that, from her perspective, the
company is information curation and lead generation. I hadn’t thought about the
business that way but it made complete sense to me. This perspective will
change how we market the company and what services we develop to support our
members and users. It’s great to have customers who care enough to tell us the
truth. We just have to be sure to listen.
Why is it that after all that has been said and written about
wasteful meetings, managers continue to conduct meetings that are unnecessary
and wasteful? Carson Tate writes
in the New York Times:
The meeting culture
that is dominating corporate America is unsustainable and unproductive.
How
many meetings did you attend last week that didn’t even have an agenda? How
many resulted in a new idea? And at how many meetings did you think, “Why am I
even here?”
Time is a commodity.
And time spent in a meeting should generate a return on investment. But how
often do we think about our time that way, and set expectations for meetings to
produce real returns? In my experience working with Fortune 500 companies, the answer
is rarely. This is just one result of a meeting-intensive culture.
This problem is not new and neither are the solutions. The
famous John Cleese video, Meetings Bloody Meetings, was first produced in 1976
and dramatizes humorously the ineffectiveness of most meetings. As I have
written in previous posts, meetings are overused and under-designed. We can no
longer afford to have meetings just because that’s what we do at 1:00 on
Mondays, or because the planning committee has something to report, or because the
COO wants to announce a new policy. These are not good reasons to bring people together, wasting their time and energy.
Technology has been both a blessing and a curse when it comes to meetings. On the one hand, location is no longer a barrier to group conversations. Smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops are all devices that allow people to participate in meetings remotely. On the other hand, meetings can be called with little planning and often with little consideration whether this is the best use of everyone's time.
In his 2003 book, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High
Quality Group Decisions, John Tropman offers very practical advice on how to have
a useful meeting. His research on this problem found that when leaders had successful meetings they almost always had these four features:
Their meetings were characterized by
decision accomplishment. Decisions got made in these
groups. Participants
appreciated the sense of closure that almost always occurred.
There was little decision rework. The group
did not have to get together to decide again something that had already been
decided or, as likely, had been avoided.
The decisions were good. There was a
feeling, buttressed by reality as time passed, that the work of the group was
of high quality. These were not just decisions made to “get something done.”
They were thoughtful and reasoned, and they were actions that made a difference
to the bureau, company, or agency.
People had fun! These were meetings that
participants looked forward to. There was a sense of enjoyment and involvement.
Participants felt that their time was well spent. They felt the meeting they
were in was the “real” meeting. It was an authentic team experience.
Meetings can be productive, meaningful, and fun. However, this requires
leadership that is intentional about the design and facilitation of these gatherings.
Meetings should have a plan, involve group decision-making, and create a
collective sense of accomplishment. Otherwise, there is no need to meet.
This time it’s radiologists. In a study reported by NPR, 83%
of radiologists failed to see the image of a
gorilla on slides that they were
reviewing for signs of cancer. The
conclusion by reporter Alix Spiegel is:
… what we're thinking
about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively
that it literally shapes what we see. So, [the researcher] says, we need to think carefully about the
instructions we give to professional searchers like radiologists or people
looking for terrorist activity, because what we tell them to look for will in
part determine what they see and don't see.
This phenomenon of selective attention permeates our society. Drivers don’t see approaching bicycles and motorcycles. Police can’t always determine who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator in a violent situation. Soldiers responding in a conflict don’t always see the innocent bystanders in their line of sight. Teachers don’t always notice when a student for whom there are low expectations suddenly does something extraordinary.
When I was a teenager, I along with others observed a
socio-drama as part of a lesson in tolerance. In this theatrical event, a crime
was committed. We were asked to say who committed the crime. To us it was
obvious. When the action was repeated it wasn’t so obvious and we learned about
how our prejudices and perceptions influence our judgment, especially in
quickly evolving situations.
And I wonder about leaders of large, complex organizations. Do they sometimes display "selective attention"? Do they look at but not see the signs of a failing business model?
Do they look at but not see the signs of a recessionary economy? Do they look
at but not see managers who are not doing their jobs effectively? Do they look
at but not see customers who are dissatisfied and looking elsewhere. Maybe it’s
denial, but it also might be an inability to see something that is unexpected.
So much information; so little time. This is a universal dilemma
of the 21st century. We are inundated with email, tweets, blog posts,
Linkedin updates and comments, Facebook news feeds and messages, rss feeds, in
addition to old-tech media like newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio. It’s more than the human brain can comprehend.
But the solution is at our fingertips. It’s called curation!
The title "curator" used to be reserved for someone who
cares for the content of large cultural institutions such as galleries,
museums, and libraries. These people protect and organize collections of
objects for the purpose of making them physically and intellectually accessible
to researchers and the public. They are professionals who have the expertise
and credentials to do this kind of work.
…curation
is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to
whatever is being gathered and organized…there is both amateur and professional
curation, and the emergence of amateur or pro-sumer curators isn’t in any way a
threat to professionals.
We can use technology to select, organize, present, and evolve
the information that we need. We can take charge of the flow by controlling quality,
timing, and topics. Users can control amount as well as when and where the
information is received.
I like the description of curation used by the International
Arts Movement for their online publication, Curator. They write:
In
keeping with IAM’s belief that artistic excellence, as a model of “what ought
to be”, paves the way for lasting, enduring humanity, The Curator seeks to
encourage, promote, and uncover those artifacts of culture – those things which
humans create – that inspire and embody truth, goodness, and beauty. We do this
through considering and grappling with the zeitgeist.
