The Performance Improvement Blog

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.

 

Community of Practice and the TorranceLearning Download

One of many methods of organizational learning is a “community of practice”. This is a term coined by Etienne Wenger to describe “…groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” TorranceLearning has created a kind of community of practice that they call the Torrance Download. The Download is a time and place for people to come together to share experiences and ideas, with the intention of everyone learning something new. 

I had the pleasure recently of attending another session of the Torrance Download. Once again the TorranceLearning team created a “…casual, fast-paced and friendly exchange of ideas with our friends, colleagues and clients in learning.” Between noon and 3:00 on a Friday, five concurrent, 30-minute discussions were held for a total of 20 topics. All of the topics were about learning and development and ranged from video production to elearning design to mobile learning to onboarding new employees. The tone, set by Megan Torrance, was one of fun, high energy, and engagement. This is a terrific model for a community of practice, either for people from different organizations or for people internal to one organization.

One type of Download discussion is called “Flash Project”. This is a leaderless conversation for the purpose of creating a list of answers to a specific question. I participated in one of these in which the
question was, “What is learning evaluation?” In 30 minutes, our group came up with an excellent list of ideas and questions that we shared with everyone in attendance at the end of the day.

We said that evaluation of learning is:

• Measuring business outcomes
• Establishing metrics for behavioral change
• Deciding how we want a learner to behave differently
• Thinking about individual, team, whole organization, and community learning
• Asking the learner, “What do you want to be known for?”

We also said that evaluation of learning is answering these questions:

• Did you like it?
• Did you learn it?
• Did you use it?
• Did it make a difference?
• Did you retain it?

And that evaluation of learning is measuring:

• How well organizational communications are aligned with pre, during, and post learning
• What managers are doing to facilitate and reinforce learning
• What resources (people, technology, money) are available to facilitate learning
• Where the gaps are between resources and learning
• Where people are starting from pre-learning
• What we know about learners' situations pre-learning
• What the organizational constraints are to learning and applying learning
• Why learning isn’t happening
• How to provide more opportunities for applying learning on the job
• What learning is still being applied months and years later
• Agile learning - Are learners able to extract useful information in any environment? What can be done to help learners become agile?
• What is being done to facilitate learning before, during, and after training

The striking thing about our Flash Project definition of “learning evaluation” is that we said that evaluation is much more than finding out what learners have in their heads at the end of a training program. We came to the conclusion that evaluation of learning should empasize achievement of business goals and it should measure the learner and learner’s situation before training, during training, and after training. And we agreed that the culture of the organization should also be evaluated because it is a critical factor in learning and application of learning.

Know Thy Culture

Every organization has a culture. But not every organization has the kind of culture that will help that organization achieve success. Matt Monge says that organizations should take Socrates’ advice and “know thyself”. Monge says, “…we have to be willing to ask ourselves tough questions and give honest answers.”

Assessing the culture of an organization by asking tough questions and being willing to hear the answers is the basis for significant organizational improvement. And being able to explain the culture in-use in comparison to the espoused culture is critical to gaining the trust and engagement of employees, recruits, and business partners. 

In an interview for the New York Times, Adam Bryant quotes Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin, as saying:

We take culture very seriously, and we do draw a distinction at LinkedIn between culture and values. Culture is who we are. It’s essentially the personality of our company — who we are and who we aspire to be. Values are the principles upon which we make day-to-day decisions. And of course your values are a subset of your culture, so they’re very much inextricably linked. Getting that right helps with recruiting. It helps with motivating. It helps with inspiring. It helps with productivity…our culture has five dimensions: transformation, integrity, collaboration, humor and results. And there are six values: members first; relationships matter; be open, honest and constructive; demand excellence; take intelligent risks; and act like an owner. And by far the most important one is members first. We as a company are only as valuable as the value we create for our members.

I assume Weiner knows what he is talking about. According to his company Web site, “LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 187 million members in over 200 countries and territories.” In my experience Linkedin has become the go-to place for developing professional connections, conducting job searches, and communicating with communities of practice. If Linkedin has truly been able to create and maintain that kind of culture given its growth, I'm very impressed.

