The Performance Improvement Blog

Hyper-Connectivity: Get Used To It! Educate for It!

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.

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Thomas Friedman: Hyperconnected

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The Future of Workplace Training

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.

("The 5As Framework" is now available as an ebook from Learning2BGreat.com)

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What Gets Rewarded Gets Done

To be successful, organizations must align their reward structure with their intended goals. Eduardo Porter, in a New York Times article titled, When Public Outperforms Private in Services, writes:

The success or failure of an organization often depends on whether it can clearly identify its goals and align the interests of managers and employees to serve them. Yet whatever reward structure an organization picks can skew incentives in an undesirable way.

A lack of goal clarity and alignment can have detrimental effects. When oil companies reward profit over both safety and protecting the environment, loss of life and environmental disasters are the result. When pharmaceutical companies reward sales people only for the quantity of drugs sold, patients will be prescribed drugs they don’t need. When states judge schools on the basis of test scores, not learning, students graduate unprepared for college and work. When banks reward mortgage agents for quantity rather than quality, a high percentage of loans fail and the entire economy suffers.

I don’t think it’s a question of private vs. public. Some public institutions and government agencies reward the wrong behavior as do some businesses. I remember consulting with a nonprofit health insurance company that rewarded customer service reps for the number of phone inquiries they handled in an hour. The tradeoff was quantity of transactions for customer satisfaction. Treating a customer with respect and solving the customer’s problem were given lip service but not rewarded in practice.

The problem, as Porter says, is tradeoffs. A company that truly values customers, might have to sacrifice some portion of profit in the short term for a satisfied customer who will continue to come back to that business over the long term. A government or nonprofit that truly values its mission, might have to sacrifice some portion of revenue in order to achieve its service goals. Neither type of organization can afford to run at a deficit but neither is sustainable without alignment of rewards with goals.

Learning and Performance Improvement in 2013

The Internet Time Alliance principals have made predictions for 2013. Charles Jennings offers this picture for the year:

A confluence of technology and improved connectivity, increasing pressures for rapid solutions and better customer service, and demands for higher performance, will force the hands of many HRDs and CLOs to refocus from models of ‘extended formal training’ to place technology-enabled, workplace-focused and leader-led development approaches at the core of their provision.

Clark Quinn predicts that “…we’ll see more examples of the notion of a ‘performance ecosystem’ of resources aligned around individual needs and responsibilities, instead of organized around the providing silos.” While he expects greater use of mobile devices to support individual needs and responsibilities, he thinks many organizations will fail to use these methods effectively.

Harold Jarche reminds us that “…work is learning and learning is the work in the network era…” However, he also believes that most organizations will continue to deliver formal courses and instructor-led training programs.

Jane Hart says that no matter what IT and T&D departments continue to do, individuals and teams will find ways to bypass these units and use technology to access what they need when they need it.

Jay Cross, similar to Jarche, argues that because of the speed and complexity of change, “Learning will continue to converge with work. Increasingly, workers will learn their jobs by doing their jobs.” He believes that “smart companies” will recognize the need for a management style that supports this kind of learning.

This group of thought-leaders seems to envision a world that is making strides away from classroom-based, formal learning and towards informal, social, mobile learning. My prediction is that 2013 will be a time of sorting out instructional delivery methods, with mobile devices taking center stage. But I don’t think there will be much overall gain in support of learning. The economic and legal pressures on organizations, perceived and imagined, will prevent most from adapting to the technological, social, and demographic changes that are going on around them.

To make learners accountable for their own learning, to push down responsibility for learning to customer-facing employees and project teams, and to engage workers in continuous performance improvement, means admitting that the way managers have been doing things might not be best for employees and it means giving up centralized control. This is difficult stuff for CEOs and other managers to accept.

So, while I hope the ITA prognosticators are right (Full disclosure: I have co-founded a business to support individual, team, whole organization, and community learning.), I’m afraid that 2013 is not going to be a year of substantive change in our organizations. Executives will talk a good game, and may even look like they are adapting to the new reality, but when faced with a choice most will opt for the familiar and safe path. 

A Year of “The Performance Improvement Blog” in Review

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2013!