IAM has criteria for deciding which “artifacts of culture” they
will collect and how they will make these materials available to the public.
People who buy into their beliefs about culture and art, will appreciate the
curation that this publication does for them.
It has been difficult enough to make sense of the large number of tangible art objects. Without
curation, it is impossible for consumers of information to
manage the amount of digital data and objects. As Rosenbaum puts it, “The world
needs thoughtful filters.” He recommends that these filters do three things: 1)
make choices about which data to include; 2) endorse a small set of
information; and 3) provide clarity to the information provided.
Aggregators of online information, such as Scoop.it and
Zite.com, serve a useful purpose, but they don’t make choices and don’t provide clarity. Curation
takes the management of information a step further, adding value to the set
of data by selecting what best fits the criteria of consumers and helping
consumers understand the meaning and usefulness of the information.
Learning to be Great™ is an example of curation of digital
objects. Jim Stilwell and I created the site to make high quality orphan,
organizational improvement tools available to organizational leaders seeking to
influence change. The site narrows down the set of tools to a manageable number and brings clarity to the application of these tools. All of the material, which comes
from our members, is organized into an easy-to-search, three by four matrix. The
matrix has three forms of tools: 1) surveys; 2) models; and 3) solutions; and
four foci: 1) individuals; 2) teams; 3) whole organizations; and 4) communities.
For each tool there is an explanation of how the tool should be used and under
what circumstances, as well as features and benefits. Finding organizational improvement tools can be an overwhelming task for a
leader. Learning to be Great™ curates the information for leaders, hopefully
contributing to their success.
Specialized sites are needed
to help users find the best resources within the digital morass of cyberspace.
Search is time consuming and provides no quality
control. Curation is needed to make sense of it all.
Why is it that the economy is expanding but the number of
high-paying jobs is not increasing (and
possibly decreasing)? Tom Friedman in
his New York Times op-ed column suggests that the answer to this question is
the “Great Inflection”. This is a time of dramatic change in work and education
due to technology. He writes:
Because of the way
every industry — from health care to manufacturing to education — is now being
transformed by cheap, fast, connected computing power, the skill required for
every decent job is rising as is the necessity of lifelong learning.
Job seekers, employees, and managers need to prepare themselves for
this change. The days of going to school, learning a skill, and working for a
company until retirement have long since gone. If you don’t come well educated,
familiar with the latest technology, but also ready to learn whatever is new,
you are not likely to find a good-paying, career-shaping job.
I live in a region of the country where many new businesses are
being started. However, these businesses won’t make a dent in overall unemployment.
They are too small, require only a few highly skilled IT professionals, and don’t
have jobs for the secretaries and entry-level folks who filled workplaces in
the past. Some of these companies have been created to get flipped, so they
outsource as much work as they can. The few employees who are hired by these companies are tech-savvy, but even so, they will
have to continually reinvent themselves as these companies grow and morph.
At the same time, not much has changed in the way we educate
students and train workers to accommodate this new workplace. We continue to
emphasize K-12 schools, two and four-year colleges, as well as employee
classroom training even though all of these are centuries-old, arbitrary
constructions designed primarily for the benefit of teachers, not learners. These
methods of educational delivery are reinforced by a system that rewards time in
class, credit-hour production, and continuity at the expense of learning. These
institutions are not adequately preparing learners for the “Great Inflection”.
The change that companies and their employees face due to technology is
mind-boggling. Friedman quotes Craig Mundie of Microsoft as saying:
…not just elites, but
virtually everyone everywhere has, or will have soon, access to a hand-held
computer/cellphone, which can be activated by voice or touch, connected via the
cloud to infinite applications and storage, so they can work, invent,
entertain, collaborate and learn for less money than ever before.
We need education and training that are in line with this
fast changing world of work. As Friedman
points out, it’s not only a flat world; it’s also a hyper-connected world.
A
perfect example of this point is Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village for orphan and
vulnerable youth in Rwanda. A third world country but the residents and
graduates of this village communicate with each other using Facebook. They are
hyperconnected which has profound implications for how they will live and work
in the years ahead.
Paul Matthews, in a blog post titled, “The future of
training is not training,” argues that workplace training needs to be about building
capability not delivering courses. He writes:
Many people in
training seldom stop to think why they are doing the training. The logistics
and hassles of keeping the training department running are sufficient to fill
up their days and obscure the real purpose.
Matthews goes on to say that the future of training is in
building the capability of employees to do their jobs more effectively.
Sean Murray and I present a similar argument in our book, “The
5As Framework,” except we go further to
say that training, as well as any
learning intervention in an organization, should contribute to achieving the
strategic goals of that organization. We wrote:
Companies today can no
longer afford to rely on these isolated events to make a difference, whether a
one-day skill-building workshop, or a year-long leadership development
institute. Maybe there was a time when companies could offer these events to
employees without concern for results. Today, resources are too precious. You
must make sure that you are maximizing the impact from every performance
intervention…This means that rather than a culture of events, you need a
culture of learning, one that supports ongoing learning throughout your
organization. In a learning culture, the normal behaviors, customs,
expectations, and goals are all oriented towards learning and performance
improvement. (p.32)
For too long, HR, training departments, and even Learning
and Development units, have focused on events. And they have become quite good
at doing events. But the future of training is not events, nor is it only
capability. It is learning that contributes in a measurable way to the success
of the organization.