Many new, fast growing, high performance companies like Linkedin are demonstrating the value of paying attention to culture. They know themselves, and they are able to articulate that intentional cultures to others. The question is, “Will these companies be able to sustain their ideal cultures as they become large and multi-national and feel the heat from competitors? Will they be able to stay as employee-centered, flexible, transparent, cross-functional, and team-based as they were during start-up and early phases of growth?

Philanthropy, Learning, and Change-Making

The recent U.S. election reminded us on a daily basis of all the serious problems we face as a nation. Political campaigns made the solutions sound simple, as if one person or one policy could put people back to work, improve our educational system, deliver better health care, clean up the environment, or prevent war. It’s just not that simple. As Baldoni writes in his Forbes blog post, “Post-Election: Now What?”:

Now is the time to put the interests of the whole society first. That will require a commitment – indeed a partnership – of community, business, nonprofit and yes government.

Philanthropic foundations, although not specifically called out in Baldoni’s post, are also part of the solution mix. Steve McCormick, President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, writes that private foundations should be “game-changers”; they should be “…creating solutions to our most critical social problems.” He writes that philanthropists must do some things differently. One of these is measurement. He admonishes philanthropists to:

Use meaningful measures. It’s difficult to chart progress in the not-for-profit sector. Measurement requires creativity, coupled with discipline, to establish the right indicators—qualitative as well as quantitative. But, as the saying goes:  “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.”

Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in launching MarketsForGood.org (see below), said that foundations should be continually learning from doing. Conversations about learning do not happen as much as they should in foundations and their grantee organizations. They should be sharing information. Raikes says that the answers exist but it’s too hard to find and apply the information. Bigger, faster impact requires finding ways to get better data to social investors and nonprofits that are doing the work on the ground. He said, “Our work relies on the free flow of quality, accessible data and information…that lead to greater impact and a better world.”  

 

I agree with McCormick that private foundations can be “game-changers” and that creative, disciplined measures will help make that happen. And I agree with Raikes that much of the data and information already exists to increase impact on society’s most serious problems; that it is more a problem of access to information than it is one of collecting the data.

However, beyond applying measures and accessing data is the challenge of actually using the information to bring about change. This is where many foundations and nonprofits get stuck. They have the information in reports on their shelves or in computer files, but that’s where it stays. That information needs to be liberated, discussed, and translated into action. If they are going to be change-makers, they need to get their organizations engaged in conversations about the implications of the information, plan the action that must be taken to implement what has been learned, and hold themselves accountable for making change.

What Gets Measured Gets Done...Revisited

One of the most frequently visited posts on this blog is “What Gets Measured Gets Done…or Not.” I suspect that the post is interesting to readers because of the popular axiom, not because of the content of the post. In that post I argue that 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.

A better way to talk about measurement in organizations is the way Terry Starbucker writes about it in his blog post titled, The Truth About “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It”, a variation of the first axiom. He writes:

The thing is, I am a proud member of the “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it“ school of business.

It’s not one of those total absolutes, but I’ll say this – it’s pretty darned close.

So when I would hear “proof” that was anecdotal, or based on “feel”, or hearsay, or seven degrees of separation indirectness, I usually don’t buy it.

Terry goes on to describe performance improvement and cost savings he achieved in a former company because he had measures of employee behavior and customer satisfaction and he and others used those numbers to develop solutions for improving performance. He not only had the data but he did something with it.

Of course, many activities are managed without being measured. Many managers organize work, provide direction, and supervise people without measuring anything important. Are they managed well? That’s a different question.

And that leads us to another variation of the first axiom: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” I like this wording because it ties measurement to action. I have done many program and organizational evaluation studies for managers who asked me to measure processes, outcomes, and impact… but didn’t want to use the data to change. I suspect the explanation for their behavior is threefold: 1) they were hoping for a glowing report that would make them look good to their bosses and funders; 2) if they didn’t get a glowing report and findings implied the need for significant change in programs and staff, they could always find something about the measurement method that would discredit the findings; and 3) they could be accountable for measuring something without having to be accountable for improving performance.

The organizations that embrace performance improvement are those that make a concerted effort to understand what the metrics mean to their organizations and how they can use the findings to make decisions about what should be sustained and what should be modified. By all means, measure everything that is important to the success of your organization. But only do this if you are going to use the data to guide decisions about improvement.